In Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and North Korea, a fool’s conceit defeated us

In a sense, it’s too soon to reflect on the disaster in Iran. After all, Trump’s cease-fires have a half-life of a week. There is every reason to think that this one will also fall apart soon enough–in Lebanon, over an attack in the Strait, or because of an escalating public argument over what was even agreed. In another sense, it’s not too soon to reflect on Trump’s well-established record on the global stage with a short history of his “great”...

Iran Comments: 0

April 2, 2026

Trump Expected Iranians to “Die for a Delcy,” and the People Did Not Come

Donald Trump did not run on isolationism because he was against war. He ran on isolationism because he is a stupid man who always wants to be the smartest man in the room. Thinking deeply, analytically, or strategically about foreign places or the complex national security threats that arise in them bores him, so he surrounded himself with the sort of emotional, reflexive, and opportunistic isolationists who also do not think deeply, analytically, or strategically. The rare exceptions (Rubio) know...

Iran

March 25, 2026

Zelensky plays his oil cards against Trump & Putin

Donald Trump has betrayed more American values and interests than my dog has hairs in January, but let’s pause on one subset of them–his aid cutoff to Ukraine, his stalling of sanctions against Russia, and his public blustering at Volodimir Zelensky that he had “no cards” to play. Well, Zelensky is playing them now, and I’m sure he’s having a good laugh at the expense of Trump and Putin somewhere. The stupidity of Donald Trump and the incompetence of his...

Russia

February 24, 2026

Chosun Ilbo: Andrei Lankov arrested in Latvia

Update: NK News reports that he’s been released (paywall). The Chosun Ilbo is reporting that the well-known North Korea expert, Professor Andrei Lankov, has been arrested in Latvia. It doesn’t say why, but Russians have often fallen under suspicion in the Baltic states in recent years as Russia wages a hybrid war against them. Professor Lankov and I fell into some strong disagreements in recent times, this is an earthquake for the many Korea-watchers who knew, liked, and admired him....

Europe/Russia/Russia & Korea

January 3, 2026

The coming Venezuela quagmire may not be the one you expect

A prediction: some legal issues with the prosecution of Nicolas Maduro will soon create significant political problems for Donald Trump and Pam Bondi. The fact that a grand jury in New York has already re-indicted Maduro, combined with the grand jury secrecy rules, means that the Trump administration has been planning this operation for several weeks. I’m impressed and surprised that the grand jury didn’t leak this and compromise the military operation. (Maduro was previously indicted by the first Trump...

U.S. Law/U.S. Politics

October 26, 2025

Planting My Standard

In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned us that political parties would use the Spoils System to politicize our civil service, usurp power, and destroy the very democracy that gave them power: They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of...

America/Censorship/Democracy/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics/Washington Views

June 5, 2025

Seoul and Washington are quietly hiring their divorce lawyers

For the first time since 1945, the two heads-of-state of the United States and South Korea would both prefer to end their two states’ alliance. Because the alliance is popular with South Korean voters, Lee Jae-myung would deny that publicly. Privately, he wants to preserve the fiction of one, to wind it down slowly, and failing that, to evade blame for the coming divorce. Trump has no such qualms. In terms of diplomacy and policy, however, the US and ROK...

Anju Links

June 4, 2025

I could watch this video of exploding Russian bombers all day.

Watch. Enjoy today, as the threat of Russian bombers begins to go up in smoke, for tomorrow, we’ll all have to think about stringing steel netting over our airport terminals. * * * Update: I’m suddenly seized by the fear that Putin has taken Trump’s measure as his puppet and will feel free to respond with unrestrained brutality against Ukrainian civilians. * * * Update 2: Inevitably: * * * Update 3: My God. I swear, I will never piss off...

Anju Links

April 30, 2023

British American Tobacco, North Korea, & the Bomb: Setting a New Low for How Evil a Tobacco Company Can Be

Last Tuesday, British American Tobacco, the world’s second-largest tobacco company, along with its Singaporean subsidiary, pled guilty to bank fraud and conspiracy charges and agreed to pay a combined $635 million in criminal and civil fines, penalties, and forfeitures to the Treasury and Justice Departments. The charges arise from an secret joint venture, going all the way back to 2001, in which BAT sold the North Korean government tobacco, other materials, machinery, and technical help to manufacture cigarettes, despite having said...

Money Laundering/NK Crime/U.S. Law

April 4, 2023

The Root of All Evil: Money, Rice, Crime & Law in North Korea

In 1997, a Washington Post reporter was allowed into the city of Hamheung, in the mountains that ring North Korea’s east coast, to investigate reports of a famine in the isolated country. There, he interviewed the director of a local orphanage, who told him that some parents who could no longer feed their children had begun to abandon them “to nature.” Some of these children died where their parents left them. In other cases, people would bring them to the...

Human Rights/Sanctions/U.S. Law

August 22, 2022

No, North Korea did not “manage” COVID. It piled famine on plague.

The editors of 38 North are smart, well-informed people, and so I’m puzzled by their decision to publish this submission by Heeje Lee and Samuel S. Han, a dentist and a research assistant, declaring Kim Jong-un’s victory over COVID. Unlike the usual suspects, Lee and Han don’t avoid all criticism of the North Korean system, its leaders, or its policies. They acknowledge “the weak state of the country’s health care system,” concede its widespread malnutrition, and lack of a COVID...

Famine & Food Aid/Fiskings/Health & Disease

August 18, 2022

How sanctions helped bring down the Soviet Bloc

Among sanctions critics who oppose America’s foreign policy goals or sympathize with its adversaries, a common cliche is that “sanctions never work.” A more nuanced criticism from skeptics of American power is that sanctions alone cannot cause states to change the policies that Washington and its allies oppose. A third argument is that sanctions are not an end unto themselves. The first argument is demonstrably untrue; the second is a half-truth; and the third is too self-evident to be worth...

Europe/History/Sanctions

July 19, 2022

The U.S. & South Korea should enforce existing sanctions against North Korea, not bargain for new ones

Between 2017 and 2022, the leaders of the United States and South Korea performed an experiment: what if they froze joint military exercises, said nothing about Kim Jong-un’s crimes against humanity, offered aid, and stopped actively enforcing sanctions? The results of the experiment are in. This week, Treasury Secretary Yellen is in Seoul, where she met with President Yoon to discuss, among other items, what each of the two government should do about Kim Jong-un’s increased missile tests, and the...

An Alliance?/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law

January 2, 2022

How Uygur and North Korea human rights activists can join forces to keep slave-made goods out of your closet

How many things do you own that were made by slaves—specifically, enslaved North Koreans or Uygurs? The bad news is that no one knows, because most of the evidence is hidden deep within the supply chains. The good news is that this may be changing just enough to make the use of slave labor unprofitable for the retailers you buy from and the sweatshops in China that employ it. “Royal Blood-Fresh” Chinese manufacturers have a long history of sourcing their...

Activism/Human Trafficking/Kaesong/Sanctions

October 3, 2021

Selling Slavery: South Korean investors’ $900,000 Kaesong lobbying campaign

Documents filed with the Justice Department in July show that a group of South Korean investors hired a San Francisco law firm and a South Korean consulting firm to lobby the U.S. government to support reopening a shuttered, looted, and partially exploded manufacturing complex near Kaesong, North Korea. The documents were required to be filed with the Justice Department and made public under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), a law designed to expose foreign propaganda and influence...

Kaesong/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Law

March 23, 2021

For the first time, the Justice Department extradites a North Korean to stand trial in the U.S.

Today, the Justice Department announced that for the first time, it has extradited a North Korean national to the United States. Mun Chol Myong, who was based in Malaysia, and whom DOJ claims to be an agent of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, allegedly laundered money through the United States to do deals between the Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea (designated in 2013 for WMD proliferation financing), the military electronics manufacturer, Glocom, and other wholesome types. Funny, no mention of...

Luxury Goods/Money Laundering/Southeast Asia/U.S. Law

July 23, 2020

You can’t blame Donald Trump for filling Moon Jae-in’s cabinet with pro-Pyongyang ex-terrorists

Yesterday morning, I was surprised to learn that my tweets about Lee In-young’s master plan to get around sanctions and bail out Kim Jong-un made the Chosun Ilbo and are spreading around Korean YouTube. Because you hate reading long posts—even long posts that you really should read—I decided to hold back for today my examination of why Lee and his colleagues are so motivated to aid and abet Pyongyang’s sanctions-busting, and all of its plans for Seoul’s money. We might...

An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/The Fifth Column

July 21, 2020

Our S Korean ally has a plan to bail Kim Jong-un out, but it’s no better than the rest of them

I really think South Korean President Moon Jae-in wants to bail Kim Jong-un out more than I want my next breath. Even before he was sworn in, he called for the reopening of Kaesong and other joint projects to ease the burden of U.S.-led sanctions. Once in office, he called for major investments in North Korea until a call from the Treasury Department scared his bankers away. He turned a blind eye to purchases of North Korean coal, and probably to the smuggling of luxury goods, into...

An Alliance?/Sanctions