Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has dodged a bullet, meaning the onslaught of speculation about whether he was dead or alive, ill or just avoiding the coronavirus. It’s amazing how quickly and easily many of us were taken in by the initial report on the Daily NK, based on […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk Everybody knows Kim Jong-Un has a lot to learn from the capitalist success of nearby Communist countries. No example is better than that of China, whose leaders have urged him to walk the capitalist road to success. His late father, Kim Jong-Il, was photographed during trips to China traipsing […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump faces a serious problem when he meets South Korea’s President Moon Jae-In Monday in New York. How can he go on promising concessions to North Korea when the State Department has already rejected North Korea’s demand for “corresponding measures” by the U.S. before […]
Special to WorldTribune.com Commentary by Donald Kirk SINGAPORE — The summit between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un wound up in a victory of style and image over real substance. Trump, hours after his historic meeting with Kim, defended the vague final declaration in a show of bluff and bluster in which he sought to […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk John Bolton, U.S. President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, may be hawkish and conservative, but at least you had to credit him with sophistication and having insights on the issues and the people whom he was confronting. In the course of many visits to Korea, he often displayed understanding […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk There is a certain inevitability about China’s need for North Korea and the North’s need for China. The two may intuitively hate one another, but they can hardly stay apart in the regional tug of war. It’s been that way ever since Chinese forces poured into North Korea to […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk In the excitement over impending summits, we may have forgotten one other solution everyone was talking about, oh, just a month or two ago. Whatever happened to all the enthusiasm for forcing Kim Jong-Un out of his job by internal upheaval, external attack, or maybe just a plain old […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk SEOUL — U.S. President Donald Trump is putting the best face on the agreement for North and South Korean leaders to meet next month at the truce village of Panmunjom, on the North-South line 55 kilometers north of Seoul for the third inter-Korean summit. Despite pervasive doubts about North […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk SEOUL — Whenever experts talk about “confederation” or “reunification” between North and South Korea, they overlook the fate of tens of thousands of people confined to prison camps in the North for offenses that might threaten the regime. Examples of such “crimes” include Christian worship, possession of a bible […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk PYEONGCHANG ― Now I know firsthand what they’re talking about when they say the Russians are tricky. Yes, they’ve gotten into American and other websites, tried to sway the U.S. presidential election and are not to be trusted, but those were media reports. In an era of fake news, […]
