https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/opinion/north-korea-summit-trump-kim.html?emc=edit_th_180607&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=599149230607
June 6, 2018
Shock! Horror! President Trump is actually doing something right.
Sadly, Democrats in Congress are responding in a quite Trumpian way: They seem more concerned with undermining him than supporting a peace process with North Korea. They are on the same side as National Security Adviser John Bolton, quietly subverting attempts to pursue peace.
While international security is complicated, here’s a rule of thumb: When you find yourself on the same side as Bolton, go back and re-examine your position.
Sure, we all wish that Trump treated Justin Trudeau or Angela Merkel with the respect that he now shows Kim Jong-un. Yes, it seems that Trump has been played by Kim. Yet another way of putting it is that Trump is finally investing in the kind of diplomatic engagement that he used to denounce, and that we should all applaud.
Trump’s newfound pragmatism is infinitely preferable to the threat of nuclear war that used to hang over all of us, so it’s mystifying to see Democrats carping about any possible North Korea deal.
“Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other than the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal,” seven Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer, warned in a letter to Trump this week.
The letter also insisted on “anywhere, anytime” inspections of suspected North Korean nuclear sites, as well as those linked to its chemical and biological warfare programs.
It’s almost unimaginable that North Korea will allow such intrusive inspections — any country would resist having an enemy poke around its military bases, underground bomb shelters and border fortifications. So these Democrats are essentially saying that no plausible deal will pass muster.
“The Democrats have gone overboard in the conditions they listed in the letter,” said Joel Wit, a North Korea watcher at the Stimson Center in Washington. “If they’re serious, it’s a prescription for failure because no one could achieve the conditions. It’s maybe payback for everything they were dealt in the Iran deal.”
“It’s like role reversal,” Wit added. “For years Democrats criticized Republicans for not wanting to engage North Korea. Now that Republicans want to engage North Korea, the Democrats are preparing to criticize them.”
Aside from Schumer, the Democratic senators who signed the letter are Sherrod Brown, Richard Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy, Robert Menendez and Mark Warner.
I appreciate that it’s galling for Democrats to see Trump present himself as a great strategist who has forced North Korea to knuckle under. White House aide Larry Kudlow boasted on Fox News: “North Korea coming to the negotiating table has a lot do with President Trump’s very firm stand.”
Poppycock. North Korean leaders have been eager for decades to meet with an American president; it’s just that no previous president agreed for fear of legitimizing the regime. It’s actually Trump who has made stunning compromises — holding a get-acquainted summit with Kim without any prospect of near-term denuclearization.
The real hero here is South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, who shrewdly used the Olympics to kick-start the peace process. Trump and Kim won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize, but if the peace process survives, Moon will be a worthy recipient.
For decades, especially after Bill Clinton’s 1994 “Agreed Framework” with North Korea, it was conservative Republicans who were the spoilers on nuclear deals with North Korea and Iran alike.
This G.O.P. petulance was bad for America. Bolton helped kill the Agreed Framework, so that North Korea hugely expanded its weapons program. Similar petulance led Trump and Bolton to try to destroy the Iran nuclear deal this spring; as a result, Iran this week announced that it was increasing its uranium enrichment capacity. Boy, that went well.
Now a similar partisan petulance seems to be turning some Democrats into spoilers. Trump’s engagement with North Korea has been chaotic and should have begun with working-level talks, but it’s still better for leaders to exchange handshakes than missiles.
Granted, there’s plenty of reason to be nervous about Trump’s deal making with North Korea, and plans can still collapse. How will Trump manage Kim when he can’t even manage a summit with the Philadelphia Eagles?
Still, even if North Korea won’t hand over nuclear weapons in the next few years, I can imagine it committing in coming months to a sustained moratorium on nuclear tests and long-range missile tests, on production of plutonium and uranium fuel, on transfer of nuclear technology to other countries, such as Syria. North Korea might also destroy an ICBM or two and accept inspectors at its nuclear sites in Yongbyon. Trump and Kim might agree to exchange liaison offices and to declare peace on the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea might well cheat, and these are half-steps, not rapid denuclearization. But half-steps toward peace are better than full strides toward war.
Overlooked No More: Yu Gwan-sun, a Korean Independence Activist Who Defied Japanese Rule
Overlooked No More: Yu Gwan-sun, a
Korean Independence Activist Who Defied Japanese Rule
When a call for peaceful protests came
in spring 1919, a schoolgirl became the face of a nation’s collective yearning
for freedom.
Yu Gwan-sun took an active part in the
March 1, 1919, independence movement against Japanese colonial rule in Korea.
Dying in prison at 17, she became a national hero.
By Inyoung Kang March 28, 2018
Since 1851, obituaries in The New
York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked,
we’re adding the stories of remarkable people.
SEOUL, South Korea — When a call for
peaceful protests in support of Korean independence came in spring 1919, a
16-year-old girl named Yu Gwan-sun became the face of a nation’s collective
yearning for freedom.
Yu was a student at Ewha Haktang in Seoul, which was established
by American missionaries as the first modern educational institution for women
in Korea. On March 1, 1919, Yu and four classmates joined others taking to the
streets with cries of “Mansei!” (“Long live Korean independence!”) in one of
the earliest protests against Japanese colonial rule. Amid the demonstration,
the Declaration of Independence — written by the publisher Choe Nam-seon and signed by 33 Korean cultural and
religious leaders — was recited at Seoul’s Pagoda Park.
The next day, protest organizers came to
Ewha Haktang and encouraged Yu and her peers to join a student demonstration to
be staged in three days. On March 5, she and her classmates marched at
Namdaemun, a gate in central Seoul. They were detained by the Japanese
authorities, but missionaries from the school negotiated their release.
The colonial government retaliated
quickly, ordering all schools closed on March 10. A few days later, Yu returned
to her hometown, Cheonan, about 53 miles south of Seoul in South Chungcheong
Province, with a smuggled copy of the Declaration of Independence. She went
from village to village spreading word of the Samil (literally “three-one,” or
March 1) Movement and rallying local residents to organize their own protests.
The movement quickly took hold. Early on
April 1, 3,000 people gathered at Aunae, a marketplace in Cheonan. Yu was
there, distributing homemade taegeukgi,
or Korean national flags, and giving speeches calling for independence. The
Japanese military police arrived and fired on the crowd, killing 19 people.
Yu’s parents were among the dead.
By the time the authorities quashed the
protests a few weeks later, an estimated two million people out of a population
of 20 million had participated in 1,542 pro-independence marches, according to
Djun Kil Kim, author of “The History of Korea.” More than 7,000 people had
been killed, and about 46,000, including Yu, had been jailed. After being
convicted of sedition, she was sent to Seodaemun Prison in Seoul.
At Seodaemun, Yu demanded the release of
other prisoners and continued to express her support for Korean independence.
She shouted at her Japanese captors and, with other inmates, organized a
large-scale protest on the first anniversary of the March 1 Movement.
“Even if my fingernails are torn out, my
nose and ears are ripped apart, and my legs and arms are crushed, this physical
pain does not compare to the pain of losing my nation,” she wrote in prison.
“My only remorse is not being able to do more than dedicating my life to my
country.”
She was eventually transferred to an
underground cell, where she was repeatedly beaten and tortured for speaking
out. “Japan will fall,” she wrote shortly before dying of her injuries on Sept.
28, 1920, at 17.
Yu was born on Dec. 16, 1902, the second
daughter of five children to Christian parents near Cheonan, in what became
South Korea when the peninsula was divided in 1945, after World War II.
She was influenced by her father, who
taught her about Christianity and instilled traditional Confucian values of
nationalism and civic awareness. Nine members of the Yu family — spanning three
generations — were involved in the independence movement.
Yu was an intelligent child who attended
a nearby Methodist church and memorized Bible verses easily, according to
curators at the Ewha
Museumin Seoul. An American missionary, Alice J. Hammond Sharp, encouraged
Yu to attend the Ewha school to advance her education, something few Korean
women did at that time.
The Korean Peninsula came under Japanese
military rule three years after Yu was born. It was formally annexed in 1910,
the start of a 35-year struggle for independence. Yu would not have remembered
a free Korea, and she died long before liberation in August 1945.
The March 1 Movement did not immediately
result in Korea’s independence, but it crystallized a sense of national unity
and was a catalyst for the resistance. Today, March 1 is a national holiday in South Korea,
where the 100th anniversary of the movement will be commemorated next year.
In August 2015, Yukio Hatoyama, a onetime leader of Japan, visited
Seodaemun, which is now a national museum.
“As a former prime minister, as a
Japanese citizen and as a human being,” Hatoyama said, “I am here today to
offer my sincere apologies, from the bottom of my heart, to those who were
tortured and were killed here.”
Hatoyama knelt and observed a moment of silence before
a monument to colonial-era independence activists. He also visited a prison
cell where Yu had been held. It was the first time a former Japanese prime
minister had visited the site.
Yu was also honored by the former United
Nations secretary general Ban
Ki-moon, who received an honorary doctorate from Ewha in 2015.
“I want to speak about a great young
Korean woman who lost her own freedom so that others could be free,” Ban said at a ceremony at the university, likening Yu to Joan
of Arc. “This is proof that violence can kill a person, but not their memory,
not their ideals. Her patriotism demonstrates the great way she lived and
died.”
Choonkyu Lee contributed research.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)