Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk VIRGINIA BEACH ― Memorial Day holiday crowds soak up the surf and sun while sailors and marines train for war in distant countries about which they know very little. A young Marine, bored with the routine at one of the dozen or so facilities between this sprawling oceanside community […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk WASHINGTON – South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in has been trying so hard to achieve the impossible dream of reconciliation with North Korea that it’s easy for foreign observers to forget a strong, traditional conservative opposition that deeply opposes the pattern of concessions to the will of North Korea’s leader […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk It’s easy to overlook the Russian stake in the Korean Peninsula. We hear so much about China’s pivotal role, its influence over North Korea and its enormous trade with South Korea that we tend to forget the Soviet Union shared responsibility with the U.S. for the artificial division of […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk SEOUL — The sinking of the Sewol ferry five years ago was one of the greatest tragedies in Korean history. The memory for me, along with many others, is especially poignant since I spent hours in the great school gymnasium where families of the 304 victims, most of them […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk Ban Ki-Moon, now that he’s no longer United Nations secretary-general, can offer frank views that would definitely have had North Korean diplomats screaming bloody murder in the UN headquarters had he expressed them there. Ban, ever bland, polite, genial, the essence of the seasoned diplomat, gave about as reasoned […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk President Moon Jae-In almost accidentally stepped into a battle that did not have to happen with journalists for foreign news organizations. The ruckus was all about a Korean reporter for Bloomberg who wrote in September that Moon sounded like a spokesman for Kim Jong-Un by singing the praises of […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk SEOUL — The Demilitarized Zone that’s divided North from South Korea since the Korean War evokes images of the Berlin Wall that divided East from West Berlin from 1961 to 1991 but shows no signs of going down after the second summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk HANOI — No matter what he does or says, Donald Trump is playing a losing game with his critics on North Korea and probably on just about everything else. If he had joined Kim Jong-Un last week in signing a piece of paper agreeing to give up sanctions while […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk HANOI – Call the outcome of the second Trump-Kim summit disappointing or frustrating, but it was anything but a “failure.” The real failure would have been President Donald Trump’s signature authorizing concessions in return for promises made only to be broken. The North’s nuclear program is buried so deeply […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk HANOI ― The slogan, “Hanoi, City for Peace,” would have seemed unimaginable when I was a correspondent in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War nearly half a century ago. This capital of what we then called “North” Vietnam was the heart of a desperate surge southward that […]
