Korea, Iran, Judiciary

North and South Korea Talks Reduce Rising Tensions Weeks Before Olympic Games

After President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un spent the last several months trading threats and insults, including Trump’s boast that his “nuclear button” was bigger than Kim’s, recent talks between the North and South have begun to reduce rising tensions. Officials from both nations who met for negotiations at the border village of Panmunjom on Jan. 9, produced an agreement to send North Korean athletes to the Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea next month and plans to schedule future meetings to improve relations.

The talks, the first between the North and South since December 2015, also announced the reopening of a military hotline that can be used to reduce the chances of a conflict breaking out due to an accident or miscalculation. At the conclusion of negotiations, Northern officials rejected Seoul’s proposal to begin talks to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, stating, “All our weapons including atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs and ballistic missiles are only aimed at the United States, not our brethren, nor China and Russia.”

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Catherine Killough, Roger L. Hale fellow with the Ploughshares Fund. Here, she talks about opportunities for North and South Korea to improve their relationship and prospects for reaching a future agreement with the U.S. over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program.

CATHERINE KILLOUGH: South Korean Presiden Moon Jae-In has been explicit from the beginning about how he wants these Winter Games to be a peace Olympics. And so South Korea has invited North Korea to participate. And it wasn’t until New Year’s when the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un kind of surprised everyone with a speech that essentially offered an olive branch to South Korea. He signaled his willingness to have North Korea participate, but most importantly, to reopen a dialogue with South Korea.

So that’s where we are right now. And the talks are, they’re centered around the North’s participation in the games. But they will likely broach broader topics of how to improve inter-Korean relations. So, this is a breakthrough moment. And I can’t emphasize enough how important it’s been to have this tension-reducing step at a time when it was getting so escalatory that we really did feel like we were on the brink of a nuclear war.

BETWEEN THE LINES: South Korean President Moon Jae-in is known for his embrace of the sunshine policy of looking for better relations with the North, and of course, he entered office at a time when there was a growing escalation of rhetoric between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in North Korea. What do we know about Moon Jae-in’s agenda here in terms of improving relations and reducing tensions?

CATHERINE KILLOUGH: President Moon Jae-in is in a really tough spot. Before he was elected, he campaigned hard for greater engagement with North Korea. Now that he’s in the position he’s in, he’s got to deal with not only our president, who has been reckless and unpredictable – he’s dealing with a conservative administration that has not fully embraced diplomacy and engagement in the way Moon would like, but he’s also got a rising militarism in Japan. And he’s trying to maintain relations with China, who is their biggest trading partner. So he’s in a really tough spot.

And I think in the face of all this, he’s done a really great job of balancing all the various elements. Just on Friday, he released a statement that he’s not going to stand weak-kneed in front of North Korea just to gain a dialogue like we did in the past. He’s basically trying to reassure what a lot of U.S. hardliners have been criticizing as a trap – that the North Koreans are essentially trying to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea. So I would emphasize here that the onus of not messing up – it shouldn’t be on President Moon. I think it really needs to be on the U.S. because we have historically – when there’s a conservative administration, constrained the South Korean progressive efforts to engage with the north.

BETWEEN THE LINES: There have been mixed signals within the Trump administration. We’ve had Secretary of State Rex Tillerson talking about no pre-conditions to sit down and talk with North Korea several weeks ago. The White House quickly pulled back from that. Rex Tillerson revised his remarks to basically say, there were still preconditions before talks could begin, and that really boils down to demanding that North Korea pledge to get rid of its nuclear weapons program. Is that something of a dealbreaker for future talks between the U.S. and North Korea?

CATHERINE KILLOUGH: For North Korea, I mean, direct bilateral talks with the U.S. – that’s always been the objective. It’s no longer the case that they’ll engage if nuclear weapons are up for discussion. And to take that even further, North Korea’s been emphatically clear that they have no intention of getting rid of their nuclear weapons so long as the United States maintains, as they put it, a “hostile policy.”

So if we ask ourselves, what would it take to convince North Korea that the U.S. isn’t hostile, the answer is, “It’s not optimistic for us.” It would require some kind of security assurance that the U.S. is not going to topple their regime. And the big North Korean ask is a normalization of relations – and that can only come in the form of a peace treaty to resolve the [unintelligible].

If you really draw this out, it’s not likely any time soon, at least not in this administration that we would agree to such demands because it would entail pulling out U.S. troops from the region and for various regions, the U.S. wants to maintain its footprint in South Korea. I think if there is a silver lining here, it’s that these issues – the future of the Korean peninsula, what it would really take to denuclearize and resolve this 70-year-old crisis is re-entering the public discourse in a way that I don’t think it has before and these are debates that are worth having, especially as the stakes for war are growing dangerously high.

For more information on the Ploughshares Fund, visit Ploughshares.org/.

Trump Tweets Support Iran Protests Amid His Threats of Nuclear Agreement Withdrawal
Interview with John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, conducted by Scott Harris

In the largest protests in Iran in nearly a decade, thousands of mostly working class people have taken to the streets to decry the nation’s weak economy, corruption and a steep rise in food and gas prices. There are reports that the first protests on Dec. 28 had been organized by hardliners opposed to reformist President Hassan Rouhani, but as the demonstrations spread across the country, economic demands transformed into bold challenges to the institutions of the Islamic Republic itself.

Over the last two weeks, at least 21 people have died in clashes with police and more than 3,700 were arrested according to news reports. While Iran’s Revolutionary Guard accused the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia of fomenting the unrest, President Rouhani acknowledged that many of the protesters grievances were valid and should be addressed. Trump expressed support for the protesters in a tweet calling on the Iranian government to “respect their people’s rights.” On the upcoming Jan. 13 compliance certification deadline, Trump could decide to re-impose sanctions against Iran, which would effectively withdraw the U.S. from the international Iran nuclear agreement.

JOHN FEFFER: These initial protests were really kind of focused against the reformers. But they spread, and they spread not just to the major cities, not just to Tehran, but to the provinces even further out – to places, to cities that folks outside of Iran had never heard of, and to be honest with you – even some places that Iranians in the big cities had never heard of either.

And the protests developed a very different character. They became more broad-based. They started to challenge some of the foundations, even the conservative foundations of Iranian society. The Iranian government, certainly elements of the Iranian government – the more religious, the more conservative elements – have labeled the protesters as being inspired by foreigners. And not necessarily just the United States. I mean there was a lot of talk inside of Iran of Saudi Arabia inspiring these protesters.

But the United States is, you know, a kind of perennial bogeyman for Iranian conservatives, so of course, the United States was identified as being an architect or one of the architects. So, if you have the American president tweeting his support for the protesters, it makes that link all the stronger, thus making it perhaps easier to discredit the protests.

BETWEEN THE LINES: John Pfeffer, what’s the future of the Iran Nuclear Agreement? This Jan. 13, Donald Trump will have the opportunity to reimpose sanctions and derail the international nuclear agreement. I’m wondering what you speculate may happen as well as what you think Iran’s response would be to an international agreement that’s signed by the United State and Iran, but also European nations, Russia and China – which have steadfastly maintained their support for the agreement?

JOHN FEFFER: That’s absolutely correct. And you know, this is an international agreement. So even if the United States were to withdraw from it, the agreement could still hold. It’s been clear that Trump himself is very much opposed to the agreement and his opposition stems not so much from the particulars of the agreement, but from the fact that it was negotiated by the Obama administration and Trump has taken aim at all of the accomplishments of his predecessor, if only to raise his own stature by comparison. A number of his advisers have said, “Look, you may not like this agreement, but this actually is extremely from the perspective of American national security interests because it genuinely does restrain Iran’s nuclear capabilities. And for us to destroy the agreement would basically give Iran the free hand to do whatever it wants to do.

Now, I don’t think that if the U.S. were to withdraw, Iran would turn around and say, OK, forget it. We are going to move full-speed ahead with a nuclear weapons program, one because I think it decided some time ago, before the negotiations for this agreement – that a nuclear weapons program was NOT actually in the interests of Iran.

But two, because Iran was still going to try to strengthen its economic relations with Europe. It has reasonably good relations with Russia and China. But it’s really the European Union that I think Iran sees as critical to its economic future of the purchase of Iranian products, but more importantly, the flow of capital from European governments and European corporations into Iran, as part of joint ventures or other economic arrangements.

So even if Trump were to cancel – come mid-January – U.S. participation in the agreement, I think it still will hold. But I think again, as with the previous decision that Trump – which was to basically push the decision onto Congress – he’s going to look for some other way of dealing with this issue other than giving a firm “yes” or “no.” And I think that means he will try to get some additional conditions the agreement. I don’t think that will go very far, but his thinking is to try to get these other basically two other groups of issues: One having to do with Iran’s missile capabilities and the other having to do with Iran’s actions in the region, particularly with respect to Hezbollah and Syria and in Iraq.

We might try to get those kind of bundled into this agreement, to at least have negotiations on that. But to be honest with you, the Trump administration efforts to do that in other spheres have so far borne little fruit. The most salient would be the NAFTA negotiations with Canada and Mexico.

The idea of renegotiating what was an extraordinarily complex agreement, especially when the Trump administration is short-handed when it comes to negotiators and expertise. It’s kind of a ridiculous project or has a ridiculous prospect, too.

So I think that’s probably what the Trump administration will attempt to do, but I think it will fail to do and then they’ll have to fall back on that binary choice of “yes or no” with the agreement. My sense is that the administration will probably end up trying to say “no” and saying the protests that took place in December again prove that we should not be negotiating with a government that does not have the support of its own people.

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute For Policy Studies. Here, he assesses the effect of Trump’s support for Iranian street protests and the consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.

For more information, visit IPS-DC.org, fpif.org and http://johnfeffer.com/.

Trump, GOP Transforming Judiciary with Rapid Confirmation of Extreme Right-Wing Judges
Interview with Marge Baker, executive vice president, People for the American Way, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

Many people on the left often ridicule President Donald Trump for running an inept administration. Yet one area where he’s already made a major impact is the judiciary, where changes to the confirmation process have facilitated many of his appointments. Under President Obama, Senate Republicans blocked votes to fill vacancies to the key D.C. Circuit Court, so Democrats changed the rules, requiring only a majority vote for confirmation of judges to lower courts, but kept the 60–vote requirement to confirm Supreme Court nominees.

After Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015, they refused to hold hearings on Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill the vacancy created by the 2016 death of Antonin Scalia. When Donald Trump was elected president, Republicans changed the rules again, requiring only 51 votes to confirm Supreme Court justices and thus were able to confirm Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch.

The U.S. has 13 federal circuit courts, to which appeals are made from district court rulings. To date, Trump has filled 12 circuit court vacancies. At the same point in Obama’s first term he had filled just three. However, three of Trump’s federal judge nominees were considered so unqualified that their nominations had to be withdrawn. Currently, there are 142 vacancies – 126 at the district level and 16 at the appellate level. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Marge Baker, executive vice president with the group People for the American Way. Here, she talks about her group’s concerns regarding the long-term impact of Trump’s right-wing extremist judicial appointments. [Rush transcript.]

MARGE BAKER: We are truly alarmed at what we’re seeing from the Trump administration. There is a relentless pace of putting extremely unqualified extremists on the bench on the lower courts – and of course they accomplished this with the Supreme Court as well after the disastrous, and we believe, unconstitutional effort to prevent President Obama from having his Supreme Court nominee even getting a hearing. And they are driven by the desire to remake the courts with extremist judges who will end up interpreting the law and the Constitution in a very narrow-minded and elitist way that ends up privileging the powerful and the wealthy instead of all Americans. And it’s a serious problem and affects every aspect of one’s lives, from consumers to workers to women’s rights to issues around civil rights, LGBT equality, environmental issues – any number of issues ends up in the Supreme Court and the lower courts – and is potentially disastrous for the American people. It’s a serious issue and frankly affects the ability of the government to serve the public good and the quality of life of all Americans.

BETWEEN THE LINES: There was, of course, a lot of coverage about Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, who was narrowly confirmed by the Senate. But for all these other nominations to the lower courts, there’s been almost a media blackout unless you go to sites like yours.

MARGE BAKER: Yeah. I think it’s really important to understand – the Supreme Court is very important, obviously – the Supreme Court hears less than 100 cases a year. There’s two levels of courts below the Supreme Court: the Courts of Appeals, which hear about 35,000 cases a year, and the district courts, which are the trial courts, and they hear about 350,000 cases a year. So the bulk of the cases that go through the courts are either decided by the lower-level trial courts called the district courts or the second level are the Courts of Appeals. Very, very few get to the Supreme Court, so all the issues we were talking about end up being decided by lifetime appointees to the lower federal courts – district courts and circuit courts. And that’s why we are so concerned – and that’s the pace at which the Trump administration is pushing through these nominees is unbelievably fast. They’re not creating opportunities to fully vet these nominees, and it’s very clear from the nominees that they’re choosing that they have an ideological agenda. They are trying to pack the courts with narrow-minded elitists who will inevitably rule in favor of the wealthy and the powerful over all Americans.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Marge Baker, in his eight years as president, Obama also appointed a lot of judges, and under Trump in many cases, the courts have been the remedy of last resort to protect civil liberties and human rights.

MARGE BAKER: Right, I mean right now the courts have been a check on the excessive executive power this administration is trying to assert. They’ve been a check on the effort to ban Muslims. They’ve been a check on what the administration is able to do – or wants to do – on the Affordable Care Act. But that is in danger if this administration is able to pack the courts with extremist ideologues. We’re seeing Republicans pack hearing agendas; we’re seeing Sen. Grassley ignore the rights of every senator to determine whether or not a nominee from their home state should go forward. We’re seeing clearly unqualified nominees pushed through, not because they’re qualified – they don’t have a bit of trial experience – but they’re being nominated to be a trial court judge. It’s because they are ideologues; it’s very, very clear that this administration and the folks vetting these nominees don’t care about qualifications or capabilities – they care about ideology.

BETWEEN THE LINES: What can be done to stop this juggernaut?

MARGE BAKER: One thing that has happened so far – we’ve succeeded in forcing the administration to withdraw three nominees for these lower courts because they’ve demonstrated they are totally unqualified to sit on the court. So one thing we can do and are doing and activists can help us do is amplify the really, really sorry records of a number of these nominees so when they’re exposed to the light of day, it’s less likely they’ll be confirmed. And the other thing is, elections matter. And 2018 elections are coming up, and a Democratically-controlled Senate would have a whole lot more ability to slow these nominations down, which is really something that would be important for the American people.

For more information, visit PFAW.org.

This week’s summary of under-reported news

Compiled by Bob Nixon

The defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq has left behind a trail of violence-induced trauma among many Sunni Arabs. When ISIS controlled Mosel and other Iraqi cities, tens of thousands of Sunni civilians were raped, kidnapped and murdered by ISIS militants. (“How Sunnis post-ISIS crisis is leading some to new Iraqi nationalism,” The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 27, 2017)
In recent months, Cuba has renewed strong economic ties with Moscow, as seen in a recent high-level meeting between President Raul Castro with Igor Sechin, head of Russia’s state-run Rosneft oil company. (“Goodbye Venezuela, Hello Russia, Can Vladimir Putin save Cuba,” Miami Herald, Dec. 26, 2017)
For desperate people, big dumpsters in the land of high-tech giants like Amazon, Apple and Google can provide a robust supply of rotten, but nutritious food like fruit, frozen pizza and ice cream – and pose tragic risks. (“Death in an Amazon Dumpster,” The Guardian, Dec. 28, 2017)

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