South Korea’s Unification Ministry has offered a new report on Tuesday, a collection of predictions and expectations for the year to come. Unlike other recent reports, the ministry offered a surprisingly upbeat outlook for the next year, despite a very tense 2017.
South Korea now expects that North Korea will, at some point in 2018, enter into direct talks with the United States, seeking to become recognized as a de facto nuclear power, seeing North Korea’s priority as shifting to the talks themselves.
Though the reports were a bit light on their exact reasoning, this does already seem to be the direction North Korea is going in recent weeks, with officials having suggested they are “ready” for talks with the US now.
This makes sense from North Korea’s perspective, as they’d insisted they were holding off on talks until they believed their deterrent capability was enough to force the US into serious talks, instead of the US making preconditions with threats to attack them unilaterally if they don’t comply.
The US, however, isn’t necessarily caught up to this realization yet, with Defense Secretary James Mattis scoffing recently at North Korea’s retaliatory capabilities. South Korea’s report, however, may suggest they have some reason to think the Trump Administration’s anti-diplomacy stance is already softening, or soon will.
Nothing public from the Trump Administration would suggest that is the case, but the South Koreans very probably have more closed-door talks with the US about North Korea than almost anyone else, and may know more about the thinking behind the US public stance.
Maybe South Korea needs to engage in direct talks with the USA pursuant to goal of all US troops leaving the Korean peninsula and letting Koreans figure this out on their own.
Oh, that’s right. The MIC and the banksters will have none of that. They are drooling over the prospect of another f-ing war.
The position described is only that of the Unification Ministry. If the real government of South Korea were serious about talks with the North that could preserve peace and unify Korea, they would tell the United States to leave their damn country. But they will not do that, because they are not serious about true, fair unification.
Actually, talks between S. Korea and its northern neighbor were first brought up by S. Korean President Moon Jae-In just after he took the Oath of Office earlier this year; the Unification Ministry hadn’t even been formed yet. At the time, Moon also demanded the removal of the THAAD missile defense systems from S. Korea, but he didn’t tell the US troops stationed there to leave (which he should’ve done as well).
As a result of his failure to kick the US occupiers out, Moon lost the opportunity to sit down with his DPRK counterpart, Kim Jong-Un, in Pyongyang and seriously discuss easing the tensions in the Korean Peninsula and possible reunification. He also lost the THAAD’s removal; and that was a loss of face as a result. The US occupiers now have him under their thumb, and he’s too weak to shake them off.
You cannot ever close out a war. Without wars, there is no economy, or at least this is what our oligarchy thinks. Money, money, money. In the meantime, our own capacities rot — idle hands, idle minds, idle land. South Korea and Japan are having their livelihoods more and more tied to the fortunes of China, and are not eager to risk calamity for the sake of us having another splendid war. But explain it to oligarchs — if you can. They have forgotten us. We do not matter.
The only way any talks will happen will be without the knowledge of the US. Any re-unification would NEVER be allowed by TPTB as that would dry up the gravy train of perpetual conflict. For sure the prostitution, gambling, and drug distribution cartels in S. Korea that the US likely has a firm control over, would also not fare well under peaceful reunification (and de-militarization) so that is just another “lobbying group” working for war.