South Korea implicated in large-scale violations of U.N. coal, shipping...
This week, a scandal is burgeoning in South Korea that a wholly owned subsidiary of the nation’s largest power company purchased large quantities of North Korean coal in violation of the coal export...
View ArticleSouth Korea has been caught violating 3 UN resolutions this week (so far)
South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade now admits that it first suspected that subsidiaries of its national power company were importing North Korean coal as early as October 2017. For...
View ArticleThe Myth of Maximum Pressure: Why Trump’s North Korea sanctions strategy must...
If you’re a journalist or scholar who writes about North Korea, you’re apt to think that the Trump administration really did impose more-or-less “maximum” pressure on Kim Jong-un, although this was...
View ArticleThe U.S.-Korea alliance is “in jeopardy” & it’s not even (mostly) Trump’s fault
MAKING THE ROUNDS IN WASHINGTON THIS WEEK IS THIS MUST-READ REPORT, in Tokyo Business Today, by Stanford Professor Daniel Sneider: “Behind The Chaos Of Washington’s Korea Policy.” The report is based...
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Moon Jae-in’s unilateral sanctions violations are decoupling South Korea’s...
A FEW JOURNALISTS HAVE (if belated and partially) figured out that Moon Jae-in’s promises to Kim Jong-un would violate a series of U.N. Security Council sanctions. The latest example of this is Moon’s...
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DOJ indicts Singaporean businessman for conspiring to violate North Korea...
The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York has indicted Singaporean national Tan Wee Beng for laundering money on behalf of two sanctioned North Korean banks—Daedong Credit Bank...
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North Korea’s mining industry is collapsing, and steel may be next
OVER THE LAST YEAR, THE BRAVE COVERT CORRESPONDENTS of the Daily NK and Rimjin-gang have reported from inside North Korea on the effects of sanctions on North Korean industry. It’s now clear that those...
View ArticleDOJ sues to forfeit $3M linked to N. Korean money laundering, proliferation...
This afternoon, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia filed suit to forfeit just over $3 million that three defendants allegedly laundered for an interconnected network of North...
View ArticleOf course, Kim Jong-un’s tourist resorts will fail. Of course, we can help...
The following question is multiple choice. Please do not use a number two pencil to blacken the oval on your screen. In April, angry, hungry citizens in North Korea’s remote Ryanggang Province took the...
View ArticleRape, revenge, sanctions & North Korea’s hated Ministry of Love
FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, Machiavelli mulled the question of whether a tyrant should seek to be feared or loved. The Ministry of State Security or MSS is North Korea’s analog to Orwell’s Ministry of...
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How to negotiate a lasting peace in Korea, feed the hungry, and heal the sick
Let’s say you still believe in a negotiated disarmament of North Korea, something to which I assign a ten percent probability at most. Or, let’s say you don’t. Suspend your disbelief and assume that...
View ArticleCongress is losing confidence in Trump & Treasury on North Korea sanctions
Yesterday, Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) introduced a new version of the Otto Warmbier Banking Restrictions Involving North Korea, or BRINK Act, which I wrote about here in...
View ArticleUN Panel investigating South Korean sanctions violations
The U.N. Panel of Experts has released its latest report, and for the first time since it began publishing them in 2009, it is now investigating South Korea for violating the sanctions. One area the...
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How Congress can legislate maximum pressure over Donald Trump’s veto
In 1986, Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act by a vote that was overwhelming, if not quite so overwhelming as the margins by which later congresses would pass North Korea sanctions. I...
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The “experts” were wrong. The sanctions are working.
The fact that even the New York Times says so didn’t make it so; it just made it harder for people who trust the New York Times to deny it. But for those of us who’ve always put more stock in the Daily...
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OFK Exclusive: Court orders three Chinese banks to comply with subpoenas for...
We’ve all heard of ancient Chinese curses. Now, here is a modern one: “May the subpoenas fall like rain on your New York correspondents.” In December 2017, that curse afflicted three Chinese banks that...
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I’ll give you a topic. The final voyage of the “Wise Honest” was neither....
Just as predicted, North Korea’s apologists have switched from the sanctions-never-work narrative to the human shield narrative. And with impeccable timing—which we can be sure the apologists will...
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Judge holds Chinese banks in contempt, fines them $50K a day for failing to...
If you haven’t already read my post about Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s order directing three Chinese banks to comply with federal grand jury and statutory subpoenas of their North Korea-related records,...
View ArticleThe Warmbier Act could raise the pressure on Kim Jong-un dramatically,...
Kim Jong-un is wrapping Donald Trump’s Christmas present, and Putin and Xi Jinping say that Trump should lift the sanctions on Kim they’ve been violating anyway, but Congress just made those sanctions...
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Huawei & North Korea: Reading between the lines of EDNY’s new indictment
HUAWEI, WHICH WAS PREVIOUSLY INDICTED FOR eleven counts of conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud, violations of Iran sanctions, and money laundering (plus criminal forfeiture counts) now finds itself hit...
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