Quotes of the Day:

“Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.”

– Bruce Coville

“Few minds are spacious; few even have an empty place in them or can offer some vacant point. Almost all have narrow capacities and are filled by some knowledge that blocks them up. What a torture to talk to filled heads, that allow nothing from the outside to enter them! A good mind, in order to enjoy itself and allow itself to enjoy others, always keeps itself larger than its own thoughts. And in order to do this, these thoughts must be given a pliant form, must be easily folded and unfolded, so that they are capable, finally, of maintaining a natural flexibility.All those short-sighted minds see clearly within their little ideas and see nothing in those of others; they are like those bad eyes that see from close range what is obscure and cannot perceive what is clear from afar. Night minds, minds of darkness.” 

– Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection

"Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not."

– Epictetus

1. North Korea test-launches 2 ballistic missiles, after end of new US-South Korea-Japan drill

2. The Uncertain Russia-North Korea Relationship

3. Mondo TV reaches $538K settlement with OFAC over N. Korea sanctions violations

4. China is turning to private firms for offensive cyber operations

5. North Korea Fires Missiles to Show Force After Putin Visit

6. Putin’s Pyongyang Arms Supplier Calls US, Japan, and South Korea ‘Asian NATO'

7. ＜Investigation＞Current living conditions of North Koreans (1) Poor infrastructure…conditions surrounding water, electricity, heating, and restrooms

8. Kim Jong-un's pin seen as move to solidify status as sole leader: unification ministry

9. N. Korea continues party plenary meeting for 3rd day

10. North Korean missile may have exploded over Pyongyang: South Korea's JCS

11. North Korea intensifies military provocations with Russia's backing

12. N. Korea speeds up landmine and fortification work on inter-Korean border

13. Trump the Realist​: The Former President Understands the Limits of American Power

14. How Korea’s Angry Young Men Swept a President into Office — and What That Means for the US

1. North Korea test-launches 2 ballistic missiles, after end of new US-South Korea-Japan drill

Let's not worry about what Kim Jong Un is doing or will do. Let's make him worry about what we can and will do. Let's focus on human rights, information, cyber, sanctions, military readiness, and the pursuit of a free and unified Korea.  

North Korea test-launches 2 ballistic missiles, after end of new US-South Korea-Japan drill

AP · by HYUNG-JIN KIM · June 30, 2024

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea test-fired two ballistic missile Monday but one of them possibly flew abnormally, South Korea’s military said, a day after the North vowed “offensive and overwhelming” responses to a new U.S. military drill with South Korea and Japan.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement the missiles were launched 10 minutes apart in a northeasterly direction from the town of Jangyon in southeastern North Korea.

It said the first missile flew 600 kilometers (370 miles) and the second missile 120 kilometers (75 miles), but didn’t say where they landed. North Korea typically test-fires missiles toward its eastern waters, but the second missile’s flight distance was too short to reach those waters.

Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesperson Lee Sung Joon later told a briefing the second missile suffered a possible abnormal flight during the initial stage of its flight. He said if the missile exploded, its debris would likely have scattered on the ground though no damages was immediately reported. Lee said an additional analysis of the second missile launch was under way.

South Korean media, citing unidentified South Korean military sources, reported that it was highly likely the second missile crashed in an inland area of the North. The reports said the first missile landed in the waters off the North’s eastern city of Chongjin.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff condemned the North’s launches as a provocation that poses a serious threat to peace on the Korean Peninsula. It said South Korea maintains a firm readiness to repel any provocations by North Korea in conjunctions with the military alliance with the United States.

The launches came two days after South Korea, the U.S. and Japan ended their new multidomain trilateral drills in the region. In recent years, the three countries have been expanding their trilateral security partnership to better cope with North Korea’s evolving nuclear threats and China’s increasing assertiveness in the region.

The “Freedom Edge” drill was meant to increase the sophistication of previous exercises with simultaneous air and naval drills geared toward improving joint ballistic-missile defense, anti-submarine warfare, surveillance and other skills and capabilities. The three-day drill involved a U.S. aircraft carrier as well as destroyers, fighter jets and helicopters from the three countries.

On Sunday, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry issued a lengthy statement strongly denouncing the “Freedom Edge” drill, calling the U.S.-South Korea-Japan partnership an Asian version of NATO. It said the drill openly destroyed the security environment on the Korean Peninsula and contained a U.S. intention to lay siege to China and exert pressure on Russia.

The statement said North Korea will “firmly defend the sovereignty, security and interests of the state and peace in the region through offensive and overwhelming countermeasures.”

Monday’s launches were the North’s first weapons firing in five days. On Wednesday, North Korea launched what it called a multiwarhead missile in the first known test of a developmental, advanced weapon meant to defeat U.S. and South Korean missile defenses. North Korea said the launch was successful, but South Korea dismissed the North’s claim as deception to cover up a failed launch.

In recent weeks, North Korea has floated numerous trash-carrying balloons toward South Korea in what it has described as a tit-for-tat response to South Korean activists sending political leaflets via their own balloons. Last month, North Korea and Russia also struck a deal vowing mutual defense assistance if either is attacked, a major defense pact that raised worries that it could embolden Kim to launch more provocations at South Korea.

Meanwhile, North Korea opened a key ruling party meeting Friday to determine what it called “important, immediate issues” related to works to further enhance Korean-style socialism. Observers said the meeting was continuing Monday.

AP · by HYUNG-JIN KIM · June 30, 2024

2. The Uncertain Russia-North Korea Relationship

Yes, a public information campaign.

Here is the template:

Recognize the nK and Russian strategies. Understand them. EXPOSE the strategies to inoculate the publics in the ROK and US as well as the international community. Attack the strategies with a superior political warfare campaign.

Conclusion:

It is also time for the United States and South Korea to establish a public information campaign that counters the aspirations and capabilities of Russia and North Korea. For some time, North Korea was able to send large numbers of munitions for use against Ukraine and reap substantial financial and other rewards. But is North Korea running out of outdated war reserve stocks it can continue sending to Russia? And how dangerous are those munitions? Will Russia reduce its support of North Korea when it is no longer getting significant North Korean assistance? And if North Korea does send military forces to fight in Ukraine, Kim will be increasing instability in North Korea that the United States and South Korea should be prepared to exploit.

The Uncertain Russia-North Korea Relationship

Moscow and Pyongyang’s new defense agreement conceals tensions within the bilateral relationship that matter over the long term. 

The National Interest · by Bruce W. Bennett · June 28, 2024

The United States and South Korea have ample reasons to worry about the new agreement between Russia and North Korea. The agreement involves a mutual defense commitment between Russia and North Korea as well as military-technical cooperation. However, details matter, and the details of that agreement and ongoing Russian assistance are not known. And the agreement is almost certainly not a basis for a new Russia-China-North Korea alliance, given the very differing objectives of these three countries.

The Russian commitment to military-technical assistance is of particular concern. Russia could provide many kinds of assistance to North Korea that would potentially place the South and even the United States at great risk. Of particular concern would be Russian help with the North Korean nuclear weapon program, which could allow the North to build more powerful weapons of mass destruction. But Russia could also assist North Korea in developing ballistic missiles, satellites, satellite launchers, air defense systems, and other weapons.

What is not clear is how much of a difference this agreement will make. After all, over the years, the Soviet Union and then Russia have provided a lot of military-related help to North Korea. The Soviet Union trained North Korean nuclear scientists and supervised the construction of the first North Korean nuclear reactor. Russia has apparently assisted North Korea with its ballistic missile program, with GPS jammers, with maraging steel and aluminum needed for uranium centrifuges, with the KN-23 theater missile (which strongly resembles the Russian Iskander missile), with enhanced guidance and performance of the 240 mm multiple rocket launcher rockets, with developing a “hypersonic” missile, with successful launch of the North Korean spy satellite, and with North Korean use of a new satellite launcher using a more powerful fuel able to put much heavier and capable spy satellites into orbit.

We do not know the full details of Soviet and Russian involvement in these or other potential transfers to North Korea, but this is already a long list. Russia did not need the recent agreement to pursue any of these, so it is not clear how much the agreement will add to the transfer of military technologies from Russia to North Korea. However, given North Korean military assistance for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia may be more inclined to accelerate its military transfers to North Korea.

The mutual defense commitment in the agreement is curious. Despite North Korean protestations, neither the United States nor South Korea have any interest in invading North Korea—the North does not need a Russian defense commitment, and likely Russia would not have many forces to send to North Korea because of its invasion of Ukraine. For Kim, this part of the agreement was thus mainly political, consistent with his recent claims that South Korea is the North’s enemy and a real threat.

However, the mutual defense commitment could be a “Putin trap,” with Russian president Vladimir Putin getting military assistance from North Korea that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un cannot expect in return. Putin has annexed four regions of Ukraine. If Ukrainian forces counterattack these regions, Putin could claim that Russia has been invaded and invoke this commitment, asking North Korea to send forces to assist in defending Russia. After all, Putin has had difficulty fulfilling his requirements for soldiers, and he may find North Korean soldiers a helpful alternative.

Ironically, this mutual defense commitment could also be a “Kim trap.” Kim knows that during the Vietnam War, some 320,000 South Korean troops supported U.S. military operations in Vietnam. This combat experience was empowering for the South Korean Army, and the United States also provided significant economic assistance to South Korea, which helped facilitate its early rise and eventually became a major economic power.

Kim may want both of these advantages and could gain them from Russia by sending North Korean troops to fight in Ukraine. To avoid defections, Kim would probably want to send only soldiers from elite families that primarily live in Pyongyang, keeping the families as hostages. Of course, these families would not want their children sent to Ukraine to suffer the horrors and effects of war. To avoid serious dissent, Kim may want to justify dispatching North Korean troops by claiming that he is only fulfilling his side of the recent agreement.

Finally, some in the community fear that this agreement is but an early step in forming a Moscow-Beijing-Pyongyang alliance. True, all three are fighting against the United States’ position as a global superpower and dominant economic power. They want to do what they can to undermine U.S. power, and in that, they share efforts. But both Russia and China seek to become the new global superpower, something they cannot both be. Thus, China was clearly unhappy to see Putin making an agreement with North Korea and strengthening Russia’s ties with Vietnam, upstaging China’s efforts to achieve dominance in Asia. And the Russian-North Korean agreement prohibits their making other agreements with third parties that infringe on their core interests. Meanwhile, despite North Korea being dependent on Chinese aid, it resists Chinese efforts to dominate the North, seeking the appearance of North Korean self-reliance.

The agreement has unsettled South Korea. South Korea threatened to start sending weapons to Ukraine if Russia did not renounce the agreement, a natural response to Russia significantly increasing the North Korean threat. Putin naively tried to reassure the South that it “shouldn’t worry” about the agreement if it does not plan aggression against the North. Putin apparently forgot that North Korea is the established aggressor on the Korean peninsula. South Korea thus needs to implement its threat to help Ukraine, which would present Putin with consequences for his actions.

It is also time for the United States and South Korea to establish a public information campaign that counters the aspirations and capabilities of Russia and North Korea. For some time, North Korea was able to send large numbers of munitions for use against Ukraine and reap substantial financial and other rewards. But is North Korea running out of outdated war reserve stocks it can continue sending to Russia? And how dangerous are those munitions? Will Russia reduce its support of North Korea when it is no longer getting significant North Korean assistance? And if North Korea does send military forces to fight in Ukraine, Kim will be increasing instability in North Korea that the United States and South Korea should be prepared to exploit.

About the Author: Dr. Bruce Bennett

Bruce W. Bennett is a senior international/defense researcher at RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution. He works primarily on research topics such as strategy, force planning, and counterproliferation within the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Program.

Image: Shutterstock.

The National Interest · by Bruce W. Bennett · June 28, 2024

3. Mondo TV reaches $538K settlement with OFAC over N. Korea sanctions violations

Excerpts:

The agency said the case demonstrates how “non-U.S. persons remitting financial transactions from a foreign jurisdiction to U.S. companies or U.S. financial institutions may expose themselves to civil liability for sanctions violations.”

Additionally, “foreign entities engaged in commercial activities with such parties should be aware of any nexus to the United States and U.S. persons and take efforts to mitigate the attendant risks,” OFAC said, citing a compliance note the agency jointly issued in March with the Department of Justice and Department of Commerce.

Mondo TV reaches $538K settlement with OFAC over N. Korea sanctions violations

https://www.complianceweek.com/regulatory-enforcement/mondo-tv-reaches-538k-settlement-with-ofac-over-n-korea-sanctions-violations/35027.article

By Jeff DaleThu, Jun 27, 2024 12:56 PM

Italy-based Mondo TV agreed to pay $538,000 to settle charges with the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) over 18 apparent violations of North Korea sanctions regulations.

OFAC said in a press release Wednesday that Mondo caused U.S. financial institutions to process nearly $538,000 in payments for animation work it outsourced to a North Korea government-owned animation studio.

The agency acknowledged the apparent violations were non-egregious, but noted the company did not voluntarily disclose the alleged misconduct as an aggravating factor.

The details: In the 1990s, Mondo accumulated approximately $1.1 million in outstanding debt to Scientific Educational Korea Studio (SEK), a North Korea government-owned animation studio, according to OFAC’s penalty notice.

In July 2019, SEK and Mondo executed an agreement whereby Mondo would pay SEK in monthly installments for work completed prior to 2016, OFAC said. In 2016, Mondo paused the relationship due to human rights concerns.

In fulfillment of the agreement, between May 2019 and November 2021, Mondo initiated 18 wire transfers that were processed by or settled at U.S. financial institutions, OFAC alleged.

These transfers consisted of 12 payments to a U.S. company’s account at a U.S. bank; one U.S. dollar-denominated transfer that was cleared by a U.S. correspondent bank; and five transfers to a foreign company’s account at a U.S. bank, per the notice.

Additionally, Mondo did not have a sanctions compliance policy at the time, OFAC noted.

Compliance considerations: OFAC acknowledged mitigating factors, including Mondo’s clean record in the past five years and its cooperation with the agency’s investigation by providing additional documents, promptly responding to requests for information, and its substantive assistance supporting broader U.S. government policy objectives.

The agency said the case demonstrates how “non-U.S. persons remitting financial transactions from a foreign jurisdiction to U.S. companies or U.S. financial institutions may expose themselves to civil liability for sanctions violations.”

Additionally, “foreign entities engaged in commercial activities with such parties should be aware of any nexus to the United States and U.S. persons and take efforts to mitigate the attendant risks,” OFAC said, citing a compliance note the agency jointly issued in March with the Department of Justice and Department of Commerce.

Mondo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

4. China is turning to private firms for offensive cyber operations

Excerpts:

The dump also reveals that some of iS00N’s operators are paid very little—which may help explain the February leak. Such firms appear to allow operators to work for the party-state by day but use company equipment and software to commit lucrative fraud by night. That permissive lack of control might represent part of the thousands of cybercrime arrests inside China by the Ministry of Public Security during 2022 and 2023.

It's unknown just how many private hacking firms like iS00N and Chengdu 404 can provide software solutions to smaller ones, though the local firms listed in iS00N’s tally number over 100. At a more basic level, we remain in the dark about the steps in the PRC intelligence cycle, how tasking is allocated, and what, if any, mechanism exists to manage conflicts. It is also uncertain if the CCP leadership creates redundant tasking and rivalries on purpose, to keep the organs of state security from conspiring together against top leaders.

While the massive airing of their secrets must have been embarrassing to all involved in the PRC hacking industry, both the business and overall CCP cyber operations continue to chug along. While the leaks implicated Chengdu 404 in a bid-rigging conspiracy to cheat the Ministries of State Security and Public Security, as of this writing, the company is still open for business and even looking to hire more engineers to develop websites, big data, and web crawler technology.

China is turning to private firms for offensive cyber operations

Leaked documents reveal prices, clients, targets, and more.

By MATT BRAZIL and PETER W. SINGER

JUNE 30, 2024 08:00 AM ET

defenseone.com · by Matt Brazil

Recent leaks and other revelations about Beijing’s use of hacking companies are shedding light on how privatization with Chinese characteristics is changing the government’s intelligence operations.

In February, 577 documents stolen from the Chinese hacking firm iS00N were dumped onto GitHub. The Microsoft-owned developer hub quickly removed the files, but not before analysts and media around the world were touting the “first-of-its-kind” look.

The leak was hardly the first revelation that private companies have been handling the kind of offensive cyber operations that were once the exclusive purview of government agencies. In 2015, a 400GB data dump exposed such efforts by the Italian Hacking Team. In 2021, a worldwide news consortium documented efforts by the Israeli NSO Group and others to help authoritarian regimes and private clients target tech firms and democracies around the world. And last year, the Carnegie Endowment compiled a list of 193 publicly reported instances of privatized offensive cyber-attacks executed by 40 firms, including six Chinese companies.

Nevertheless, the iSoon document dump revealed activities of unexpected scope. Working on behalf of China’s Public Security Bureaus and State Security Departments, the company has spied on targets all over Europe, Asia, and North America. The leak was “narrow, but it is deep,” said John Hultquist, the chief analyst at cyber security firm Mandiant. “We rarely get such unfettered access to the inner workings of any intelligence operation.”

Origins

China’s turn to private-sector hackers comes amid a two-decade expansion of espionage operations that target not just potential adversary governments and militaries, but foreign government officials, dissidents abroad, Hong Kong activists, China-focused journalists, and foreign businesses in critical sectors, including defense industrial bases. Particular efforts are made to learn about military and space technologies, whose secrets are increasingly held in digital form. As Peter Mattis put it in Chinese Communist Espionage, “the craft of technical operations (has) shifted from the elegance of the device and its delivery to the elegance of software,” which “marked the clear emergence of computer network exploitation as a go-to part of the Chinese intelligence toolkit.” The digital shift has enabled several astounding successes, such as harvesting information on 20 million U.S. government employees from the Office of Personnel Management from 2013 to 2015, hacking into the U.S. Commerce Secretary’s emails, and numerous other exploits.

However, China’s cyber operations have also been plagued by uneven training and occasional sloppy practices. A decade ago, the infamous PLA Unit 61398 (APT 1) did not even bother to hide their IP addresses; in 2021, a unit of Recorded Future, using “common analytical techniques,” mapped the extensive infrastructure and foreign targets of PLA Unit 69010 in Urumqi, Xinjiang. That same year, they discovered that another SSF PLA Unit, 61419, had failed to keep its purchases of foreign antivirus software from being publicly posted for all to see.

Such blunders are notable but probably were not the reason for the recent privatization trend, and they were multiplied by this year’s poor OPSEC at iS00N, along with the public drama of Chengdu 404 suing that firm. More likely, it was an increase in the scale of Beijing’s intelligence operations, leading to the transfer of what appears to be a substantial portion of work from state security agencies to contractors (the leaked documents show only a few iS00N clients were military). Some of the known companies include independent operators such as iS00N and Chengdu 404, as well as Ministry of State Security fronts such as Hunan Xiaoruizhi S&T and Hainan Xiandun Technology (the latter is still listed online).

The origins of iS00N–type companies may be traced to the “patriotic hacking” of the 1990s, which featured figures like Lin Yong and his “Honker Union” and Wu Haibo, who founded the 1990s hacking group “Green Army.” By the early 2000s, more sophisticated military entities, notably PLA Unit 61398 (APT 1), were carrying out sophisticated attacks, and it seemed that hacking had become the province of the military.

But looking back, the path to privatized operations appears to have been laid amid the downswing in U.S.-China relations that began with Obama’s 2010 “pivot” to Asia and Xi Jinping’s ascent to power in 2012. After Wu launched iS00N in 2010, other private firms began popping up, including Chengdu 404 in 2014. The trend may have been accelerated by Xi’s aggressive foreign and domestic policies, particularly in his second term in 2017-22, which generated additional intelligence requirements. Today, private intelligence companies offer the ability to hire people quickly for emerging requirements. In particular, they can hire for unclassified jobs without waiting on the kind of security clearances that the government would require of its own employees. (Almost none of iS00N’s contracts in the leaked client table are marked as classified.) This likely helps Beijing maintain a worldwide intelligence and influence offensive whose “scope and intensity…is overwhelming Western defenses,” writes Nigel Inkster, the former director of operations and intelligence at MI-6.

Revelations

The leaked iS00N documents provide a range of insights into this business of hacking for the PRC. The company’s rates for monitoring individual email addresses are listed at $125,000 per year or $300,000 for three years. A five-page table documents contracts going back to 2016 with a variety of clients, starting with the Chengdu Public Security Bureau and spreading to other PSBs across China. One contract with the Ministry of Public Security Number 3 Institute in Beijing, hired the firm to provide a “remote evidence inquiry system” for use on the China Unicom Network. Intriguingly, the table reveals iS00N’s work for technology companies across China. For example, the Shaanxi Xianxiang Network Technology Company was provided “data acquisition service” for $22,800, while the Fujian Zhongrui Electronic Technology Company received “sharp eye data analysis services.” This raises the possibility that iS00N has become the provider of spying and other software to other contractors favored by the PSBs in their localities.

Actual full-text agreements among the documents are rare, but there is an iS00N contract with the Bayingol Public Security Bureau in Xinjiang, which hired the company to hack the email accounts of Uyghur emigres and their families back home in Bayingol—and also the databases of airlines and telecom companies that emigres might use in Macau, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan. Other jobs had iS00N monitoring NATO and government ministries in Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia, Thailand, and the UK.

The dump also reveals that some of iS00N’s operators are paid very little—which may help explain the February leak. Such firms appear to allow operators to work for the party-state by day but use company equipment and software to commit lucrative fraud by night. That permissive lack of control might represent part of the thousands of cybercrime arrests inside China by the Ministry of Public Security during 2022 and 2023.

It's unknown just how many private hacking firms like iS00N and Chengdu 404 can provide software solutions to smaller ones, though the local firms listed in iS00N’s tally number over 100. At a more basic level, we remain in the dark about the steps in the PRC intelligence cycle, how tasking is allocated, and what, if any, mechanism exists to manage conflicts. It is also uncertain if the CCP leadership creates redundant tasking and rivalries on purpose, to keep the organs of state security from conspiring together against top leaders.

While the massive airing of their secrets must have been embarrassing to all involved in the PRC hacking industry, both the business and overall CCP cyber operations continue to chug along. While the leaks implicated Chengdu 404 in a bid-rigging conspiracy to cheat the Ministries of State Security and Public Security, as of this writing, the company is still open for business and even looking to hire more engineers to develop websites, big data, and web crawler technology.

Matt Brazil is a senior analyst with BluePath Labs, a Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, and a former U.S. Army officer and diplomat. He is a co-author of Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer (Naval Institute Press, 2019).

P.W. Singer is a best-selling author of such books on war and technology as Wired for War, Ghost Fleet, and Burn-In; senior fellow at New America; and co-founder of Useful Fiction, a strategic narratives company.

defenseone.com · by Matt Brazil

5. North Korea Fires Missiles to Show Force After Putin Visit

Graphic, map, and video at the link.

North Korea Fires Missiles to Show Force After Putin Visit

• Kim Jong Un seeking to develop multiple warhead missiles
• Putin and Kim struck mutual-defense pact during visit

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-30/north-korea-fires-missile-in-show-of-force-after-putin-visit?sref=hhjZtX76

By Jon Herskovitz and Soo-Hyang Choi

June 30, 2024 at 5:18 PM EDT

Updated on June 30, 2024 at 11:26 PM EDT

North Korea shot off at least two suspected ballistic missiles Monday, days after firing a rocket to test a new multiple warhead system for delivering a nuclear strike.

The missiles were launched at about 5:05 a.m. and 5:15 a.m. from a province southwest of Pyongyang and headed toward the northeast, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a dispatch sent to reporters. The launch was the second in less than a week. North Korea typically doesn’t comment on its launches until the following day.

One of the projectiles was a short-range ballistic missile that flew about 600 kilometers (375 miles) and landed in waters off the east coast, the JCS said later.

The other ballistic missile may have had trouble in flight that caused it to break apart and spread debris on North Korea’s inland territory, it added. The missile flew about 120 kms before it disappeared from radar. The distance and flight path open the possibility that debris could have fallen in the Pyongyang area, Yonhap News reported.

Kim Jong Un's Missile Program

Types of ballistic missiles tested by the North Korean leader

Sources: South Korean Defense Ministry

Note: Data as of July 1 2024. Includes two failed tests of ICBMs in 2022 and suspected failed IRBM test in 2024. March 18, 2024 test was of at least six SRBMs.

The latest launches have been a show of force for leader Kim Jong Un after he hosted Vladimir Putin in Pyongyang in mid-June. The two countries reached a deal during the Russian president’s first visit to North Korea in 24 years to come to the other’s aid if attacked, raising alarm among the US and its key allies in Asia — Japan and South Korea.

About a week after the visit, North Korea claimed it successfully conducted a test of a multiple warhead missile system on June 26. But South Korea called the launch a failure and accused Kim’s regime of using “deception and exaggeration” to cover up a missile that exploded in the early stages of flight.

Read more: South Korea Doubts North’s Claim of Multiple Warhead Success

North Korea has at times made dubious claims about successes in weapons tests. But Kim has set the goal of being able to deploy multiple warheads to hit several targets, making them harder to intercept and more likely at least one can reach its target.

• Read more on North Korea:Why North Korea Sends Trash Balloons to the South: QuickTake
• Putin’s Defense Pact With Kim Jong Un Alarms US and Allies
• What Putin, Kim’s Military Pact Means for the World: QuickTake
• Putin, Kim Agree to Immediately Offer Military Aid If Attacked

The technology is known as MIRV, or multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles, and was first developed in the 1960s, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

“The development of MIRV technology is not easy,” according to a factsheet on MIRV by the center. “It requires the combination of large missiles, small warheads, accurate guidance, and a complex mechanism for releasing warheads sequentially during flight.”

“The development of MIRV technology is not easy,” according to a factsheet on MIRV by the center. “It requires the combination of large missiles, small warheads, accurate guidance, and a complex mechanism for releasing warheads sequentially during flight.”

Russia has had multiple warhead deployment technology for decades, and the test earlier in June increases concerns that deepening military ties between the two countries could involve tech transfers to help Kim’s MIRV program.

The US and its partners have accused Kim of sending millions of rounds of munitions to help Putin in his grinding war on Ukraine in return for aid that’s propping up North Korea’s economy and technology that could advance its military.

Pyongyang and Moscow have denied the charges of arms transfers despite ample evidence showing them taking place.

North Korean Munitions Routes Into RussiaSource: White House

Russia, in return, is providing North Korea with food, raw materials and parts used in weapons manufacturing, South Korean Defense Minister Shin Wonsik has said. The food aid has helped Kim stabilize prices for necessities, and if the arms transfers grow, Russia will likely send more military technology to Kim, increasing Pyongyang’s threat to the region, Shin added.

Over the weekend, Kim presided over a major meeting of his ruling Workers’ Party of Korea that is “stepping up the historic advance for the comprehensive rejuvenation of Korean-style socialism,” the state’s propaganda apparatus reported.

In a separate move that has increased friction on the divided peninsula, North Korea since late May has sent more than 2,000 balloons into South Korea carrying trash such as waste paper, cigarette butts and used batteries, according to South Korea’s military and police.

— With assistance from Seyoon Kim and Shinhye Kang

(Updates with details on missile flights from paragraph two.)

6. Putin’s Pyongyang Arms Supplier Calls US, Japan, and South Korea ‘Asian NATO'

Reporting from Kyiv.

Putin’s Pyongyang Arms Supplier Calls US, Japan, and South Korea ‘Asian NATO'

kyivpost.com · by AFP · June 30, 2024

North Korea condemns drills by Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul and warns of “fatal consequences” for what Kim Jong Un thinks is a Pacific version of the Atlantic Alliance.

by AFP | June 30, 2024, 5:00 pm

Rusian and North Korean flags waving at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur region on September 13, 2023, during the meeting of Russian and North Korea's leader. Artem Geodakyan / POOL / AFP

• China
• Russia

North Korea denounced on Sunday joint military drills by South Korea, Japan and the United States, calling them an "Asian version of NATO" and warning of "fatal consequences".

It comes a day after the allies wrapped up three-day exercises, dubbed "Freedom Edge", in ballistic missile and air defenses, anti-submarine warfare and defensive cyber training.

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US, South Korean and Japanese leaders agreed at a trilateral summit last year to conduct annual drills as a sign of unity in the face of North Korea's nuclear threats and China's rising regional influence.

"We strongly denounce... provocative military muscle-flexing against the DPRK," Pyongyang's foreign ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run KCNA news agency Sunday, referring to the North's official name.

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"The US-Japan-ROK relations have taken on the full-fledged appearance of an Asian-version NATO," it said, warning of "fatal consequences".

"The DPRK will never overlook the moves of the US and its followers to strengthen the military bloc."

The latest joint drills involved Washington's nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, Tokyo's guided-missile destroyer JS Atago, and Seoul's KF-16 fighter jet.

Pyongyang has always decried similar combined exercises as rehearsals for an invasion.

The two Koreas have meanwhile been caught in a tit-for-tat balloon campaign in recent weeks, with Pyongyang sending trash-filled balloons southwards in retaliation to similar missives sent northwards from the South carrying pro-Seoul propaganda.

Other Topics of Interest

UK Warns of Russian Interference in July 4 General Election

In what the British government says is a “classic example from the Russian playbook,” it sees the Kremlin’s “hostile state actors seeking to influence the outcome of the election campaign.”

South Korea has also grown anxious over the North's warming relations with its isolated neighbor Russia.

North Korea is accused of breaching arms control measures by supplying weapons to Russia to use in its war in Ukraine, and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a summit with leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang this month in a show of unity.

kyivpost.com · by AFP · June 30, 2024

7. ＜Investigation＞Current living conditions of North Koreans (1) Poor infrastructure…conditions surrounding water, electricity, heating, and restrooms

We need to be more concerned with the internal conditions and the potential for internal instability than we are of missile tests. The most likely path to conflict is through internal instability in north KOrea.

＜Investigation＞Current living conditions of North Koreans (1) Poor infrastructure…conditions surrounding water, electricity, heating, and restrooms

asiapress.org

(FILE PHOTO) Many provincial cities are paralyzed by the deteriorating power situation. In some cases, even children are mobilized to fetch water. Photo taken in South Hwanghae Province in 2008. (ASIAPRESS)

ASIAPRESS recently conducted a survey of North Koreans living in the northern part of the country to get an overall picture of their lives, from the most basic conditions they face to education and health care. In this first part of a three-part series, ASIAPRESS presents the latest developments in water, electricity, heating, and toilet conditions. (JEON Sung-jun / KANG Ji-won)

The series was conducted from March to May by interviewing three people in Ryanggang and North Hamgyong provinces. The interviews in this series were conducted in the northern regions where the interviewees live, so there are limitations to generalizing from the content of the interviews to North Korea as a whole. However, the interviews do allow speculation about the situation in other parts of the country. The first part of this series summarizes the account of "A," an interviewee who lives in an urban area in Ryanggang Province.

◆Tap water supplied only at specific times…unreliable due to dilapidated pipes and low water pressure

In March, ASIAPRESS asked "A" about water and drinking water conditions. She described the local water situation and said that while it varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, in most areas water is delivered at specific times.

"In the building where I live, (water) is delivered twice a day, at 7 a.m. and 5 p.m., but the water pressure is low, so you have to go and get it yourself if you live higher than the third floor."

"A" said that the water supply is insufficient, so she has to conserve water all the time. She pointed out the reason:

"The water supply is definitely less robust than in 2019, because the pipes are old and the water pumps are not in good condition. That's why there are a lot of problems."

◆Electricity supplied 1-2 hours a day, while the cost of heating has skyrocketed

"The electricity situation is even worse now (in March) because there is no water, so it's limited to one or two hours a day. Often there is no electricity for the whole day."

North Korea relies on hydropower for more than 60 percent of its electricity supply, so the power situation tends to be worse during the dry season. March, the month the reporting partner told ASIAPRESS about conditions there, is part of the dry season, so the power situation was even worse than usual.

"There is a clear distinction between industrial and residential electricity. There is almost no supply for the residential areas, while the industrial lines seem to have some electricity supply."

Electricity for industrial use supports production activities in factories and businesses, while electricity for residential areas is for general households. The supply of electricity to residential areas is almost cut off to make up for the shortage, the reporting partner said.

She added that many residents use Chinese solar panels to light their homes.

Solar panels are installed on an apartment in the suburbs of Hyesan. Photo taken from the Chinese side of the border in mid-October 2023 (ASIAPRESS

As the electricity situation continues to deteriorate, heating costs have also increased, "A" said.

"The cost of heating has gone up," she said. "Before, we had some electricity, so we used heaters and things like that, but now we can hardly use them."

As a result, the reporting partner explained, there is more demand for firewood and coal, which have now become more expensive.

"Coal and firewood have also increased in price. Firewood used to cost 100 yuan per cubic meter (/㎥), and now it's 125 yuan. Coal used to cost 110 yuan per ton, and now it's up to 150 yuan."

※1 Chinese yuan is about 189 Korean won.

◆“Traditional” toilets remain the norm with little hope of improvement on the horizon

"The toilets haven't changed much from before," she said. "The newer apartments are putting in locally made tiles to modernize the outdoor communal toilets, but they don't drain properly. You have to keep filling them to use the (human waste) for compost, so they smell bad and are still uncomfortable to use."

New toilets are still built in the traditional, non-flushing way, which requires scooping out human waste once they are filled. Normally, North Korean homes are equipped with flush toilets, but with the recent water shortage, they are not easy to use.

"Sometimes individuals put a (flushing) toilet in the bathroom at home, but I don't think most people want to change (to flushing toilets) because they're used to traditional toilets. I've heard that apartments in Pyongyang are importing pumps from China to increase water pressure, which is a priority if you want to modernize your toilets."

In a speech on October 10, 2020, at a military parade celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Workers' Party of Korea, Kim Jong-un broke down in tears over his failure to take care of the people's lives and vowed to improve them. However, based on this survey, it appears that there has been no significant improvement in the basic living conditions of North Koreans compared to the past. In the next installment, ASIAPRESS will look at the country's education and health care systems.

Kim Jong-un breaks down in tears during a speech at a military parade to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Workers' Party of Korea, on October 10, 2020. (Korean Central Television screen capture)

(To be continued in the next installment)

※ ASIAPRESS communicates with its reporting partners through Chinese cell phones smuggled into North Korea.

• Farmers protest against lack of food rations, police mobilized Cadres diverted food to other uses
• ＜Inside N. Korea＞State-led smuggling resumes in the Yalu River, sends seafood and copper ore to China, bringing in UN-sanctioned goods like cars and machinery
• ＜Inside N. Korea＞Hungry elderly people flock to government office to demand rice, leading police to mobilize to put down unrest…Hyesan city
• ＜Inside N. Korea＞Recruitment for the world's longest military service(1)　This year 8 years for men, 5 years for women
• ＜Investigation＞Why aren’t North Korea’s women having babies anymore? (1)　The fertility rate is already severely low…It’s rare to see anyone carrying babies around

asiapress.org

8. Kim Jong-un's pin seen as move to solidify status as sole leader: unification ministry

Another indication of weakness. Kim is desperate to make himself the Supreme, Great, and Dear Leader because he is facing enormous internal stress.

Kim Jong-un's pin seen as move to solidify status as sole leader: unification ministry | Yonhap News Agency

en.yna.co.kr · by Kim Han-joo · July 1, 2024

SEOUL, July 1 (Yonhap) -- A pin featuring the solitary portrait of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is perceived as an effort to reinforce his position as the sole leader, Seoul's unification ministry said Monday.

A photograph from the state-run Korean Central News Agency, published Sunday, showed the pin prominently displayed on the suit jackets of all North Korean officials attending a plenary meeting of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea's 8th Central Committee on Friday.

It marks the first confirmed instance of pins exclusively featuring Kim's portrait being used.

"This is part of a move to obscure the legacies of previous leaders and establish Kim Jong-un's authority as a sole leader," said Kim In-ae, the deputy spokesperson for the ministry, during a press briefing.

The deputy spokesperson said the move appears to be aimed at strengthening internal cohesion and legitimizing Kim's rule amid increasing public dissatisfaction due to economic hardships and the influx of external cultural content, such as K-pop dramas.

She said that the idolization of Kim Jong-un began in earnest around 2021, marking his 10th year in power.

The pin featuring Kim Il-sung, North Korea's founder, began production and distribution in November 1970, while his successor Kim Jong-il's pin started being produced in February 1992 for his 50th birthday celebration.

Since Kim Jong-il's death in December 2011, pins with dual portraits of the two late leaders have been widely distributed to the public.

A portrait pin, a key symbol of the Kim family's cult of personality, must be worn by everyone in North Korea, from ordinary citizens to top officials.

However, it is still unclear whether Kim Jung-un's pins are being worn by ordinary citizens.

The wearing of Kim Jong-un portrait pins by senior party officials during significant events like the plenary meeting could also be a temporary measure to emphasize loyalty to Kim Jong-un during the proceedings.

A pin featuring the portrait of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is shown in this photo carried by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency on June 30, 2024. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)

khj@yna.co.kr

(END)

en.yna.co.kr · by Kim Han-joo · July 1, 2024

9. N. Korea continues party plenary meeting for 3rd day

​Still no significant reports from the session, I have pated the KCNA statement below this article.

N. Korea continues party plenary meeting for 3rd day | Yonhap News Agency

en.yna.co.kr · by Kim Han-joo · July 1, 2024

SEOUL, July 1 (Yonhap) -- A plenary Central Committee meeting of North Korea's ruling Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) has continued for the third day in a row, state media reported Monday, amid attention being paid to whether it would announce follow-up measures to implement a new partnership treaty with Russia.

The third day of the 10th plenary meeting of the WPK's 8th Central Committee was held Sunday "to work out detailed and practical measures for successfully fulfilling the tasks for 2024," the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.

"The participants are intensifying the discussion while conducting an in-depth study of the draft resolutions to be submitted to the plenary meeting and thoroughly exploring ways to carry out the tasks for the second half of the year entrusted to their sectors and units," the KCNA said in an English dispatch.

The plenary meeting began Friday, with five agenda items approved by all members of the WPK Central Committee, the KCNA said, without further disclosing other details.

On the second day, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended the meeting to "discuss and decide on a series of important immediate issues arising in maintaining the upturn in the comprehensive development of Korean-style socialism," it said.

North Korea usually holds a party plenary meeting for a few days in June. But this year's meeting has drawn more attention due to the possibility that it could discuss detailed measures to expand cooperation with Russia following its signing of a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty with Moscow.

Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a summit in Pyongyang on June 19 and clinched the treaty that calls for providing military assistance to each other without delay if either side comes under an armed attack.

This photo, carried by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency on June 30, 2024, shows the North holding the 10th plenary meeting of the 8th Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea the previous day. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)

khj@yna.co.kr

(END)

en.yna.co.kr · by Kim Han-joo · July 1, 2024

Third-day Sitting of Tenth Plenary Meeting of Eighth Central Committee of WPK Held

Date: 01/07/2024 | Source: KCNA.kp (En) | Read original version at source

https://kcnawatch.org/newstream/1719785263-104305354/third-day-sitting-of-tenth-plenary-meeting-of-eighth-central-committee-of-wpk-held/

Pyongyang, July 1 (KCNA) -- The enlarged meeting of the Tenth Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea continued on June 30.

The third-day sitting saw sectional consultative meetings to work out detailed and practical measures for successfully fulfilling the tasks for 2024 which are of great significance in implementing the programme set forth at the Party Congress.

The participants are intensifying the discussion while conducting an in-depth study of the draft resolutions to be submitted to the plenary meeting and thoroughly exploring the ways for carrying out the tasks for the second half of the year entrusted to their sectors and units.

Members of the Political Bureau of the Party Central Committee and leading officials of different fields are guiding the sectional consultative meetings. -0-

www.kcna.kp (Juche113.7.1.)

10. North Korean missile may have exploded over Pyongyang: South Korea's JCS

Monday

July 1, 2024

 dictionary + A - A 

Published: 01 Jul. 2024, 08:57

Updated: 01 Jul. 2024, 15:16

North Korean missile may have exploded over Pyongyang: South Korea's JCS

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2024-07-01/national/northKorea/North-Korea-fires-two-ballistic-missiles-JCS/2080163

The trail of what appears to be a North Korean missile is seen near South Korea's northwestern border island of Yeonpyeong on Wednesday. [NEWS1]

North Korea launched two ballistic missiles in the early hours of Monday, with one of the missiles possibly failing and landing inside North Korea, according to South Korean military authorities.

One short-range ballistic missile was fired from the Jangyon area in South Hwanghae Province at around 5:05 a.m. and flew about 600 kilometers (372 miles), landing in the ocean off North Korea's northeastern coast, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said.

Another ballistic missile was launched at around 5:15 a.m. but flew only about 120 kilometers.

"The second missile may have flown abnormally in the initial stage of its launch," said Col. Lee Sung-jun, the spokesperson for the JCS. "If it exploded during the launch, the debris could have fallen on North Korean territory."

An official from the JCS said that while it is difficult to know exactly where the second missile landed because it disappeared from the radar during its launch, it is possible that it fell toward Pyongyang.

Related Article

North criticizes South-U.S.-Japan military drill, threatens countermeasures

Seoul imposes more sanctions on North Korean, Russian entities, ships and individuals

North denies missile launch failed, claims successful test of MIRV technology

Seventh wave of North Korean trash balloons disrupts Seoul and Gyeonggi

“While strengthening our monitoring and vigilance against additional launches, our military is maintaining a full-readiness posture while sharing North Korean ballistic missile data with the U.S. and Japanese authorities,” the JCS said.

Monday’s provocation comes five days after North Korea launched a ballistic missile Wednesday and claimed through its state media that it was a successful test to secure multiple warhead capabilities, contrary to Seoul’s assessment that the test failed.

It also comes after Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry on Sunday blasted South Korea, the United States and Japan for carrying out "Freedom Edge," the first trilateral multi-domain military exercise, the day before.

North Korea's Foreign Ministry said that it will “never overlook the moves of the U.S. and its followers to strengthen the military bloc,” adding that it will “firmly defend the sovereignty, security and interests of the state and peace in the region through offensive and overwhelming countermeasures.”

According to the JCS, the new trilateral exercise aims to improve trilateral interoperability.

Freedom Edge is the first iteration of a regular exercise conducted in multiple domains, including air, sea, underwater, space and cyber. It is meant to advance trilateral military cooperation, stepping up from the existing bilateral drills between the United States and its East Asian allies.

Pyongyang has recently been scaling up its provocations by launching ballistic missiles and sending waste balloons across the border to South Korea. In response to the distribution of anti-North Korea leaflets by defectors and activists in the South, North Korea sent thousands of waste balloons across the border in a total of seven rounds between May 28 and June 26.

Update, July 1: Added details about the suspected failed missile launch, including the rocket's possible explosion over Pyongyang.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]

11.  North Korea intensifies military provocations with Russia's backing

We must understand the nature, objectives, and strategy of theKim family regime. If we did we would understand its political warfare and blackmail diplomacy strategies and recognize how these actions support those strategies.

We must not overreact.

And again, let's not worry about what Kim Jong Un is doing or will do. Let's make him worry about what we can and will do. Let's focus on human rights, information, cyber, sanctions, military readiness, and the pursuit of a free and unified Korea.  

North Korea intensifies military provocations with Russia's backing

The Korea Times · July 1, 2024

A news report on North Korea's launch of two ballistic missiles is seen on a television screen at Seoul Station, Monday. Yonhap

North Korea fires 2 ballistic missile toward East Sea; 1 may have fallen on land near Pyongyang

By Lee Hyo-jin

North Korea launched two ballistic missiles Monday, marking its latest military provocation as the reclusive regime continues to escalate cross-border tensions, now with Russia as its main backer.

According to South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Pyongyang launched two short-range ballistic missiles in the morning from the Jangyon area in South Hwanghae Province. The missiles were fired northeastward, with one launched around 5:05 a.m. and the other around 5:15 a.m.

The first missile flew about 600 kilometers before landing in the sea off the North's eastern coast, according to the JCS, while the second one flew about 120 kilometers, sparking speculation that it may have fallen on land near Pyongyang.

It was North Korea's eighth ballistic missile test so this year amid diversifying provocations, including the launch of trash-filled balloons, with the latest one occurring Wednesday.

Monday's missile launch occurred five days after Pyongyang fired a ballistic missile toward the East Sea, claiming it was a successful test launch of a multiple warhead missile. The South Korean military refuted this claim, describing it as "deception," asserting that the missile exploded in the early stage of flight.

There was also speculation that the latest missile test could have been a demonstration to increase the chances of missile exports to Russia amid enhanced military cooperation following a summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin, June 19.

Russia, which has emerged as North Korea's primary supporter in the field of defense, has strengthened its backing following the signing of a comprehensive strategic partnership between Putin and Kim during their summit. Internationally, Moscow has been advocating for a review of the United Nations Security Council sanctions imposed on Pyongyang for its nuclear and missile tests.

"The right thing to do would be to call for a revision of the sanctions regime on North Korea if all member states of the UNSC are truly interested in easing tensions," Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said last week, echoing the Russian leader's remarks made during the meeting with Kim.

During the summit, Putin called for a review of the UNSC sanctions, criticizing them as an "indefinite restrictive regime led by the United States and its allies." He also described these sanctions as inhumane to the North Korean people, drawing parallels to the suffering of the Russians during the Siege of Leningrad in World War II.

Meanwhile, the North commenced a major plenary session of the Workers' Party of Korea on Friday, according to its state media, Korean Central News Agency. While the specific agendas were not disclosed, the multiday mid-year plenum is expected to review economic goals and discuss potential follow-up measures from the Kim-Putin summit.

Inter-Korean relations could also be among the topics of discussion. In the previous plenum in December 2023, the Kim regime abandoned the goal of unification on the Korean Peninsula and reclassified South Korea as its primary enemy state.

The Korea Times · July 1, 2024

12. N. Korea speeds up landmine and fortification work on inter-Korean border

Though counterintuitive, this may be an attempt to portray the threat from the South for domestic messaging to justify the suffering and sacrifices of the Korean people in the north.

Preventing defections? Perhaps. But there have been very very few defections across the DMZ. Then again, it may be that the regime fears the effectiveness of SOuth Korean broadcasts.

N. Korea speeds up landmine and fortification work on inter-Korean border - Daily NK English

North Korea handed down the orders after the South Korean government resumed anti-Pyongyang loudspeaker broadcasts

By Seulkee Jang - July 1, 2024

dailynk.com · by Seulkee Jang · July 1, 2024

A view of Panmunjom from the South Korean side of the border. (Wikimedia Commons)

The North Korean authorities have sent more military personnel to the inter-Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) to speed up the ongoing work of burying landmines and building fortifications, Daily NK has learned.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Daily NK source in the North Korean military said Wednesday that although work to bury landmines and build fortifications in the DMZ was initially carried out by front-line corps stationed in the areas concerned, many personnel of the military’s Seventh and Eighth General Bureaus – specialized engineering units – have been dispatched since authorities issued an order in mid-June to “speed up the work.”

The Seventh and Eighth General Bureaus oversaw the construction of barriers and high-voltage power lines in the no-man’s land along the China-North Korea border, the site of frequent defections and rampant smuggling, from 2021 until recently.

The North Korean government’s deployment in the DMZ of specialized engineering units with experience in building barriers along the China-North Korea border suggests that it wants to complete the ongoing work in the inter-Korean buffer zone ahead of schedule.

As a result, North Korean troops in the DMZ violated the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) several times in their haste to complete the work, despite an order to the frontline corps to raise their alert status by declaring a “special patrol period” for the entire military ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to North Korea on June 18.

North Korean troops violated the MDL while working in the DMZ on June 9 and June 20. They returned to their side of the line after receiving warning broadcasts and warning shots from South Korean troops.

Work appears focused on preventing defections among frontline personnel

The simultaneous laying of landmines, clearing of vegetation, and construction of fortifications in and around the DMZ by the North Korean authorities appears to be aimed primarily at preventing defections by personnel of North Korea’s frontline military police units tasked with patrolling the MDL.

North Korea ordered the acceleration of work in the DMZ after the South Korean government ordered the resumption of anti-Pyongyang loudspeaker broadcasts for the first time in six years on June 6 in response to North Korea’s launch of garbage-laden balloons into the South.

“Young soldiers like the softer speaking style of the South,” the source said. “Especially since the informative parts of the broadcasts about the weather or market prices are usually in line with reality, many soldiers really believe the South after listening to them and say that the South is ‘quite amazing.'”

“It seems that construction in the frontline areas will be completed as soon as possible, since an order has been issued,” the source said. “The authorities don’t worry much about accidents such as mine explosions [due to the rushed work].”

South Korean military authorities said on June 18 that several North Korean soldiers working in the DMZ had been injured or killed by landmine explosions. In a press briefing, an official from the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the North Korean military was rushing its work despite suffering several casualties from mine explosions as troops buried mines and cleared vegetation along the front line.

Some even claim that the order to speed up the North Korean army’s work in the DMZ came from the ruling party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department.

A Daily NK source in Pyongyang said the Propaganda and Agitation Department issued the order because it feared a backlash if South Korea’s retaliatory loudspeaker broadcasts led to defections by frontline troops or internal unrest, since the trash balloon blitz was its idea.

Daily NK works with a network of sources living in North Korea, China, and elsewhere. Their identities remain anonymous for security reasons. For more information about Daily NK’s network of reporting partners and information-gathering activities, please visit our FAQ page here.

Please send any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.

Read in Korean

dailynk.com · by Seulkee Jang · July 1, 2024

13. Trump the Realist​: The Former President Understands the Limits of American Power

Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam" should take the lead in containing China.

South Korea should take the lead in containing north Korea.

Excerpts:

But Washington can constrain China without launching a full-blown trade war, and so it should avoid issuing new tariffs, except in direct response to Chinese trade restrictions against American goods. U.S. officials should also avoid belligerent military initiatives that would risk an actual war between the two states. And in the event the countries do find themselves at risk of a hot conflict, the United States should push a coalition of Indo-Pacific countries, including Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam—whose aggregate power roughly matches that of China—to take the lead in containing Beijing.

With other U.S. adversaries, Washington should be even less involved. Russia may be militarily dangerous, but the country is not an existential threat to the United States—a fact that its middling performance in Ukraine has made clear. It therefore makes no sense for Washington to continue writing blank checks to Kyiv, especially when Ukraine’s European neighbors are so rich. The United States should apply significant pressure to these countries to start paying for Ukraine’s defense, especially given that they are the states actually threatened by Moscow. Washington should, similarly, pressure South Korea to assume leadership in containing its poor, northern neighbor. The United States should even push its Arab partners and Israel to work together to hold Iran in check, so that Washington can withdraw most of its own forces from the Middle East.

The reality is that, after almost 80 years of U.S. leadership, the world has entered a transition phase from hegemonic order to a restored balance of power. Like all prior balance-of-power systems, this one will feature global dissent, disharmony, and great-power competition. Today, such dissent most obviously comes from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Yet disruption of global stability during this transition phase comes not only from rising challengers but also from the hegemon itself. To forestall decline, the dominant power undermines its own system, which it begins to see as a drain. It grows increasingly unwilling to accept subsidizing the security of allies and the well-being of the world in general. It increasingly views trade policy not in terms of price optimization, efficiency, and corporate profits but in terms of whether it makes the country weaker or stronger, whether it helps the working class find and maintain good-paying jobs, whether it builds or destroys communities, and whether it causes trade surpluses or deficits. A hegemon in decline no longer believes that trade is free.

The United States has become exactly this type of weary titan, less able to honor external commitments and less interested in doing so, too. This explains the rise of Trump and his appeal to his followers, who disdain what they see as a corrupt governing class that puts the world’s well-being above their own country’s interests. It explains why his rise coincides with the rise of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Both men, though they have entirely different personalities, pledged to make their countries great again by upending the liberal world order. This should alert analysts to the fact that neither is responsible for the system’s demise. Instead, there are greater structural factors at work. Trump may still shock many in Washington, and he no doubt has a divisive personality. But his foreign policies are the predictable product of deeply impersonal forces.

Trump the Realist

The Former President Understands the Limits of American Power

By Andrew Byers and Randall L. Schweller

July 1, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Andrew Byers and Randall L. Schweller · July 1, 2024

The structure of unipolarity that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union bestowed the United States with enormous, unchecked power. The United States became the first country in history with no peer or near-peer competitors. It became the only one with influence in every region of the world and the only one to unquestionably dominate its own neighborhood. By 1992, the United States may have been the most powerful country in every major global theater.

For American officials, the natural temptation was to use this moment to expand the United States’ global influence. Drunk with power, Washington doggedly enlarged NATO into eastern Europe, paying little heed to Russian concerns about Western encroachment. It broadened its embrace of economic openness, supporting the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, despite the potential threat its compulsory dispute settlement posed to national sovereignty. It also backed China’s membership in the organization in 2001. In the eyes of U.S. policymakers, this expansionist campaign was not just good for their country but also good for the world. Washington, like all hegemons, convinced itself that the world order it was creating was universally preferred to all others. It began to pursue what the international relations scholar Arnold Wolfers called “milieu goals,” or goals designed to make the world better conform to one country’s values.

In the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was possible to defend this line of thought. When power is highly concentrated in the hands of one hegemonic state, the dominant entity’s fortunes and misfortunes are, in fact, often shared by everyone else. The hegemon’s well-being necessarily carries some measure of well-being for other members of the international system, since its collapse would entail the collapse of the system as a whole. That is why, in its 2002 National Security Strategy, the George W. Bush administration could honestly argue that the world’s major powers were converging on “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.” These states were, the document continued, “on the same side—united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos.”

But as the hegemon’s dominance begins to fade, so, too, does this natural harmony of interests. Rising powers become increasingly unhappy with their global standing, with the international order’s rules and norms, and with the interests and values the order promotes. Community interests cease to overshadow individual ones. And as revisionist states grow in power, they develop the capacity to realize their aims. In the 2002 report, for example, the Bush administration depicted China as a team player, one that was “discovering that economic freedom is the only source of national wealth.” But by 2017, the U.S. National Security Strategy declared that China’s “integration into the post-war international order” was a failure, labeling China a “revisionist” power that wants to “shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.”

Rising challengers are not the only revisionists: as the hegemon declines, it also becomes frustrated with the existing order. Many of the deals it made at the peak of its power no longer make sense. For example, U.S. policymakers from across the ideological and partisan spectrum have become frustrated with the transatlantic partnership. In the original bargain struck after World War II, Washington provided security to its European allies and vital economic assistance to their struggling postwar economies. In exchange, they mostly supported Washington during the Cold War with Moscow and enabled the United States to project power over the European continent. But once the Soviet Union dissolved and Europe became rich, it no longer made any sense for the United States to shoulder more than 70 percent of NATO’s defense expenditure. The alliance ceased to have a clear raison d’être.

It is, therefore, not surprising that many Americans are turning away from presidential candidates who embrace a muscular, expansive foreign policy. They see the compelling structural reasons to demand a shift. And so many of them have embraced a candidate who has called for global restraint, retrenchment, and narrow self-interest: Donald Trump.

During his first term as president, Trump proved that he was truly unique among modern U.S. leaders. Unlike any president before him in the post–1945 era, he was skeptical of treaties and alliances, preferring competition to cooperation. He defined the national interest to exclude things such as the spread of liberal values and military or humanitarian interventions. He did not view the United States as a divine intervenor for the mistreated abroad. Instead, he shifted Washington’s focus to great-power competition and to regaining the United States’ global power advantages. He was, in other words, a true realist: someone who avoids idealistic and ideological views of global affairs in favor of power politics.

In Trump’s first term, these realist impulses were muted and sometimes stopped by hawkish national security staffers who did not share his vision. But having learned that personnel is policy, Trump will not make this mistake again. His next administration will, instead, result in perhaps the most restrained U.S. foreign policy in modern history.

REALITY CHECK

The Republican Party is having an intense debate about international relations. The party’s traditional establishment is made up of neoconservatives and primacists who want the United States to exercise its power around the world and use its military capabilities to achieve many ends. For example, they support massive, continued U.S. aid to Ukraine as a means of sticking it to Russia, and have wholeheartedly embraced the Biden administration’s framing of military support for Ukraine as a contest between democracy and autocracy. Trump and his allies, on the other hand, do not support more aid to Ukraine. They do not see geopolitics as a grand ideological contest. And unlike neoconservatives, they have a pronounced preference for U.S. allies paying for their own security. In February, for example, Trump declared that he would let Russia have its way with any European country that does not spend at least two percent of its GDP on its own defense. “If we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?” Trump recounted a NATO country’s leader asking him. “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.”

The traditional Republican establishment still retains substantial power. The party’s Senate leadership, for instance, is dominated by neoconservatives. Slowly but surely, however, the Trumpist camp is winning. It is doing so, most obviously, in primaries, where Trump and Trump-endorsed candidates continue to prevail. But polling suggests that Trumpist realism is also winning the hearts and minds of conservative voters. In a recent poll by the Chicago Council on World Affairs, 53 percent of Republicans answered “stay out” to the question “Do you think it will be best for the future of the country if we take an active part in world affairs or if we stay out of world affairs?” A similar number—55 percent—said the costs outweigh the benefits of maintaining the United States’ role in the world.

To most foreign policy elites, who view U.S. power as a normative good, this trend appears dreadful. But the former president’s “America first” agenda is an intellectually defensible, fundamentally realist program that seeks to ascertain and act on the United States’ national interests rather than the interests of others. It is born of an inescapable premise: the United States no longer has the power it once did and is spreading itself too thin. It needs to sort its essential national interests from desirable ones. It must devolve more responsibility to its wealthy allies. It must stop trying to be everywhere and do everything.

In his first term, Trump’s realist instincts were frequently thwarted by his senior national security advisers. But the former president’s inclination for restraint nonetheless shaped his policies. Trump avoided new military entanglements, began extricating the United States from its 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, and engaged adversarial states such as China, North Korea, and Russia in ways that lessened the possibility of conflict. He shifted the burden of paying for mutual defense to allies and away from American taxpayers. He talked tough as a means of pressuring other leaders and appeasing his domestic base. But he never acted like a neoconservative primacist. Even when it came to Iran, the country toward which he was most belligerent, Trump always pulled back from the brink of using significant military force.

BREAKING FREE

In his second term, Trump’s realist instincts would find fuller expression. Trump will not completely turn Washington’s back to the world (contrary to the claims of his opponents). But he will likely withdraw from at least some current U.S. commitments in the greater Middle East. He will surely demand that wealthy allies in Asia and Europe pay for more of their security. And he will likely focus most of his attention on Beijing, concentrating on ways to outcompete China while avoiding military conflict and a new cold war.

Trump and his allies have also talked about the need to become less dependent on foreign sources of energy; they predict greater self-sufficiency would lead to U.S. job growth and decreased energy costs for American consumers. As president, Trump would likely follow through on this rhetoric by eliminating many current regulations in the energy sector, thereby making it easier for domestic oil and gas producers to drill. Critically, such a policy would make the Persian Gulf much less important to Washington. Over the last 50 years, every U.S. presidential administration has been forced by circumstances to spend a disproportionate amount of time, attention, and resources on the Middle East—in no small part to ensure the flow of oil. A United States that no longer needs to do so would be freed from having to care very much about Iranian-Saudi squabbles and would no longer need to maintain a significant number of U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf region. As the Biden administration’s experiences have shown, U.S. troops spread out across dozens of bases in Iraq and Syria are at risk of being attacked by Iran and its proxies.

The former president, of course, would maintain his belligerent rhetoric toward Washington’s adversaries, criticizing their depredations and acts of aggression. Such talk can be useful in reminding the rest of the world that the United States does not share many values with countries such as China, Iran, Russia, or even some U.S. allies, including Saudi Arabia—and that even a more transactional, realist United States would not stoop to the level of those countries. But Trump should not talk the United States into a new cold war with China or a hot war with regional competitors such as Iran. The Trump administration must hold other states accountable and extract the very best deals it can for the United States. But military conflict or prolonged periods of hostility are in no one’s best interest.

Trump, thankfully, has an impressive track record at avoiding the use of U.S. military force. This is not because he is more of a humanitarian than his predecessors but because he views world politics more in geoeconomic terms than geostrategic ones, and so he tries to conduct conflict via economic rather than military means. “I want to invade, if I have to, economically,” Trump said in 2019, when talking about Iran and its nuclear program. “We have tremendous power economically. If I can solve things economically, that’s the way I want it.”

This sentiment is deeply held by the former president. As far back as 2015, when all of Washington was under the influence of unfettered free-trade shibboleths, Trump warned about the dangers of economic dependencies, built up over decades of liberalization, that could be exploited for geopolitical leverage. (The United States relies, for example, on foreign countries for energy, medical equipment, semiconductors, and critical minerals.) He also emphasized the enormous power wielded by the United States in the forms of tariffs, sanctions, access to the dollar, and control over global economic networks. Once in office, he wielded American economic power, typically seen as a way to entice others to join the multilateral free-trading system, as a stick to punish those who suckered Washington during the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. “We are righting the wrongs of the past and delivering a future of economic justice and security for American workers, farmers, and families,” Trump declared at the signing of the interim trade deal with China. “It should have happened 25 years ago.”

THE WEARY TITAN

As a conservative realist, Trump should be clearheaded about what really matters to Washington and avoid steps that might provoke military confrontation. Whenever possible, he should delegate responsibility for global problems to U.S. allies, leaving the United States to focus only on what is truly necessary for the American national interest.

Trump can start by focusing on China. Securing a relationship with Beijing that ensures American prosperity and does not increase the likelihood of war may be the supreme challenge facing the United States. Beijing and Washington are contesting global economic and political leadership, and there are multiple flash points between them. But none of these should lead to conflict. The primary point of military contention—the fate of Taiwan—does not require U.S. military intervention. The United States ought to arm the island so it can deter and hopefully defeat a Chinese invasion. But Taiwan is not a U.S. ally, and so Washington should not risk war with China to outright defend it.

In other areas, Trump can constrain China by relying, as he usually does, on trade restrictions. The Trump administration’s innovative use of export controls on cutting-edge technology has become the new tool of choice for twenty-first-century power politics. Unlike traditional balancing, which amasses power through arms and allies to offset a target’s military power, Trump’s strategy seeks to prevent, not counter, the further rise of a peer competitor. In the coming years, both the United States and Europe will want to ensure their firms avoid sharing certain technologies with Beijing and rely on non-Chinese suppliers for critical sectors, such as telecommunications and infrastructure.

Trump has an impressive track record at avoiding the use of U.S. military force.

But Washington can constrain China without launching a full-blown trade war, and so it should avoid issuing new tariffs, except in direct response to Chinese trade restrictions against American goods. U.S. officials should also avoid belligerent military initiatives that would risk an actual war between the two states. And in the event the countries do find themselves at risk of a hot conflict, the United States should push a coalition of Indo-Pacific countries, including Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam—whose aggregate power roughly matches that of China—to take the lead in containing Beijing.

With other U.S. adversaries, Washington should be even less involved. Russia may be militarily dangerous, but the country is not an existential threat to the United States—a fact that its middling performance in Ukraine has made clear. It therefore makes no sense for Washington to continue writing blank checks to Kyiv, especially when Ukraine’s European neighbors are so rich. The United States should apply significant pressure to these countries to start paying for Ukraine’s defense, especially given that they are the states actually threatened by Moscow. Washington should, similarly, pressure South Korea to assume leadership in containing its poor, northern neighbor. The United States should even push its Arab partners and Israel to work together to hold Iran in check, so that Washington can withdraw most of its own forces from the Middle East.

The reality is that, after almost 80 years of U.S. leadership, the world has entered a transition phase from hegemonic order to a restored balance of power. Like all prior balance-of-power systems, this one will feature global dissent, disharmony, and great-power competition. Today, such dissent most obviously comes from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Yet disruption of global stability during this transition phase comes not only from rising challengers but also from the hegemon itself. To forestall decline, the dominant power undermines its own system, which it begins to see as a drain. It grows increasingly unwilling to accept subsidizing the security of allies and the well-being of the world in general. It increasingly views trade policy not in terms of price optimization, efficiency, and corporate profits but in terms of whether it makes the country weaker or stronger, whether it helps the working class find and maintain good-paying jobs, whether it builds or destroys communities, and whether it causes trade surpluses or deficits. A hegemon in decline no longer believes that trade is free.

The United States has become exactly this type of weary titan, less able to honor external commitments and less interested in doing so, too. This explains the rise of Trump and his appeal to his followers, who disdain what they see as a corrupt governing class that puts the world’s well-being above their own country’s interests. It explains why his rise coincides with the rise of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Both men, though they have entirely different personalities, pledged to make their countries great again by upending the liberal world order. This should alert analysts to the fact that neither is responsible for the system’s demise. Instead, there are greater structural factors at work. Trump may still shock many in Washington, and he no doubt has a divisive personality. But his foreign policies are the predictable product of deeply impersonal forces.

• ANDREW BYERS is a Nonresident Fellow at Texas A&M University’s Albritton Center for Grand Strategy.
• RANDALL L. SCHWELLER is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program for the Study of Realist Foreign Policy at Ohio State University.

Foreign Affairs · by Andrew Byers and Randall L. Schweller · July 1, 2024

14. How Korea’s Angry Young Men Swept a President into Office — and What That Means for the US

Hmmm.....

How Korea’s Angry Young Men Swept a President into Office — and What That Means for the US

Politico · by DAVID SIDERS

Korea is just the beginning. Around the world, young women are swinging to the left, while young men are flirting with the right.

Illustration by Jen Yoon for POLITICO

07/01/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Catherine Kim is an assistant editor at POLITICO Magazine.

It was an innocuous enough scene, just a little bit of fluff to keep the fans happy: In February, Huh Yun-jin, a 22-year-old member of the popular South Korean girl group LE SSARAFIM, appeared on national television to showcase a day in her life. As a makeup artist fussed over her, Huh kept her eyes glued to the pages of Breast and Eggs — a critically acclaimed novel that captures the fraught reality of womanhood in Japan.

Huh didn’t mean to start a debate. But her reading habits quickly inflamed South Korea’s ongoing gender wars.

Shortly after the show’s airing, Korea’s chat forums devolved into battle zones, as commenters furiously dissected Huh’s choice in “feminist” literature. Feminism had already been labeled as a dirty word in Korea for years now, and Huh was now being branded as a follower.

“If a girl group is tainted by feminism, you’ve got to send them to hell.”

“Why don’t you guys use this time to actually do yourselves a favor by reading a book too.”

“She wants to act all cultured, attending exhibitions and reading books, but all she reads is feminism. LOL.”

“Is feminism really that bad? You lowly Korean men have a major inferiority complex.”

“Feminists, if I see you I’ll beat you up and make you crippled.”

Around the world, from the United States to China to the U.K. to Germany to Tunisia, in chat rooms and in the streets, the gender divide is widening as Gen Zers split along political lines: Young women are increasingly swinging to the left, while young men are moving to the right — negating conventional wisdom that young people as a whole are more progressive than the generation before them. “Gen Z,” observed data journalist John Burn-Murdoch, who tracked this trend for the Financial Times, “is two generations, not one.”

The United States in particular saw this growing partisan gender split during the 2022 midterms, when far more women voters between the ages of 18 and 29 stood beside Democratic candidates than their male counterparts.

But nowhere is this divide more evident than it is in Korea, where the ideological gap between young men and women is growing wider than anywhere else — altering the country’s politics and fully taking over Korean society.

In Korea, arguably the world’s most wired country, online forums have become battlegrounds over dating violence, the gaming industry and systemic sexism. And in the country’s 2022 presidential race, a populist candidate stoked political polarization between the two genders to his advantage.

At the start of his campaign, Yoon Suk Yeol, the conservative candidate and an avowed “anti-feminist,” declared, “structural discrimination based on gender” does not exist. It was a message that Korea’s young men really wanted to hear — even if it wasn’t true. When it comes to gender parity, Korea consistently ranks near the bottom of most developed nations. But Yoon knew what he was doing: He was speaking directly to young men who felt left behind by a tough economy and who were unhappy with the rapid push for gender equality.

They overwhelmingly voted for Yoon and his People Power Party (PPP) by nearly 60 percent, catapulting him to the presidency with a razor-thin margin of 0.7 points.

These days, for both men and women in Korea, anger is the dominant emotion, a marked shift for a country that normally prides itself on promoting a sense of hope and a can-do attitude. The economy is tanking, housing prices are at an all-time high, income inequality continues to grow, and fertility and marriage rates are far lower than a decade ago. But instead of lobbying for change, as younger generations have done for centuries, young Koreans are fighting among one another over gender rights — and both men and women insist they are the ones who are the real victims. According to new polling, 86 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 39 believe that hatred against men is a serious issue. An equal percentage of women of the same age believe hatred against women is a serious issue.

Nobody comes out winning.

Young Korean men might find relief venting their spleen online, but their quality of life hasn’t improved and isn’t likely to any time soon, says sociologist Kim Nae-hoon, the author of Radical 20s: K-Populism and the Political, which explores the rise of Korea’s raging young men. A third of Koreans still believe their job prospects are worse than the previous year. South Korea’s happiness levels are still one of the lowest out of all OECD countries. Trust in society has plummeted. As a result, Yoon’s favorability ratings have now hit a record low.

“[Politicians’] goal is to have men’s complaints target specific individuals or groups — not the system,” says Kim. “By always giving them something to complain about, politicians keep the group under their control. This is the true nature of today’s ‘hate politics.’”

Korea’s gender divide has a troubling dark side. Today, Korean men on the internet cheer as the government guts the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family — which promotes gender equality, protects victims of sexual and domestic violence and supports family-friendly policies. But more troubling, the threat of violence against women looms: A 2023 analysis found that Korean women were likely to be killed or almost killed by an intimate partner every 19 hours, a rapid escalation from 2021, when a woman was killed or almost killed by an intimate partner every day and a half. Meanwhile, according to Human Rights Watch, gender-based violence in Korea is “shockingly widespread,” and nearly 90 percent of the country’s violent crime victims are women. In a recent video that went viral, a drunk man repeatedly strikes a female clerk in a convenience store, yelling, “Feminists need to be hit.” And in one of the most shocking cases, a woman was stabbed to death in the bathroom of a subway station last year by a male coworker who’d been stalking and threatening her.

“I see a lot more posts online now by men harshly criticizing women in a derogatory way,” says Kim Dain, a 23-year-old college student in South Korea, speaking hesitantly, as she chooses her words carefully. “Now when I’m outside, I am in constant fear of wondering whether all men think the same.”

For all the differences between the two countries, some think this could be a cautionary tale for the U.S. — if its men and politicians choose to go down the same path of division.

This isn’t the Korea that I grew up with.

When I was a kid there in the early 2000s, the news would occasionally flash with a shocking case of violence, but that didn’t impact how I operated out in the world.

Online controversies were never as intense as they are now either. I left 11 years ago to go to high school in the States. Then, the internet was the only way I could feel in touch with my country — scrolling through online forums to see what my peers were gossiping about — but the rapidly changing gender dynamics have made it an increasingly toxic place I now avoid.

So how did Korea get here?

Some point to a Facebook post.

Less than 100 days before Korea’s 2022 presidential election, polls showed that Yoon was losing to his opponent, Lee Jae-myung, a labor-lawyer-turned-politician who gained popularity for doling out Covid-19 stimulus money to his residents as governor of the Gyeonggi province.

Yoon’s campaign needed a bombshell announcement to turn the tables. So Yoon hopped on Facebook and uploaded a simple post: “Abolition of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.”

Up until then, Yoon had left the outright criticism to the more radical members of his party. In the past, he just demanded the ministry’s name be changed to reflect support for both genders. (To fully understand the logic behind this decision, it is important to note that a more accurate translation of its Korean name is the Ministry of Women Affairs and Family).

But his Facebook post upped the ante. It racked up over 40,000 likes and nearly 10,000 comments: “I’m supporting you after seeing this”; “KING IS BACK”; “This is the best campaign strategy.” “DREAM COMES TRUEEEEE.”

In polling released a few days later, Yoon, who also blamed the country’s low birth rate on feminism — because why else wouldn’t women want to have babies? — squeaked ahead by a 2.3 percent margin.

Perhaps the bump in polling shouldn’t have been a surprise, especially in a country with a long history of traditional patriarchy. Backlash had already been mounting against Korea’s own #MeToo movement for years, after its peak in 2018. People were wary of the movement, which had repopularized feminism and brought down high-profile names in entertainment, academia and business. Yes, the public agreed that the movement helped address Korea’s history of gender discrimination. But there was also widespread concern that it treated men as potential criminals and wrongly penalized all men for the wrongdoings of a select few. And for young men who came of age during the #MeToo movement, those concerns were particularly pressing: In 2018, 77 percent of men under 30 supported the #MeToo movement. That number dropped to 29 percent by 2021.

“The idea that’s fixed is, ‘Feminism is bad,’” says Minyoung Moon, a Clemson University lecturer who published a report about the backlash against feminism in South Korea. “[Men] think women’s movement activists are like interest group people, they’re only working for women’s interests, period.”

Young men went wild for Yoon. Members of Ilbe Storehouse, an online forum that has long served as an echo chamber for misogynistic and fringe ideas and enjoyed a surge in popularity amid the backlash to #MeToo, were especially fanatic in their praise of him. “You old farts can shut up, I’m all in for voting Yoon Seok Yeol,” one fan commented. (A friend of mine broke up with her boyfriend after finding out he was an active user.)

In one widely liked post from earlier this year, a user uploaded a poorly drawn cartoon of an unattractive Korean woman, dressed in a T-shirt that reads, “Unmarried Pig” and complaining bitterly that Korean men are marrying foreign women in droves. Standing behind her are a bevy of Barbie-esque women who don’t appear to be Korean.

“You’ve just got to filter out all the Korean women,” a user wrote approvingly.

Buoyed by Yoon’s anti-feminist declarations, these online communities helped lead a movement to drive young male voters toward the presidential candidate. (While a majority of young men voted for Yoon, only 34 percent of women in that age group did the same.) Yoon’s candidacy would mark a new stage in modern-day sexism — one where it is driven and weaponized by politicians.

When I talk to other young Korean women, I hear a mix of fear, anger and apprehension. Fear, because they worry about being a victim of violence. Anger, because lawmakers have emboldened misogynists for their political gain. And apprehension, because if things continue at this pace, what does this mean for Korea’s future?

The marriage rate is already taking a hit. Distrust between men and women is at an all-time high. Only one in three Koreans have a positive perception of marriage. Family members and friends repeat the same question to me over and over: “What’s the point of marriage if I know I won’t be able to find a good partner?”

Couple that cynicism with a cost-of-living crisis, and it’s no wonder Korea’s birth rate is at a record low. And as the population continues to decline, so will Korea’s once-booming economy.

The threat of violence also looms, and it’s not just everyday women who are the victims. South Korea has also seen an increase in political violence against politicians — violence that’s cropping up across the political spectrum, impacting both men and women alike. That’s because once hate in general, no matter the target, becomes widely accepted, it spreads, according to Nathan Park, a non-resident fellow and Korea watcher at the Quincy Institute.

“This type of nihilistic violence started among the youth and became the ammo of the South Korean conservatives,” Park says. “That is the most concerning development.”

In early January, opposition leader Lee Jae-myung was stabbed by an assailant who later said he wanted to prevent Lee from becoming president. Just three weeks later, Rep. Bae Hyun-jin from the ruling party was attacked with a rock by a 14-year-old boy who claimed he committed the crime because Bae was “doing a (bad) job in politics.”

“In the U.S., there is already a level of incel terrorism,” Park says, “and I am very, very concerned that might become more and more common and deadlier in the U.S.”

As Park sees it, Korea’s troubles are a cautionary tale for the U.S., which is also seeing a widening partisan gap between young men and women and is already seeing politicians use gender as a wedge issue. Polling shows that some young men in the U.S. increasingly are rejecting feminism as a whole.

In 2023, Daniel Cox, a pollster from the American Enterprise Institute who studies the gender divide among the youth, conducted a series of surveys of young men. He found that, unlike older generations, most of the surveyed cohort don’t see feminism as “promoting the interests of women and pursuing gender equality.” They see feminism as “damaging men; it’s reducing their opportunities; it’s limiting what they’re able to do in the world.”

“Roughly half of young men still say it’s important for them to be viewed as masculine,” Cox says, “but it’s unclear what that means. And when [masculinity] becomes very ill-defined, it’s defined against feminism.”

Some American politicians are going out of their way to cater to these angry young men.

Donald Trump boasts about grabbing women by their genitals, calls female political rivals “birdbrain” and “monster” and rejects being labeled as a feminist because “I’m for everyone.” Former Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, who’s now running to represent Arizona’s 8th district in Congress, denies that women are paid less in the U.S. (Fact check: Women in the U.S. make 14 percent less than their male counterparts, for similar work.) And then there’s Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who tells his audience that liberal elites want “men to be quiet and shut up.” It’s the same kind of rhetoric that has been seen in Yoon’s speeches: Validation for the men who feel liberals have forced them into a corner by pushing feminist policies like equal pay and representation in leadership.

And like the politicians of Korea, U.S. lawmakers have the internet on their side to recruit acolytes. As in Korea, where online communities such as Ilbe have radicalized young men, social media in the U.S. has also fed extreme narratives on gender to the youth, Cox says.

Meanwhile, in Korea, things aren’t likely to improve any time soon.

I ask the sociologist Kim Hak-jun if the extreme vitriol in my home country will force Koreans to wake up and turn things around.

He laughs, then offers a blunt, one-word answer:

“No.”

Politico · by DAVID SIDERS

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com