Tag: north korea

Trump Must Not Let Washington’s Korea Hawks Intimidate Him Again

One of the great foreign policy disappointments of Donald Trump’s first term was the failure to advance his initial promising initiative to begin normalizing relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).  Trump had abandoned the threats and bluster toward Pyongyang that marked his early months in office.  Instead, he moved to open a personal dialogue with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and facilitate productive negotiations on several important issues.  That approach led to an unprecedented U.S.-DPRK summit meeting in Singapore on June 12, 2018 and, later on, to a famous sight: the U.S. president crossing the Demilitarized Zone from South Korea into the communist North on June 29, 2019, to hold a brief chat with Kim.

Unfortunately, Trump failed to prevent hawks from both parties in Congress and in the overall national security establishment from sabotaging such conciliatory efforts.  Indeed, the president made a fatal blunder of his own by appointing the rabidly hawkish John Bolton as his National Security Advisor.  Congressional opponents of any meaningful relationship between the United States and the DPRK also excoriated Trump for moving to reduce Washington’s confrontational stance toward Pyongyang.

Indeed, hardliners in Congress and the broader policy community denounced the president for his willingness even to interact with Kim. The United States gave the odious dictator a huge boost in prestige, critics contended, merely by affording him a face-to-face meeting with the president and treating him as an equal. “In his haste to reach an agreement, President Trump elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo,” intoned House minority leader Nancy Pelosi.

Despite that bruising political experience during his first term, Trump has indicated that he would be receptive to a new dialogue with the North Korean leader before the end of 2026.  “I get along with him well,” Trump stated.  “And you know what? The fact that I get along with him, that’s a very good thing, not a bad thing.”

On the delicate and difficult issue of relations with North Korea, Trump’s instincts are correct.  A new summit meeting would be a useful first step toward ending the dangerous policy rigidity that, except for Trump’s all-too-brief interlude, has plagued the U.S. stance toward North Korea for decades.

To achieve a constructive breakthrough, however, the president must go on the offensive against a host of vitriolic, often partisan, detractors.  Even his mild new outreach to Pyongyang is already drawing fire akin to the ideological and partisan attacks that doomed his efforts in 2018 and 2019.  The rhetoric of Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) was typical. “Kim Jong Un is not, I think, terribly impressed with Donald Trump.  And withdrawing forces from Korea, canceling exercises, plays into his game.”  Trump in a Truth Social post the previous Sunday stated that he told Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” planned joint military exercises alongside South Korean forces.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board echoed Reed’s opposition to Trump’s conciliatory gestures to Pyongyang. “President Trump is nothing if not impulsive, and his latest brainstorm is to rekindle his courtship of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.”  The Journal’s editors were especially annoyed that Trump had cited his “very good relationship” with Kim and had contended that U.S. military exercises with South Korea “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”

The editors expressed alarm at the president’s approach.  “This will reinforce the growing belief in Asia and Europe that the U.S. is becoming an unreliable ally,” they fumed.  “It may also increase the calls in the South for Seoul to develop its own nuclear deterrent.”

Despite the shrill criticism, Trump’s latest initiative actually is a cautious, overdue effort to jump-start meaningful diplomacy with Pyongyang.  The real danger is that such a modest, conciliatory effort will be too little, too late.

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North Korea Preparing To Send 50,000 More Troops To Russia — First Trains Already Moving West, German Intelligence Reports

Germany’s Deutsche Welle reported Friday, citing German defense intelligence sources, that North Korea could deploy as many as 50,000 more troops to Russia for use in the Ukraine war. Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR) circulated similar assessments to allied media and claimed the first troop trains had already left Russia’s Far East bound for the western theater of operations.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday that Ukrainian intelligence had assessed a deployment decision had already been made, placing the number somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 additional soldiers. He called the development a serious escalation of the Pyongyang-Moscow military partnership.

Officials in Ukraine, the United States, and South Korea have long assessed that North Korea began sending troops to aid Russian operations in late 2024. Those soldiers reportedly took heavy casualties in frontal assault operations in the Kursk and Zaporizhzhia sectors. Neither Russia nor North Korea has offered comment on the new reports. Neither government has ever officially acknowledged the original deployments.

The arrangement serves both sides in clear ways. Moscow gains additional infantry for its high-attrition offensive operations at a time when manpower has become a central constraint in the war. North Korea, in return, receives battlefield experience, military hardware, and economic support from Moscow — a deepening relationship that Western intelligence agencies have tracked closely since late 2024.

European governments are watching the situation carefully. German media described the reported buildup as “alarming.” Analysts note that a reinforcement of this scale would substantially reshape the manpower equation for Russian commanders, particularly at a moment when Ukraine is simultaneously fighting its own mobilization shortfalls and trying to hold a long front line with a smaller force.

If the deployment proceeds as described by Ukrainian and German sources, it would mark the largest single third-country military contribution to the Russia-Ukraine conflict since the war began in February 2022.

Also, remember this intelligence is coming from Western sources that have a political bias.

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Report: Ukraine IDs North Korean Missile Unit Active in Russian Invasion

A senior Ukrainian intelligence official told Reuters in a report published on Wednesday that Russia had begun deploying a North Korean missile unit to its war theater against Ukraine, apparently exploiting potential vulnerabilities the invaded country has against ballistic missiles.

According to the report, the North Korean hardware is active in Russia’s Voronezh, which borders the occupied Ukrainian region of Luhansk, one of the two Donbas regions strongman Vladimir Putin “annexed” in the early months of the invasion. The official sharing the information, Andrii Cherniak of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, said the new missile unit “could be equipped with 120 ballistic missiles and six launchers for strikes against Ukraine.” He estimated that about 90 North Korean troops are in Voronezh and are expected to help operate the newly arrived missile units.

North Korea has been an active belligerent in the Russian invasion of Ukraine since at least late 2024, when Ukrainian intelligence officials first began observing North Korean troops fighting alongside the Russians. That year, Putin visited Pyongyang for the first time in two decades and signed a “mutual defense treaty” with communist dictator Kim Jong-un, which preceded the Kim regime becoming a much more vocal supporter of the Russian invasion on the world stage and ultimately publicly confirming its participation in the war. Kim has claimed, however, that North Korean troops in Russia were there only to clear landmines placed by Ukrainians, contrary to evidence that Pyongyang has played a larger offensive role in the conflict.

Reuters noted that it could not independently verify the Ukrainian intelligence official’s claims or receive any meaningful response from Pyongyang or Moscow. Ukrainian media has documented the use of North Korean missiles against its targets in the past week, however. Cherniak stated that North Korean ballistic missiles, in particular, had been active against Ukraine since at least August 2025. North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles were allegedly used to bomb civilian residences in Ukraine last week.

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Kim Yo Jong Threatens Japan With ‘Additional Military Options’ — Calls Tokyo A ‘War Criminal State’ As North Korea Targets Tomahawk Tests And US Alliance

Kim Yo Jong, the most powerful figure in North Korea after her brother Kim Jong Un, issued a direct military threat against Japan on Wednesday, warning that Pyongyang would develop “additional military options” in response to Tokyo’s expanding defense posture — and explicitly accusing Washington of enabling what she called the revival of a “war criminal state.”

The statement, published by the Korean Central News Agency, was both specific in its grievances and deliberately vague in its threatened response. Kim cited Japan’s recent test-firing of Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles — American-supplied weapons that give Japan’s Self-Defense Forces their first real offensive reach — as well as Japan’s May participation in U.S.-led military exercises in the Philippines. She accused Tokyo of moving to “formulate the possession of the capability for preemptive attack” and said those actions were entering “the stage of actual act.” In a direct shot at Washington, she condemned the United States for using Japan and South Korea as a “shock brigade” in the Asia-Pacific, encroaching on the security interests of neighboring states.

“Japan, a war criminal state, is accelerating its transformation into a war state, taking advantage of the acute and variable trend of the present international situation,” Kim stated per KCNA. “We will never remain a passive onlooker to the military evolution of Japan, which may pose a grave threat to the security of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” She concluded with a formal declaration: “I make it clear upon authorization that the armed forces of the DPRK and the military leadership will set up additional military options, which are obviously due to Japan’s transformation.”

Japan’s defense posture has shifted dramatically over the past two years. Under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s legacy framework and continued by his successor, Japan has committed to doubling defense spending as a share of GDP — a structural break from the postwar pacifist constitution’s constraints that Tokyo spent eight decades trying to work around. Japan has deployed Type-12 surface-to-ship missiles and U.S.-supplied Tomahawk cruise missiles to its Southwestern Islands, the chain that runs between Kyushu and Taiwan, directly complicating any Chinese or North Korean calculus in the region. Tokyo’s defense minister stated as recently as Tuesday that Japan’s military needs to be expanded with a “sense of urgency and crisis,” per Channel News Asia, following a new government threat assessment that specifically named China, Russia, and North Korea as growing dangers requiring an immediate response.

The framing Kim Yo Jong deployed is worth unpacking, because Pyongyang’s propaganda rarely wastes specific language. By invoking Japan’s colonial-era record — a reference that carries enormous weight throughout East Asia — and then linking it to current military policy, she is positioning North Korea as the historical victim entitled to a security response. This narrative has more resonance in China and across Global South capitals than Western audiences typically appreciate. Beijing uses similar framing about Japanese militarism when it wants to create diplomatic space for opposing U.S.-Japan defense cooperation, and Pyongyang coordinates its messaging with Beijing more closely than most Western analysts acknowledge. The question is not whether Kim Yo Jong’s statement constitutes an existential threat on its own — it does not — but whether it signals an upcoming weapons test, a new missile deployment, or an acceleration of Pyongyang’s tactical nuclear force positioning toward Japan.

The timing is also notable in that Japan is watching Taiwan’s Han Kuang war games begin on the same day. Japan understands better than most Western nations that a Taiwan contingency is a Japan contingency — U.S. bases in Okinawa and on the main islands would be the immediate staging grounds for any American response to a Taiwan blockade or invasion. North Korea’s ability to threaten those bases with short-range missiles is real and has been since at least 2017. A Pyongyang that feels emboldened by China’s regional pressure campaign, or that calculates it can extract economic concessions by rattling sabers while Washington is distracted in the Middle East, has every structural incentive to escalate its rhetoric in exactly this direction.

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Kim Jong Un Creates Ultimate Deadman Switch: North Korea To Auto-Launch Nukes If Assassinated

North Korea just casually revised its constitution to automatically launch a nuclear strike if leader Kim Jong Un is assassinated, or if the country’s nuclear command-and-control system is placed in danger by hostile forces’ attacks. 

The change was adopted during the first session of the 15th Supreme People’s Assembly in Pyongyang on March 22 and was disclosed this week by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, which briefed senior officials on the details.

The updated Article 3 of North Korea’s nuclear policy law states: “If the command-and-control system over the state’s nuclear forces is placed in danger by hostile forces’ attacks … a nuclear strike shall be launched automatically and immediately.”

South Korean intelligence officials said the revision codifies procedures for retaliatory nuclear attacks in the event that Kim is killed or incapacitated during an attack, Reuters reports.

The policy update comes months after the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials in U.S.-backed Israeli strikes in February 2026. Analysts have described those operations as a “wake-up call” for Pyongyang, highlighting the effectiveness of leadership-targeted strikes.

Professor Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in Seoul told The Telegraph that the constitutional emphasis gives added weight to what may have been existing policy: “This may have been policy before, but it has added emphasis now it has been enshrined in the constitution. Iran was the wake-up call.”

The nuclear policy revision was adopted alongside broader changes to North Korea’s constitution, also passed in March and revealed earlier this week. Those amendments remove all references to unification with South Korea, add an explicit territorial clause defining the country’s borders (including with the Republic of Korea to the south), and formally state that command authority over nuclear forces rests with Kim Jong Un as chairman of the State Affairs Commission.

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Has Iran Learned the North Korea Lesson: Nukes Are Essential To Deter the US?

Arms control advocates contend that by attacking Iran in the name of preventing the emergence of a “rogue” nuclear state, the United States may have “taken a sledgehammer” to the entire nuclear nonproliferation regime.  Iran could be one of the first technologically capable powers to confirm that fear.  The clerical regime has indicated that the country may withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.  Such a move would eliminate any official monitoring of Tehran’s nuclear research and nuclear fuel enrichment.  North Korea took a similar step in 2003, and the move clearly facilitated the growth of Pyongyang’s embryonic nuclear-weapons program.

Foreign policy experts and members of the news media also note that Washington’s responses to the nuclear threat that North Korea, on the one hand, and Iran, on the other, allegedly pose to regional and world peace are diverging more sharply than ever before. The United States and its Israeli ally are now waging a major air war against Iran – supposedly to prevent that country from weaponizing its nuclear program.  Their stance toward North Korea is far more subdued.  Although U.S. leaders continue to officially demand that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) commit to adopting a non-nuclear status and relinquish the weapons that it has already built, that demand is widely regarded throughout the international system as ineffectual posturing.  Even more significant, neither the United States nor an ally is taking any military action against the DPRK.

The contrast between Washington’s caution in dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea and the flagrant U.S. coercion of Iran, which possesses no such weapons, could hardly be more striking. It has not gone unnoticed.  Pyongyang’s successful defiance of the United States regarding the nuclear issue could well produce an important lesson for Iran’s leaders.  Pyongyang has covertly built a small arsenal of approximately 50 nuclear warheads and an increasingly sophisticated fleet of ballistic missiles to deliver them.  U.S. and other leaders now treat North Korea with caution and restraint, however grudgingly.  Conversely, an Iran without nuclear weapons is being pounded severely.  Iranian leaders would be obtuse not to at least try to acquire (through construction or purchase) a modest deterrent similar to North Korea’s.

Until President Donald Trump’s first administration, Washington sought to prevent through diplomacy either Pyongyang or Tehran from pursuing a nuclear weapons program.  That approach apparently achieved some success with respect to Iran in 2015 when the clerical regime signed a multilateral agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which placed restrictions on its nuclear program to ensure that it remained peaceful.  The document also contained provisions for frequent and intrusive UN inspections.  Trump, however, rescinded U.S. approval of that agreement in May 2018, dismissing it as “a bad deal.”  Thereafter, Israeli officials and their American supporters have repeatedly warned that Tehran was just months or perhaps even weeks away from building a nuclear arsenal.  There has never been compelling evidence supporting those allegations, but such warnings had become ever-present during the months leading up to the current war.

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Two US citizens get combined 16 years in prison for running North Korean laptop farms — fake remote IT work scheme netted DPRK $5 million in around three years

Two individuals from New Jersey pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering after their arrest in June 2025 for running laptop farms that allowed North Korean IT workers to pose as American residents and work at U.S. companies. According to the Department of Justice, the two individuals, Kejia Wang and Zhenxing Wang, were sentenced to 9 years and 7 years and 8 months of prison time, respectively, plus another three years of supervised release. Furthermore, they are required to forfeit a total of $600,000 that they were paid for during their service to North Korea, more formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

“For years, the defendants enriched themselves by assisting North Korean actors in a fraudulent scheme to gain employment with U.S. companies,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said in the statement. “The ruse placed North Korean IT workers on the payrolls of unwitting U.S. companies and in U.S. computer systems, thereby harming our national security. NSD will hold accountable those who facilitate North Korea’s illicit revenue generation efforts.”

Records reveal that the two defendants, plus several other co-conspirators, stole the identities of over 80 U.S. persons and used them to illicitly gain positions in over 100 U.S. companies, including several that are listed in the Fortune 500. This resulted in massive expenses for the affected businesses, where they collectively had to spend over $3 million on legal fees, computer network remediation costs, and other damages.

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Russian Official Confirms North Koreans Operating Along Ukraine Border

Alexander Khinshtein, governor of Russia’s Kursk region, said in a televised interview on Tuesday that North Korean troops are assisting with mine-clearing efforts along the border with Ukraine.

“Representatives of the Korean People’s Army have played a vital role in clearing the border area. Today, they are deeply engaged in demining efforts, which are crucial for the future reconstruction and security of the region,” Khinshtein stated.

The governor said the “camaraderie between the Russian and Korean peoples compels us to forge a unique partnership with North Korea.” To that end, he said a plan is under development to designate the city of Kaesong in North Korea as a “sister city” to Kursk.

Kursk was counter-invaded by Ukrainian forces in August 2024, 18 months after Russia invaded Ukraine. The Russians were taken completely by surprise, allowing Ukrainian forces to take and hold positions deep inside Kursk province.

In desperation, the Russians turned to North Korea for cannon fodder. Pyongyang sent about 12,000 troops to help the Russians recapture Kursk, a deployment both Russia and North Korea denied for months until finally providing official confirmation in April 2025. The Russian government announced Kursk had been recaptured from Ukrainian forces in the same month.

According to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, his forces were sent to “annihilate and wipe out the Ukrainian neo-Nazi occupiers and liberate the Kursk area in cooperation with the Russian armed forces.”

Kim declared the North Korean soldiers, who seemed baffled by modern drone warfare and took heavy losses in Kursk, to be “heroes of the motherland.” The North Korean regime held a ceremony to honor them in August 2025.

Khinshtein, who was appointed acting governor of Kursk by President Vladimir Putin in December, said on Tuesday that the border between Kursk and Ukraine remains “contaminated with land mines, unexploded ordnance, aerial bombs, and shells,” necessitating an extensive de-mining operation.

Khinshtein’s predecessor as governor, Alexey Smirnov, resigned due to public anger over his handling of the Ukrainian counter-invasion, particularly his failure to evacuate civilians from the occupied territory.

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Deterring The Next Quasi-World War: China–Russia–North Korea Versus US

Russian planes recently flew into Polish and Romanian airspace to test NATO’s resolve while the world veers toward a conflict in Asia—one that could be far worse than the situation in Ukraine—where true deterrence and resolve remain largely absent.

Let’s backtrack a little.

On Sept. 3, Beijing staged a military extravaganza to parade a full suite of fearsome weapons. Many journalists were awed, and some defeatist experts advocated Chamberlainian appeasement. Others, mostly China observers, tried decoding the seating plan of senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials atop Tiananmen Square for clues about the power struggles in Zhongnanhai.

However, what is often overlooked in the discussion about the event is that it represents the financing and support mechanisms behind a new type of quasi-world war. The ongoing Russia–Ukraine war is one example, and the potential invasion of Taiwan by the Chinese regime is another. Let’s explore this further.

The Xinhua images of the Sept. 3 event, featuring Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un consorting in solidarity, should be interpreted as a calculated response to the new tripartite model the West has devised for militarily supporting Ukraine. That model conveys that Kyiv identifies its military hardware needs, European allies provide the financing, and the United States produces and delivers the hardware.

The Beijing event showcased a parallel model: Moscow requests war materiel, including troops, China and North Korea supply them in exchange for cheap Russian energy, with India and a few other countries dipping in. Thus, even though the war’s actual fighting is confined within Ukraine and Russia, its financing involves a much wider array of adversarial states. The coalitional symmetry in this financing mechanism can prolong the bloody conflict indefinitely, which Russia and Ukraine, if left to their own devices, cannot achieve.

A way to stop the war is to break that symmetry, which seems to be the goal of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “secondary tariffs.” On Aug. 6, he doubled the headline tariff on India to 50 percent for buying cheap Russian oil. It is showing results. India reportedly bought much less Russian oil in August. Notably, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Tianjin from Aug. 31 to Sept. 1, quietly skipped the Sept. 3 military parade.

Now, Trump is pressuring Europe to immediately end its remaining reliance on Russian energy and join him in a similar effort against Beijing, and has called for imposing up to 100 percent additional tariffs on China for buying Russian crude oil. The EU leadership is not yet entirely on board, but has proposed to advance its target of ending all energy imports from Russia from 2027 to 2026 or even sooner.

But whatever happens to the war in Ukraine, the world would not be okay even when Putin agrees to call it quits, because Xi has all the intentions to do a sequel. Xi’s primary interest in supporting Russia lies in an expected reciprocation from Moscow if China invades Taiwan. What would a China–Taiwan war look like?

The Russia–Ukraine war is already a quasi-world war. Despite the combat space being narrowly confined, it nevertheless involves the participation of approximately 50 countries on four continents in various capacities.

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Navy SEALs Reportedly Killed North Korean Fishermen and Mutilated Their Bodies To Hide a Failed Mission

You are a fisherman in one of the poorest, most repressed countries in the world. About 20 years ago, your country was suffering from a famine that is still forbidden to discuss frankly. The streets are filled with living reminders of starvation, people whose bodies are marked by childhood malnutrition. Food is precious to you.

So today, as other days, you woke up before dawn with your companions to go diving in the freezing cold ocean, in hopes of putting some mussels on your family’s table. But suddenly, you die. A man you have never met and whose presence you did not know about has shot you with his rifle. His companions stab your lungs so that your body will sink to the bottom of the sea. Your family will likely never know what happened to you.

That is what happened to a group of unnamed North Korean fishermen who accidentally stumbled upon a detachment of U.S. Navy SEALs in 2019, according to a Friday report by The New York Times. The commandos had set out to install a surveillance device to wiretap government communications in North Korea. When they stumbled upon an unexpected group of divers on a boat, the SEALs killed everyone on board and retreated.

The U.S. government concluded that the victims were “civilians diving for shellfish,” sources told the Times. Officials didn’t even know how many, telling the Times that it was “two or three people,” even though the SEALs had searched the boat and disposed of the bodies. The mission wasn’t just an intelligence failure. It was a failure that killed real people through no fault of their own.

The mission was carried out during the first Trump administration. The U.S. government wanted insight into North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his high-stakes nuclear negotiations with President Donald Trump. Matthew Cole, one of the reporters who broke the story, wrote on his Substack that he first caught wind of the story in 2023 from a source who wanted him to know “how the SEALs involved in the mission had avoided any accountability because of how secret the mission was.”

The broader point of the story, according to the Times, was that the U.S. government “often” hides the failures of special operations from policymakers. Seth Harp, author of The Fort Bragg Cartel, roughly estimates that Joint Special Operations Command killed 100,000 people during the Iraq War “surge” from 2007 to 2009. The secrecy around America’s spying-and-assassination complex makes it impossible to know how many of those people were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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