Latest in North Korea
The Department of Justice has charged three foreign nationals with conspiracy to violate sanctions regulations against North Korea with bank fraud, in addition to conspiracy to launder funds.
In a federal indictment unsealed Thursday, May 28, the Justice Department has charged 28 North Korean and 5 Chinese citizens with acting as agents of North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank and facilitating over $2.5 billion in illegal payments for the country’s nuclear weapons program. Working for the Foreign Trade Bank, the agents allegedly established more than 250 front companies to mask payments which transited through the U.S. financial system.
Cryptocurrency obfuscation tools and techniques are likely to play a growing role in financing threats to U.S. national security.
On Jan. 28, the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing on U.S. defense policy in the Korean peninsula that examined the administration’s efforts to strengthen the U.S. alliance with South Korea while deterring and securing the denuclearization of the countries’ shared foe in the north.
Editor’s Note: Iran and North Korea have posed thorny problems for multiple U.S. administrations. The Trump administration, however, is trying a new tack, hoping to transform the regimes and eschewing intermediate steps. Robert Litwak of the Wilson Center calls for a more transactional approach, working incrementally to decrease the danger these rogue regimes pose rather than trying, and probably failing, to fundamentally transform them.
Daniel Byman
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Editor’s Note: The Trump administration has made North Korea one of its strategic priorities, but the Pyongyang regime is inscrutable, making it difficult to determine the best approach. Brookings senior fellow Jung Pak dissects Kim Jong Un's annual New Year's speech and argues that the North Korean leader is confident and trying to set the United States up for responsibility should relations go further awry.
Daniel Byman
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On Thursday, the White House cancelled President Donald Trump’s June 12 meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in the following letter.
Editor’s Note: North Korea may be both the world's most dangerous and most despotic regime. Understandably, most U.S. administrations have focused on the nuclear danger, but the Trump administration has also stepped up pressure on the human rights front. Andrew Yeo of Catholic University argues this focus makes sense and that confronting North Korea requires calling the regime out on human rights.
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The Olympic games are more than just sport.
The 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea have begun. For two weeks, athletes from around the world will careen down mountains and glide on mirror-perfect ice. But as always, global politics–and the military and security threats behind those politics–lie just beneath the sporting surface.
I’ve been trying to figure out why the U.S. government thought it was useful to attribute the “WannaCry” attack to North Korea. WannaCry was a global ransomware attack that hit hundreds of thousands of computers, cost billions of dollars in damage, and compromised U.K. healthcare computers in ways that “put lives at risk.” In a Tuesday, Dec.