Despite the change in regime, the lines of communication between the U.S. and North Korea have remained open, leading to the announcement on Monday that they they would hold talks on Feb. 23 in Beijing. It will be the third in a series of “conversations” between the two countries which began last July in the hopes of restarting the six-party talks (the six being the U.S., North and South Korea, China, Russia and Japan) that were blown up by North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests of 2009. The Beijing meeting had originally been scheduled for the week after Kim Jong Il’s death and U.S. diplomats were unsure what to expect when they reached out to their North Korean counterparts. When the previous North Korean leader, Kim Il Sung died, Kim Jong Il spent three years mourning his father.
To understand just how hard it is for the Obama Administration or anyone else to predict what the death of Kim Jong Il will bring to North Korea, it helps to understand just what a backward, out-of-touch place that country is. Having raided my mid-’90s notes to flesh out Jim Jackson’s excellent obituary of Vaclav [...]
Our colleague Massimo Calabresi knows a lot about the risks a reporter must take to uncover the truth in an international danger zone. From 1995 to 1999, Massimo covered wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo for TIME. He was once detained in Serb-held Bosnia while investigating mass graves there as part of a reporting project [...]
Is it possible that the North Koreans launched a July 4 cyber attack on the US government? If so, what’s the appropriate retaliation? Should we turn the electricity in Pyongyang on and off a few times, if we can do it? The North Koreans are clearly in the midst of some sort of internal meltdown, [...]
