Last week, Moon Jae-in’s government made its first formal overture to North Korea, proposing military discussions on ceasing hostile actions and Red Cross talks on resuming reunions of divided families. But the proposals were quickly shot down by the White House, where presidential spokesman Sean Spicer said the atmosphere for such talks was “far away.” The New York Times leapt on the exchange, calling the disagreement the “first visible split” between Moon and the Trump administration.

But it’s not clear how deep this rift really is, or if the press was exaggerating it. After all, during Moon’s summit with Trump last month, the two governments signed a joint communique that strongly endorsed Moon’s desire to resolve North-South conflicts through bilateral dialogue and negotiation. Moon himself has played down any differences with Trump, explaining on July 19th to Korean lawmakers that the initial phase of any talks will focus on humanitarian issues. “Denuclearization talks require the right conditions,” he added, through a spokesman.

Ironically, reports of a US-ROK dispute over North Korea surfaced as the Trump administration itself is talking to Pyongyang. “The Trump administration has been negotiating with the North Koreans – that’s a fact, not a myth,” Leon V. Sigal, a former State Department official, told Newstapa in an interview. Sigal is part of a team of former US officials and experts who meet regularly with North Korean government officials for discussions that are called “Track 2 dialogues.”

The administration’s talks with North Korea came to light in June, shortly before the death of Otto Warmbier, the American college student held by Pyongyang for 17 months. According to a story published on June 18 by the Wall Street Journal, US diplomats have been holding secret talks in Pyongyang and Europe with North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator, Madame Choi Sun Hee, for “more than a year” as part of the “Track 2” process. Then, after President Trump’s inauguration in January, “the official and nonofficial American contacts with the North Koreans started to merge.”

In May, Joseph Yun, the State Department’s special representative for North Korea, met Choi in Oslo at a meeting organized by US participants in the “Track 2” process. Their purpose was to discuss the plight of four Americans in prison in North Korea. But after leaving Norway, Choi, whose title is director-general of the North American affairs bureau of North Korea’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters that her government would be willing to meet US officials for talks on the nuclear issue “if the conditions are set,” the Journal said.

In early June, as part of this process, Yun met in New York with Pyongyang’s ambassador to the UN. It was here that he was informed that Warmbier, who was being considered for release, was in a coma. Yun, on instructions from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, then flew to Pyongyang to bring him back. Since his death a few days later, no new talks have been scheduled as the Trump administration considers its options. “The question is, is this a hiatus or is Trump rethinking the process?” asked Sigal.

Judging by the administration’s latest statements, the road to direct talks is still open. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, for example, has repeatedly said that the United States is not going to war with North Korea, and has instead emphasized negotiations. After Trump’s UN Ambassador Nicki Haley threatened the use of force against North Korea after its July 4 missile test, Mattis called reporters into his Pentagon office and flatly denied that the launch had brought the US and North Korea closer to war.

This does not mean, however, that a consensus has been reached in Washington for negotiations to proceed – far from it. Hawkish elements from both the Democratic and Republican parties continue to call for a harder line against North Korea, and even for regime change. But there are indications that key elements of the national security state are beginning to see that there is no viable option but re-opening direct talks with North Korea over its nuclear and missile ambitions.

Some of the strongest voices for engagement have come from former senior leaders of US intelligence who came of age during the Cold War. One of them is James Clapper, the former US Director of National Intelligence who flew to Pyongyang in 2014 to retrieve a US prisoner. Several times over the last month, he has proposed that the United States and North Korea open “interest sections” in each other’s capitals. This is similar to the US arrangement with Cuba before President Obama normalized relations in 2015.

Clapper, who was a military intelligence officer in Korea during the 1980s, has also proposed that North Korea “cap” its missile tests “in return for dialogue and a peace treaty.” In a recent interview on CNN, he said, “The only option is diplomacy. The best hope is to engage with them.” In his recent speech in Seoul about his 2014 visit to Pyongyang, he spoke almost wistfully about learning about the pain of national division from the senior North Korean intelligence officer who rode with him in his car.

He even wanted to talk about the tragedy that occurred when the peninsular was being split through these many years. In fact, he mentioned, I thought it was interesting, how the two languages have separated. The North Korean version of Korean was very different than the South Korean version. In many ways I thought that was a very telling comment.

Another advocate for a negotiated peace is Robert Gates, the former Secretary for Defense who spent nearly 27 years at the CIA, where he was the director from 1991 to 1993. He recently unveiled a sweeping proposal that would allow North Korea to keep some of its nuclear weapons while agreeing to hard limits on his arsenal of missiles. Under his plan, which he outlined in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on July 10, the US would “forswear a policy of regime change” as it did with Castro after the 1962 missile crisis, sign a peace treaty with Kim Jong Un and consider “some changes” in the structure of US military forces in South Korea.

But Gates’ plan has a fatal flaw: it would be brokered entirely through China. Under Gates’ proposal, Beijing would be required to bring North Korea to the talks and convince its government to accept invasive inspections of its weapons facilities to ensure compliance with the agreement. The US would tell China, “If that is not an outcome you can accept, we are going to take steps you hate,” Gates told the Journal.

This “let China do it” mentality is very strong in Washington at the moment. Its most prominent proponent is Victor Cha, the director of Korea programs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who was the deputy head of the US delegation to the six-party talks with North Korea in the Bush administration.

“It’s not enough to ask China to pressure Pyongyang to set up a U.S.-North Korea negotiation,” Cha wrote recently in the Washington Post with Jake Sullivan, the former director of policy planning for the Obama administration. “China has to be a central part of the negotiation, too.” They argued that “China, rather than the United States, should be paying for North Korea to halt and roll back its nuclear and missile programs.”

While this view is heartily endorsed in the media, many Korea specialists scoff at the idea that North Korea would let China push it around like that.

“Pyongyang will perceive any effort to get them to denuclearize as another overly intrusive move and lacking respect for North Korean sovereignty,” said James F. Person, a historian who has specialized in North Korea’s diplomacy with China and the former Soviet Union. “We can’t afford to outsource our policy to China because that’s asking North Korea to do what they most resent,” he said. “Ultimately, we will have to talk to the North.” Person spoke at a July 10 press briefing organized by the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a US government think tank in Washington.

This pragmatic view has emerged in recent months among former high-ranking officials, such as William Perry, who negotiated with North Korea on its missile program as Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration. On the eve of President Moon’s visit to Washington in June, Perry was one of several retired senior officials who signed a letter to Trump urging him to begin negotiations without any preconditions with the North. This week, in an interview with Senator Bernie Sanders, Perry explained his position.

“North Korea is not a crazy nation,” he told Sanders. “They are reckless, ruthless, but they are not crazy. They are open to logic and reason. Their main objective is to sustain their regime. If we can find a way of dealing with them that they can see gives them an opportunity to stay in the regime, we can get results.”

That was the primary message at the Wilson Center briefing, which was led by former California congresswoman Jane Harman. Last fall, she and Person floated a proposal for direct talks with North Korea in the Washington Post. “Only the United States – the supposed existential threat that justifies [North Korea’s] nuclear and ballistic missile programs – can fully address Pyongyang’s security concerns,” they wrote. At the Wilson briefing, Person elaborated on their proposal.

He argued that the latest North Korean missile test was not a “game changer,” as many analysts have suggested, but is instead part of a “credible defensive rationale that goes back a very long time.” But now that they have the capability to launch ICBMs that can travel great distances, he said, North Korea will continue to test to give it the best possible leverage when the door opens for talks with Washington. “They want to make sure when they get to the negotiating table that they’ve pushed their program as far as they can,” he said.

So what would a direct US-North Korean negotiation look like? Most analysts believe it would have to begin with the North offering to freeze its nuclear and missile programs in exchange for the US and South Korea scaling down their annual military exercises. At the Wilson briefing, New York Times reporter David Sanger suggested that the US has a “window of opportunity” to offer such a deal soon because the main US-ROK exercises take place in the spring. “Between now and next spring, we wouldn’t lose much” if the US temporarily halted the exercises, he said.

Sigal, who has been talking to the North for over 20 years, cautioned that, for any deal to be accepted in Washington, a North Korean moratorium would have to go beyond the freeze of current programs as suggested by China and Russia. He said that would involve North Korea stopping its uranium enrichment and plutonium production as well as its nuclear and missile testing. That, in turn, would require the United States to pledge to end its “hostile policy,” as demanded for decades by North Korea.

“You’ve got to suspend the production of fissionable material too,” he told Newstapa. He said the US would “have to pay for that, not in money terms but in terms of moving away from the hostile policy. Some of that’s going to involve military exercises, some of that’s going to involve [lifting] sanctions, some of that’s going to involve starting the peace process. But that’s what’s got to be worked. That’s the first stage agreement that may be possible.”

WHAT JUST HAPPENED WITH NORTH KOREA?

Over the past two weeks, America and the world experienced another serious crisis in Korea that frightened many people into believing that a nuclear war was about to break out any moment.

The tension dissipated with last Monday’s declaration from Kim Jong Un that he would “watch a little more” the “conduct of the Yankees” before considering plans to test-fire three missiles towards Guam. His announcement was followed by a tweet from President Trump praising Kim for his “very wise and well reasoned decision” and saying that the “alternative would have been both catastrophic and unacceptable!”

But the big questions about the war scare were: How did it begin? Why did it end? And what comes next?

The latest standoff was sparked by the same combination of forces that led the United States into invading Iraq in 2003: leaked reports from US intelligence, a media willing to believe almost anything about “the enemy,” in this case North Korea; and an arrogant and power-mad president, Donald Trump, who is in deep trouble at home for his aggressive behavior towards critics and appalling statements on race and immigration.

On August 8, someone in US intelligence leaked a Defense Intelligence Agency report to the Washington Post saying that Kim Jong Un could have a nuclear-tipped ICBM capable of hitting the United States by 2018, “crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power.” The leak immediately became the story of the day, sparking CNN and other cable networks to jump into action with alarming tales suggesting that Kim now had the capability to nuke any city in the United States.

As one US journalist wrote in the leftist publication Counterpunch, “fourteen years after the disaster in Iraq was sold to Americans on the pretense of WMDs, which never existed, the mainstream media continue to push war hungry narratives.”

The DIA claim may have been a huge exaggeration. After analyzing North Korean data, several analysts pointed out in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that the Hwasong-14 missile fired in recent tests “is a sub-level ICBM that will not be able to deliver nuclear warheads to the continental United States.”  But those doubts, which were almost certainly included in US intelligence reports provided to Trump, didn’t stop the president.

Hours after the Post story came out, he issued his apocalyptic warning that North Korea would face “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it continued to threaten the United States. He ended the week by saying that US forces in Asia were “locked and loaded” and ready for battle.

Those threats became more real on August 11, when NBC News broadcast a detailed report that the Pentagon has plans to strike “approximately two dozen North Korean missile-launch sites, testing grounds and support facilities” using B-1B heavy bombers stationed at Anderson Air Force Base in Guam. “Pairs of B-1Bs have conducted 11 practice runs of a similar mission since the end of May, the last taking place on Monday,” NBC said. Reporter Cynthia McFadden added that the B-1Bs could fire their missiles from outside of Korean airspace, thus making it possible to launch unilateral strikes.

What happened next was hardly surprising. North Korea’s KCNA declared that the North’s “Strategic Force” was “carefully examining” plans for making “an enveloping fire” at areas near Guam with medium and long range missiles, and were only awaiting the command from Kim Jong Un. Because of the long history of B1 flights to Korea from Guam, the historian Bruce Cumings wrote in the Guardian, North Korea’s statement had “a concrete, predictable nature.”

To the US media, however, it was seen as a declaration of war. Every network sent correspondents scurrying to Guam, where they interviewed local residents and government officials about the fears about a potential attack. Many of these reports, such as this broadcast on CBS News, turned into sheer war propaganda for the Pentagon and its fleet of bombers (“backed up by plenty of firepower,” they “regularly fly over the Korean peninsula and would be used in a potential conflict.”)

Then, over the weekend, US officials downplayed the threat while warning that an attack on Guam would be met with force. “If they fire at the United States, it could escalate into war very quickly,” Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis declared. On Monday, came Kim Jong Un’s declaration about the need to “defuse the tensions” around Guam following his visit to the Korean People’s Army Strategic Force Command.

Although Yonhap and other Korean media ran Kim’s statement, it wasn’t described as a breakthrough until the Wall Street Journal filed a story late that night that the North “had pulled back its threat to attack a U.S. territory.” After this, it still took several days for the US cable networks to admit that the situation had changed. This was particularly true of CNN, which had feverishly reported every new development in the standoff. It didn’t report Kim’s shift until Trump tweeted about it on Wednesday, 36 hours after the story first broke.

Fox News and other conservative media, of course, said Kim’s about-face was due entirely to Trump’s tough statements and threats. In fact, those statements were seen by some of Trump’s advisers as ill-advised and dangerous, which is why they spent the weekend after his “locked and loaded” comments trying to defuse the crisis. One of the strongest signals came from CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who has been surprisingly candid about North Korea’s justifications for building a new arsenal.

Last Sunday, he took to Fox News to offer assurances that “nothing imminent” was about to happen with North Korea. He added: “What I’m talking about is, I’ve heard folks talking about that we have been on the cusp of a nuclear war. No intelligence that would indicate we are in that place today.” The same day, H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, told NBC that Trump is determined to “resolve the crisis short of a military conflict.”

Still, it was clear from statements from the administration that the shifts in both Washington and Pyongyang came after intensive discussions with China as well as possible back-channel communications with Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un’s desire to defuse tensions, for example, was published hours after China told the United States that it would immediately impose a ban on imports of North Korean coal, iron and seafood as part of its enforcement of the recent sanctions passed by the U.N. Security Council.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, “the timing of the announcement was a response to Mr. Trump’s plans to kick off a probe into China’s alleged theft of US intellectual property.” The New York Times added later that the White House had held off from announcing the probe “to secure China’s support” for the UN sanctions on North Korea. Later in the week, Steve Bannon, Trump’s controversial political adviser, admitted that Trump’s focus on China and its trade deficit with Beijing was the driving factor in his North Korea policies.

“To me, the economic war with China is everything,” he told The American Prospect, a liberal magazine that has been critical of China’s trade policies. He also added some thoughts on Korea. “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it,” he said. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.” Bannon was fired 24 hours later after his comment.

Another factor in the rapid end to the tensions may have been President Moon Jae-in’s response to reports about the possibility of a unilateral US strike on North Korea. It hardly seems like a coincidence that, hours after NBC reported on the Pentagon’s plans to hit North Korean missile sites, Chung Eui-yong, Moon’s national security adviser, spoke to McMaster and agreed to “discuss in advance” any military steps they could take to contain North Korea.

Then on August 15 came Moon’s extraordinary speech insisting that “only the Republic of Korea can make the decision for military action on the Korean Peninsula.” This was widely seen in the US as a direct warning to Trump about taking unilateral action, and was displayed as a front-page story in the New York Times. Moon was also responding to critics from the opposition parties that he has appeared weak and ineffectual as Trump’s threats dominated the news over the past several weeks.

With the immediate crisis over, attention began to focus on the possibility of negotiations and how they might begin.

Mattis and Secretary of State Tillerson explained the Trump administration’s position in an unusual joint op-ed written for the Wall Street Journal. After explaining that the US had no interest in regime change in Pyongyang, they laid down their conditions for talks. “Given the long record of North Korea’s dishonesty in negotiations and repeated violations of international agreements, it is incumbent upon the [Kim] regime to signal its desire to negotiate in good faith” by ceasing its nuclear tests and missile launches, they wrote.

North Korea has already put a hold on its nuclear tests; many observers here note that its last underground explosion was in September 2016, three months before the US presidential election and eight months before South Korea’s. Now, the question is, what would Kim Jong Un get in return for stopping his missile tests?

One idea, which has the support of several former high-ranking US officials, is for the US and South Korea to either suspend or drastically scale down their war games that have been criticized by North Korea and China as a barrier to peace in the region. The idea was given added impetus last week by the New York Times, which reported that a “permutation” of a two-sided freeze “may be the best way to defuse the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.” The next exercises, Ulchi-Freedom Guardian, began on Monday.

So far, the freeze idea is a non-starter for the Pentagon. After meeting with President Moon in Seoul last week, Gen. Dunford told reporters traveling with him that the exercises were “not currently on the table as part of the negotiation at any level.” He added: “as long as the threat in North Korea exists, we need to maintain a high state of readiness to respond to that threat.”

But Bannon, in his interview, threw out an idea that’s also flatly opposed by Dunford but shows how Trump might deal with North Korea in future negotiations. Trump, he said, “might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear buildup with verifiable inspections and the United States removed its troops from the peninsula.” That echoes one of the president’s theme from the 2016 campaign, when he criticized South Korea and Japan for not paying enough for the US troops on their soil.

Meanwhile, US critics of Trump’s policies are looking back to the Bill Clinton administration and how it handled the 1994 crisis with North Korea over its decision to abandon the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. Last week, 64 Democratic lawmakers released a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson expressing “profound concern” about Trump’s threatening comments and supporting Tillerson’s proposals for direct talks with Pyongyang.

In a significant passage, they urged him to “make a good faith effort to replicate” the success of the 1994 Agreed Framework in which North Korea froze its nuclear program for over 10 years. The current situation, of course, is very different: in 1994, North Korea had yet to explode a nuclear bomb, and had only tested a few missiles. Still, the conflict over NPT almost led Clinton to launch a pre-emptive strike on North Korea’s nuclear facility, an action that was called off after Jimmy Carter flew to Pyongyang and negotiated a preliminary settlement with North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

It’s important to remember, former US diplomats say, that Pyongyang traded its nuclear program in return for an end to enmity – the same demand they are making today. “What people don’t know is that North Korea made no fissile material whatsoever from 1991 to 2003,” Leon V. Sigal, a former State Department official who directs a Northeast Asia security project at the Social Science Research Council in New York, told Newstapa. “That’s a pretty good deal.” The framework collapsed in 2003 amidst accusations from the Bush administration that the North had started a secret uranium program, which Pyongyang denied.

Despite the propaganda onslaught of the last two weeks, most Americans support a negotiated solution to the tensions with North Korea. According to a Quinnipiac University national poll released on August 16th, 86 percent of US voters support the U.S. and its allies “negotiating a deal with North Korea to prevent them from using nuclear weapons,” with 60 percent saying that they expect the issue to be resolved diplomatically.

Now, they say, it’s up to the Trump administration to make the peace.

On Tuesday, Tillerson seemed to shift towards dialogue when he noted that Pyongyang has gone for two weeks without a missile test. “We hope that this is the beginning of the signal we’ve been looking for,” he said, according to the New York Times. “Perhaps we’re seeing our pathway to sometime in the near future of having some dialogue.”

WHAT JUST HAPPENED WITH NORTH KOREA?

Over the past two weeks, America and the world experienced another serious crisis in Korea that frightened many people into believing that a nuclear war was about to break out any moment.

The tension dissipated with last Monday’s declaration from Kim Jong Un that he would “watch a little more” the “conduct of the Yankees” before considering plans to test-fire three missiles towards Guam. His announcement was followed by a tweet from President Trump praising Kim for his “very wise and well reasoned decision” and saying that the “alternative would have been both catastrophic and unacceptable!”

But the big questions about the war scare were: How did it begin? Why did it end? And what comes next?

The latest standoff was sparked by the same combination of forces that led the United States into invading Iraq in 2003: leaked reports from US intelligence, a media willing to believe almost anything about “the enemy,” in this case North Korea; and an arrogant and power-mad president, Donald Trump, who is in deep trouble at home for his aggressive behavior towards critics and appalling statements on race and immigration.

On August 8, someone in US intelligence leaked a Defense Intelligence Agency report to the Washington Post saying that Kim Jong Un could have a nuclear-tipped ICBM capable of hitting the United States by 2018, “crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power.” The leak immediately became the story of the day, sparking CNN and other cable networks to jump into action with alarming tales suggesting that Kim now had the capability to nuke any city in the United States.

As one US journalist wrote in the leftist publication Counterpunch, “fourteen years after the disaster in Iraq was sold to Americans on the pretense of WMDs, which never existed, the mainstream media continue to push war hungry narratives.”

The DIA claim may have been a huge exaggeration. After analyzing North Korean data, several analysts pointed out in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that the Hwasong-14 missile fired in recent tests “is a sub-level ICBM that will not be able to deliver nuclear warheads to the continental United States.”  But those doubts, which were almost certainly included in US intelligence reports provided to Trump, didn’t stop the president.

Hours after the Post story came out, he issued his apocalyptic warning that North Korea would face “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it continued to threaten the United States. He ended the week by saying that US forces in Asia were “locked and loaded” and ready for battle.

Those threats became more real on August 11, when NBC News broadcast a detailed report that the Pentagon has plans to strike “approximately two dozen North Korean missile-launch sites, testing grounds and support facilities” using B-1B heavy bombers stationed at Anderson Air Force Base in Guam. “Pairs of B-1Bs have conducted 11 practice runs of a similar mission since the end of May, the last taking place on Monday,” NBC said. Reporter Cynthia McFadden added that the B-1Bs could fire their missiles from outside of Korean airspace, thus making it possible to launch unilateral strikes.

What happened next was hardly surprising. North Korea’s KCNA declared that the North’s “Strategic Force” was “carefully examining” plans for making “an enveloping fire” at areas near Guam with medium and long range missiles, and were only awaiting the command from Kim Jong Un. Because of the long history of B1 flights to Korea from Guam, the historian Bruce Cumings wrote in the Guardian, North Korea’s statement had “a concrete, predictable nature.”

To the US media, however, it was seen as a declaration of war. Every network sent correspondents scurrying to Guam, where they interviewed local residents and government officials about the fears about a potential attack. Many of these reports, such as this broadcast on CBS News, turned into sheer war propaganda for the Pentagon and its fleet of bombers (“backed up by plenty of firepower,” they “regularly fly over the Korean peninsula and would be used in a potential conflict.”)

Then, over the weekend, US officials downplayed the threat while warning that an attack on Guam would be met with force. “If they fire at the United States, it could escalate into war very quickly,” Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis declared. On Monday, came Kim Jong Un’s declaration about the need to “defuse the tensions” around Guam following his visit to the Korean People’s Army Strategic Force Command.

Although Yonhap and other Korean media ran Kim’s statement, it wasn’t described as a breakthrough until the Wall Street Journal filed a story late that night that the North “had pulled back its threat to attack a U.S. territory.” After this, it still took several days for the US cable networks to admit that the situation had changed. This was particularly true of CNN, which had feverishly reported every new development in the standoff. It didn’t report Kim’s shift until Trump tweeted about it on Wednesday, 36 hours after the story first broke.

Fox News and other conservative media, of course, said Kim’s about-face was due entirely to Trump’s tough statements and threats. In fact, those statements were seen by some of Trump’s advisers as ill-advised and dangerous, which is why they spent the weekend after his “locked and loaded” comments trying to defuse the crisis. One of the strongest signals came from CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who has been surprisingly candid about North Korea’s justifications for building a new arsenal.

Last Sunday, he took to Fox News to offer assurances that “nothing imminent” was about to happen with North Korea. He added: “What I’m talking about is, I’ve heard folks talking about that we have been on the cusp of a nuclear war. No intelligence that would indicate we are in that place today.” The same day, H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, told NBC that Trump is determined to “resolve the crisis short of a military conflict.”

Still, it was clear from statements from the administration that the shifts in both Washington and Pyongyang came after intensive discussions with China as well as possible back-channel communications with Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un’s desire to defuse tensions, for example, was published hours after China told the United States that it would immediately impose a ban on imports of North Korean coal, iron and seafood as part of its enforcement of the recent sanctions passed by the U.N. Security Council.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, “the timing of the announcement was a response to Mr. Trump’s plans to kick off a probe into China’s alleged theft of US intellectual property.” The New York Times added later that the White House had held off from announcing the probe “to secure China’s support” for the UN sanctions on North Korea. Later in the week, Steve Bannon, Trump’s controversial political adviser, admitted that Trump’s focus on China and its trade deficit with Beijing was the driving factor in his North Korea policies.

“To me, the economic war with China is everything,” he told The American Prospect, a liberal magazine that has been critical of China’s trade policies. He also added some thoughts on Korea. “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it,” he said. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.” Bannon was fired 24 hours later after his comment.

Another factor in the rapid end to the tensions may have been President Moon Jae-in’s response to reports about the possibility of a unilateral US strike on North Korea. It hardly seems like a coincidence that, hours after NBC reported on the Pentagon’s plans to hit North Korean missile sites, Chung Eui-yong, Moon’s national security adviser, spoke to McMaster and agreed to “discuss in advance” any military steps they could take to contain North Korea.

Then on August 15 came Moon’s extraordinary speech insisting that “only the Republic of Korea can make the decision for military action on the Korean Peninsula.” This was widely seen in the US as a direct warning to Trump about taking unilateral action, and was displayed as a front-page story in the New York Times. Moon was also responding to critics from the opposition parties that he has appeared weak and ineffectual as Trump’s threats dominated the news over the past several weeks.

With the immediate crisis over, attention began to focus on the possibility of negotiations and how they might begin.

Mattis and Secretary of State Tillerson explained the Trump administration’s position in an unusual joint op-ed written for the Wall Street Journal. After explaining that the US had no interest in regime change in Pyongyang, they laid down their conditions for talks. “Given the long record of North Korea’s dishonesty in negotiations and repeated violations of international agreements, it is incumbent upon the [Kim] regime to signal its desire to negotiate in good faith” by ceasing its nuclear tests and missile launches, they wrote.

North Korea has already put a hold on its nuclear tests; many observers here note that its last underground explosion was in September 2016, three months before the US presidential election and eight months before South Korea’s. Now, the question is, what would Kim Jong Un get in return for stopping his missile tests?

One idea, which has the support of several former high-ranking US officials, is for the US and South Korea to either suspend or drastically scale down their war games that have been criticized by North Korea and China as a barrier to peace in the region. The idea was given added impetus last week by the New York Times, which reported that a “permutation” of a two-sided freeze “may be the best way to defuse the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.” The next exercises, Ulchi-Freedom Guardian, began on Monday.

So far, the freeze idea is a non-starter for the Pentagon. After meeting with President Moon in Seoul last week, Gen. Dunford told reporters traveling with him that the exercises were “not currently on the table as part of the negotiation at any level.” He added: “as long as the threat in North Korea exists, we need to maintain a high state of readiness to respond to that threat.”

But Bannon, in his interview, threw out an idea that’s also flatly opposed by Dunford but shows how Trump might deal with North Korea in future negotiations. Trump, he said, “might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear buildup with verifiable inspections and the United States removed its troops from the peninsula.” That echoes one of the president’s theme from the 2016 campaign, when he criticized South Korea and Japan for not paying enough for the US troops on their soil.

Meanwhile, US critics of Trump’s policies are looking back to the Bill Clinton administration and how it handled the 1994 crisis with North Korea over its decision to abandon the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. Last week, 64 Democratic lawmakers released a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson expressing “profound concern” about Trump’s threatening comments and supporting Tillerson’s proposals for direct talks with Pyongyang.

In a significant passage, they urged him to “make a good faith effort to replicate” the success of the 1994 Agreed Framework in which North Korea froze its nuclear program for over 10 years. The current situation, of course, is very different: in 1994, North Korea had yet to explode a nuclear bomb, and had only tested a few missiles. Still, the conflict over NPT almost led Clinton to launch a pre-emptive strike on North Korea’s nuclear facility, an action that was called off after Jimmy Carter flew to Pyongyang and negotiated a preliminary settlement with North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

It’s important to remember, former US diplomats say, that Pyongyang traded its nuclear program in return for an end to enmity – the same demand they are making today. “What people don’t know is that North Korea made no fissile material whatsoever from 1991 to 2003,” Leon V. Sigal, a former State Department official who directs a Northeast Asia security project at the Social Science Research Council in New York, told Newstapa. “That’s a pretty good deal.” The framework collapsed in 2003 amidst accusations from the Bush administration that the North had started a secret uranium program, which Pyongyang denied.

Despite the propaganda onslaught of the last two weeks, most Americans support a negotiated solution to the tensions with North Korea. According to a Quinnipiac University national poll released on August 16th, 86 percent of US voters support the U.S. and its allies “negotiating a deal with North Korea to prevent them from using nuclear weapons,” with 60 percent saying that they expect the issue to be resolved diplomatically.

Now, they say, it’s up to the Trump administration to make the peace.

On Tuesday, Tillerson seemed to shift towards dialogue when he noted that Pyongyang has gone for two weeks without a missile test. “We hope that this is the beginning of the signal we’ve been looking for,” he said, according to the New York Times. “Perhaps we’re seeing our pathway to sometime in the near future of having some dialogue.”

A week of confusion in Washington

By Tim Shorrock

On Monday morning, as military tensions between North Korea and the United States appeared to reach a breaking point, Pyongyang’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho went before television cameras in front of his hotel in New York City.

Incensed that President Trump had followed last week’s bombastic speech to the UN by tweeting that North Korean leaders “may not be around much longer,” Ri told reporters that Trump had “declared war” on his country. If a state of war existed, he added, North Korea reserved the right to “make countermeasures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers even when they are not inside the airspace border of our country.”

That, of course, was a reference to the Pentagon’s September 23 flight of US B1-B bombers off North Korea’s east coast, and sparked another round of US media speculation about Kim Jong Un’s military intentions and capabilities. Coming after Ri’s declaration that North Korea was considering testing a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean, they appeared to escalate tensions even more and worried long-time observers of North Korea.

“That’s not the Ri Yong-Ho I know, and I negotiated with him for years,” Joseph DeTrani, a former CIA proliferation expert who met with Ri many times as special envoy to the Six Party Talks during the Bush administration, told Newstapa. Negotiations, not military conflict, “are the only way to resolve” this crisis, he said.

But DeTrani recalled, with some anger, several incidents in the past when the North had taken military action, including its shootdown in 1969 of a US EC-121 reconnaissance plane that killed 31 Americans on board (according to newly released US documents, that incident almost led President Richard Nixon to retaliate with nuclear weapons – but in the end, he did nothing).

DeTrani, who visited Pyongyang several times on behalf of the Obama administration, was one of about 150 people gathered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an influential military think tank, to hear an address by South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha. In her speech, Kang agreed with US officials who believe that North Korea’s nuclear program has reached, in her words, “a tipping point.”

“Pyongyang seems fast approaching its stated goal of having nuclear-tipped ICBMs capable of targeting the continental U.S.,” she said. As President Moon Jae-in warned CSIS during his visit to Washington in June, she reiterated that “there cannot be another war on the Korean Peninsula” and pledged to take “public diplomacy and outreach” to “a whole new level.” Kang’s appearance seemed to solidify CSIS’s role as an unofficial liaison between Washington and Seoul. That relationship could become official when Victor Cha, CSIS’s Korea Chair, is named US ambassador to South Korea, as expected.

But given the policy differences between Moon and Trump and the constant disagreements within the US administration itself about how to deal with North Korea, it’s easy to see why Ri and the North Korean leadership might be confused about America’s intentions.

Their confusion was apparent on Tuesday, when the Washington Post reported from Switzerland that senior North Korean officials “have been quietly trying to arrange talks with Republican-linked analysts in Washington, in an apparent attempt to make sense of President Trump and his confusing messages to Kim Jong Un’s regime.” As one of those Republicans told the Post, “their number-one concern is Trump. They can’t figure him out.”

Among the Americans contacted were Bruce Klinger, a former CIA analyst who runs North Korea programs for the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and Douglas Paal, who once worked as an Asian analyst for the Reagan and Bush administrations. Paal chaired a meeting last week at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where two Japanese experts warned that the Abe government must be included in any US negotiations with North Korea (I covered it for Newstapa). Neither Klinger or Paal accepted Pyongyang’s invitation, according to the Post.

At another CSIS seminar on Tuesday, Sue Mi Terry, a former senior Korea analyst for the CIA who was the Korea Director for President Bush’s National Security Council, said she met with North Korean official in Sweden this past summer. While they said de-nuclearization was “off the table,” Terry said, the officials “were willing to meet to discuss a peace treaty.” But that idea has been rejected by the US government, largely because it’s seen as a strategy to “get the US to pull out troops” from South Korea, she said. But she was critical of Trump’s tweets about North Korea and his rhetoric at the UN, which she called “counterproductive.”

At the CSIS forum where Kang spoke, there was more talk of Trump’s UN speech. “It’s very important to lower the temperature,” said Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State who in 2000 became the highest-level US official to ever visit Pyongyang. She took issue with US officials and pundits who claim that the Clinton administration’s 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea was a failure. Under that agreement, North Korea “made no new fissile material, no ICBMs and no missiles,” she said. During her talks with former leader Kim Jong Il, she added, Kim said “we could keep US forces in South Korea.”

Trump’s rhetoric has also raised concerns for US public. On Monday, CBS News published a new poll showing that 53 percent of Americans were concerned that Trump might act too quickly “and start an unneeded war in Korea.” According to CBS, “a majority disapprove of President Trump’s handling of the [North Korea] situation, and more voice concern that the U.S. would go to war too quickly than too slowly.”

A week of confusion in Washington

By Tim Shorrock

On Monday morning, as military tensions between North Korea and the United States appeared to reach a breaking point, Pyongyang’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho went before television cameras in front of his hotel in New York City.

Incensed that President Trump had followed last week’s bombastic speech to the UN by tweeting that North Korean leaders “may not be around much longer,” Ri told reporters that Trump had “declared war” on his country. If a state of war existed, he added, North Korea reserved the right to “make countermeasures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers even when they are not inside the airspace border of our country.”

That, of course, was a reference to the Pentagon’s September 23 flight of US B1-B bombers off North Korea’s east coast, and sparked another round of US media speculation about Kim Jong Un’s military intentions and capabilities. Coming after Ri’s declaration that North Korea was considering testing a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean, they appeared to escalate tensions even more and worried long-time observers of North Korea.

“That’s not the Ri Yong-Ho I know, and I negotiated with him for years,” Joseph DeTrani, a former CIA proliferation expert who met with Ri many times as special envoy to the Six Party Talks during the Bush administration, told Newstapa. Negotiations, not military conflict, “are the only way to resolve” this crisis, he said.

But DeTrani recalled, with some anger, several incidents in the past when the North had taken military action, including its shootdown in 1969 of a US EC-121 reconnaissance plane that killed 31 Americans on board (according to newly released US documents, that incident almost led President Richard Nixon to retaliate with nuclear weapons – but in the end, he did nothing).

DeTrani, who visited Pyongyang several times on behalf of the Obama administration, was one of about 150 people gathered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an influential military think tank, to hear an address by South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha. In her speech, Kang agreed with US officials who believe that North Korea’s nuclear program has reached, in her words, “a tipping point.”

“Pyongyang seems fast approaching its stated goal of having nuclear-tipped ICBMs capable of targeting the continental U.S.,” she said. As President Moon Jae-in warned CSIS during his visit to Washington in June, she reiterated that “there cannot be another war on the Korean Peninsula” and pledged to take “public diplomacy and outreach” to “a whole new level.” Kang’s appearance seemed to solidify CSIS’s role as an unofficial liaison between Washington and Seoul. That relationship could become official when Victor Cha, CSIS’s Korea Chair, is named US ambassador to South Korea, as expected.

But given the policy differences between Moon and Trump and the constant disagreements within the US administration itself about how to deal with North Korea, it’s easy to see why Ri and the North Korean leadership might be confused about America’s intentions.

Their confusion was apparent on Tuesday, when the Washington Post reported from Switzerland that senior North Korean officials “have been quietly trying to arrange talks with Republican-linked analysts in Washington, in an apparent attempt to make sense of President Trump and his confusing messages to Kim Jong Un’s regime.” As one of those Republicans told the Post, “their number-one concern is Trump. They can’t figure him out.”

Among the Americans contacted were Bruce Klinger, a former CIA analyst who runs North Korea programs for the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and Douglas Paal, who once worked as an Asian analyst for the Reagan and Bush administrations. Paal chaired a meeting last week at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where two Japanese experts warned that the Abe government must be included in any US negotiations with North Korea (I covered it for Newstapa). Neither Klinger or Paal accepted Pyongyang’s invitation, according to the Post.

At another CSIS seminar on Tuesday, Sue Mi Terry, a former senior Korea analyst for the CIA who was the Korea Director for President Bush’s National Security Council, said she met with North Korean official in Sweden this past summer. While they said de-nuclearization was “off the table,” Terry said, the officials “were willing to meet to discuss a peace treaty.” But that idea has been rejected by the US government, largely because it’s seen as a strategy to “get the US to pull out troops” from South Korea, she said. But she was critical of Trump’s tweets about North Korea and his rhetoric at the UN, which she called “counterproductive.”

At the CSIS forum where Kang spoke, there was more talk of Trump’s UN speech. “It’s very important to lower the temperature,” said Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State who in 2000 became the highest-level US official to ever visit Pyongyang. She took issue with US officials and pundits who claim that the Clinton administration’s 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea was a failure. Under that agreement, North Korea “made no new fissile material, no ICBMs and no missiles,” she said. During her talks with former leader Kim Jong Il, she added, Kim said “we could keep US forces in South Korea.”

Trump’s rhetoric has also raised concerns for US public. On Monday, CBS News published a new poll showing that 53 percent of Americans were concerned that Trump might act too quickly “and start an unneeded war in Korea.” According to CBS, “a majority disapprove of President Trump’s handling of the [North Korea] situation, and more voice concern that the U.S. would go to war too quickly than too slowly.”

The United States has agreed to “substantially increase” the sale of advanced weaponry and military technologies to South Korea as a result of recent discussions between Presidents Donald Trump and Moon Jae-in about their joint approach to countering North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

The first major exports under this new initiative are likely to be intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) tools for identifying and destroying military targets and installations in case of war with North Korea, according to a Newstapa review of U.S. government statements and defense contractor websites.

Missile defense systems will also figure large in any sales. Kim Jong-dae, a lawmaker with the Justice Party, recently asserted that “it’s very likely” that the United States could push Seoul to buy its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system that has been so controversial in Korea, as well as Patriot PAC-3 and SM-6 missile interceptors. The THAAD system and the Patriot batteries are made by Lockheed Martin, and the SM-6 by Raytheon.

ISR has been a major emphasis for South Korea. It recently earmarked $10.6 billion for procurement and R&D as “part of a program to improve its own ISR capabilities,” and in two years will launch the first of five military satellites, according to the US military newspaper of record Defense News. ISR technologies are also important for the upgraded communications systems that will be necessary if and when South Korea regains wartime operational control of its military.

One possible option for South Korea, observers say, could be the “Avenger” drone previously known as the “Predator.” This unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) made by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems has been used extensively by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the US Air Force in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. The new version can carry 3,000 pounds of sensors and bombs and is considered one of the world’s most deadly weapons.

The Avenger would augment the fleet of four RQ-4 “Global Hawk” high-altitude surveillance drones South Korea purchased from Northrop Grumman in 2015 for delivery in 2018. The US corporation, which is the second largest US military contractor, has close ties to Samsung Corporation and Korea Aerospace Industries. General Atomics said in August it is engaged in talks to sell the Avenger to a foreign buyer that was later identified as India by Defense News.

The export of the Avenger drone to South Korea would require a change in US policy. Under the Obama administration, the Global Hawks sold to Seoul could only be used for reconnaissance, and were not armed, according to a US Congressional Research Service report prepared for US lawmakers last May. As a result, the Korean Ministry of National Defense is spending nearly $450 million to “indigenously develop” a UAV designed for armed combat that it hopes to be ready by 2021, CRS said.

Few details have been provided by the White House and the Pentagon on the future weapons and technologies to be sold to South Korea, and none of the sales are expected to happen quickly.

“Foreign military sales involve drawn-out processes that can take years,” Real Clear Defense, a military publication, noted in September. “They typically entail complex negotiations not only between nations but within the U.S. government, with the Pentagon, the State Department and Congress all playing central roles.”

The US arms sales to South Korea will be overseen by US Army Lieutenant General Charles Hooper. He is the Director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency,  which is charged with overseeing Pentagon financial and technical assistance to US military exporters.

In a speech Tuesday in Washington, Hooper told hundreds of contractors and foreign military officers that the Pentagon was prepared to listen as much as possible to South Korea and other military partners “to make sure we understand their requirements before we move forward.”

His agency, Hooper said, is committed to making sales move as quickly as possible to “reduce the flash-to-bang time” and “get weapons to partners as quickly as we can.” He added: “we’re in an increasingly competitive environment.” He spoke to the annual military convention and exhibition sponsored by the Association of the US Army, which was attended by all major US companies as well as about 20 arms makers from South Korea.

Hooper declined comment on specific arms sales. But last month, he told another conference that the Pentagon is already “working very closely with our South Korean allies to assess their immediate requirements” and “address our mutual interests.” He has plenty of experience: he spent the previous three years as US defense attache to Egypt, where US exports have risen 46 percent since 2011 to $238 million in 2016, or 16 percent of Egypt’s total.

South Korea’s 2016 imports of $1.6 billion made it the world’s 6th largest purchaser of arms, behind Saudi Arabia, Algeria, India, Iraq and Egypt, according to the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database. Most of South Korea’s weapons come from the United States.

South Korea is “a major purchaser of U.S. weapon systems,” and is “regularly among the top customers for Foreign Military Sales (FMS),” the congressional research group recently stated. From 2008 to 2016, it said, Korean contracts under FMS reached $15.7 billion and commercial acquisitions $6.9 billion, for a total of $22.5 billion in acquisitions over that time.

According to CRS, 75 percent of South Korea’s imports were purchased from U.S. military corporations, including Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing (which recently won a five-year contract to sustain South Korea’s fleet of F-15s). They make up four of the world’s top five arms companies.

In addition,“European and Israeli defense companies also compete for contracts; Korea is an attractive market because of its rising defense expenditures,” CRS noted. US competitors include the EU’s Airbus, which recently beat out Boeing for a $1.3 billion tanker contract with the South Korean Air Force.

Much of the “complex negotiations” will involve technology transfers. Key Korean weapons systems, such as the KF-X fighter jet built by Korea Aerospace Industries with assistance from Lockheed Martin, rely on the U.S. for core technologies, particularly advanced radar that serve as an aircraft’s “eyes and ears.”

As recently as last year, however, the US government and Pentagon have denied South Korean requests for the transfer of some of these technologies. This was particularly true for missiles, which South Korea has limited since it joined the Missile Technology Control Regime in 2001.

At the time, “the US military absolutely did not want to see South Korea have their own independent long-range strike capability,” military analyst John Pike wrote in his popular military blog, GlobalSecurity.org.

But in 2012, the US and South Korea compromised, allowing South Korea to increase its missile range from 300 to 800 kilometers.  But recently, Washington “rebuffed” the Korean request for the “long-range precision air-to-ground missile” called JASSM, the Guardian reports. It is made by Lockheed Martin.

The US limits on missiles and technology sales are now being extended as a result of the heightening tensions with Pyongyang over its nuclear and ICBM tests. “I am allowing Japan & South Korea to buy a substantially increased amount of highly sophisticated military equipment from the United States,” Trump tweeted a few days after North Korea exploded its sixth and largest atomic bomb on September 3.

Yet even before Trump’s announcement, Moon’s government was pushing to revise its missile guidelines to double the maximum weight of its warheads to 1,000 kilograms.

That will “improve its ability to destroy hardened targets,” Bruce Klingner, a former CIA deputy division chief for Korea who now heads up the Northeast Asia program for the extreme-right Heritage Foundation, told the military publication Defense One. Doing so, he said, “augments allied deterrence and defense capabilities” and “furthers the trend of South Korea assuming a larger responsibility for its defense.”

The desire for Seoul to take a larger role in military matters is reflected in President Moon’s latest drive to accelerate the transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON) from the US military.

“It’s only when we regain wartime operational control of our military that North Korea will fear us more and the South Korean public will trust the military more,” Moon declared on September 28. That, in turn, will require an expansion of South Korea’s satellite communications, defense analysts point out. Taking over OPCON “requires significant across the board investment in communications enablers,” Australian security expert Dr. Euan Graham told Defense News.

That could open a lucrative, new market for US intelligence integrators such as CACI International. It is one of five contractors that dominate the US spying and surveillance business and has extensive operations at US bases in South Korea, including the huge new base at Camp Humphries near Pyeongtaek. Employment notices on the CACI website show the company is currently hiring in Korea for work at this base, and looking specifically for classified telecommunications network operators.

Korean purchases of high-tech items such as drones will also strengthen US-South Korean industrial cooperation. Under the ROK’s 2015 drone deal with Northrop Grumman, for example, South Korea purchased two ground stations and supporting equipment so Korean  operators can “control and maintain the system,” the company said. Because that involves extensive training, it deepens US-Korean cooperation in intelligence operations and further tightens the military alliance.

One of the most extensive training programs is run by Lockheed Martin, which manufactures for South Korea the F-16 fighter jet, the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense systems also deployed by Japan, and the T-50 training aircraft jointly marketed around the world with KAI.

Under a program called “ROKStar,” it provides millions of dollars in R&D funding and mentoring to South Korean universities and research institutes for technologies in line with Lockheed’s “core capabilities,” according to the company website. Among these are signals processing technologies used by the US National Security Agency to monitor global communications. In 2016, ROKStar awards went to researchers at Korea University, Seoul National University, and Ulsan National Institute for Science and Technology.

Northrop Grumman, which makes many of the advanced radar systems used in US missile programs, is deeply rooted in Korea through its local CEO, Brian Kim, a former executive with Boeing Defense, Space and Security (where he oversaw sales of AH-64 Apache helicopters and small bombs). Kim, according to his official biography, spent over 20 years working in the US for KAI and its founding partners Samsung Aerospace and Hughes Aircraft Company, where he presided over aircraft programs such as the KAI T-50.

Boeing, of course, is well represented by Mark Lippert, the last US ambassador to South Korea. In April, he joined the company in Washington as its vice president for international affairs, and quickly threw himself into Korean affairs. He was an honored guest in June when President Moon spoke to the US Chamber of Commerce just before his summit with Trump, and has been spotted by Newstapa at every major Korea-related event since then at the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies in downtown Washington.

As tensions in Korea have increased this year, stock values for the companies doing business in Korea have risen sharply. Boeing’s shares this year have risen around 60 percent since Trump moved into the White House in January. Raytheon is up 25 percent, while both Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman saw their stock rise by 20 percent (that’s about double the 12.4 percent rate for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.)

But even the relatively minor cutbacks in the domestic defense budget over the past year has led US defense contractors to focus more on boosting exports. “One area where we expect the majority of our growth potential to come from in the years ahead is our international customers,” Marillyn Hewson, the CEO of Lockheed Martin, said at a “media day” last March. South Korea is central to their plans.