Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is on a fast track, and that’s not just in terms of her hot-shot career. She’s up against a tight deadline. She’s got until Jan. 20 to persuade the U.N. Security Council to strengthen what she says is already the […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk The late Don Oberdorfer would surely have had qualms with the award named for him and presented by U.S. Ambassador Mark Lippert to Noh Hyo-dong, the longtime diplomatic and Washington correspondent for Yonhap News Agency. Why would a top U.S. diplomat be handing out a prize in the name […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk The exchanges between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in their first debate left an uneasy feeling about U.S. foreign policy. While Trump worried about all the money the U.S. has been squandering overseas, Clinton came through with ritual affirmation of U.S. treaty commitments. Their words were empty, less than […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk North Korea is truly a schizophrenic state. All in a day we hear about the need for generous foreign donors to come to the rescue of thousands of victims of flooding in the Onsong district in the hard-scrabble northeast where life is tough in the best of times. Then, in […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk WASHINGTON — The Chinese remain the great enigma when it comes to figuring out whether they’re friend or foe, honorable adversaries or dangerous rivals for power and influence from the Korean peninsula to the South China Sea and beyond. Nobody believes they’re doing much to discourage North Korea’s nuclear […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk You have to credit the North Koreans with chutzpah ― the Yiddish word for “nerve,” brazen arrogance or insolence, all in untranslatable exclamation. The leaders of the world’s 20 strongest, most powerful nations were gathered in a solemn conclave in China, and in Pyongyang North Korea’s Supreme Leader did […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk Time slowly erases the traces of those held in North Korea. The longer they’re there, the easier it is to forget them. Their families, reluctant to invest more psychic energy on those for whom they know the North Koreans have no mercy, give up the quest. As individuals move […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk U.S.-China relations are at their worst in years, and North and South Korean are not getting along either. In fact, relations between those two are at such a low ebb that two-way trade, once about several hundred million dollars a year, has almost ceased. Curiously, however, North Korean coal […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk The prospect of a missile war between North and South Korea poses a threat to regional stability that previously seemed unimaginable. Images of North and South Korean gunners firing ballistic missiles at one another from redoubts far north and south of the demilitarized zone are edging closer to reality […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk On the chessboard of Northeast, East and Southeast Asia, the players are inexorably arranging their pieces. A naval exercise, a warplane flyover, a flotilla of fishing boats, a missile launch ― all such gestures, bloodless today, evoke the image of great powers maneuvering for bloody moves tomorrow. It’s as […]
