Word: koreanizing
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...Obama had entertained the possibility of striking a grand bargain with North Korea: a nuclear deal, plus U.S. diplomatic recognition of the North and a move toward a formal peace treaty (South Korea and North Korea are still technically at war, since no treaty was signed to end the Korean War). Kim's provocative acts have blown those expectations away. "[The Administration] feels as if it held out its hand early on, only to have it bitten," says Bruce Klingner, a senior fellow at Washington's Heritage Foundation and a former CIA official. "Their attitude now is, you had your...
...Monde, the Obama administration has asked Berlin for somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 additional troops, Rome and Paris for 1,500 apiece, and London for 1,000. The Obama administration also hoped that another 4,000 will come from an increase in Georgian, Turkish, Polish, and South Korean troop levels...
...would Pyongyang make such a change? As usual, parsing the reasons the North Korean government does anything is murky business. But Pyongyang watchers in Seoul believe the crackdown comes for two main reasons. First, there has been a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots in North Korea, partly due to the prevalence of relatively free markets, says Cheong Seong-chang, senior fellow at the Sejong Institute, a think tank in Seoul. Since 2000, the bigger traders in North Korea have come to live a life "almost as lavish as South Koreans," says Cheong. "They have big refrigerators...
...imbalances will continue to persist, say analysts and North Korean defectors in Seoul. The largest and wealthiest of North Korea's traders, including government-owned companies, have long since swapped out of North Korean won and instead hold Chinese renminbi, yen or dollars as a store of value. The black-market value of the won has been decreasing for years, and North Korean inflation has been accelerating. The former head of a large North Korean trading firm who recently defected to Seoul told TIME, "Some kind of move like this was expected for a long time." And, he says...
...begun to feel threatened. Small traders and black markets existed outside of government control, and by definition at some point the regime was not going to tolerate that, analysts say. "The breakaway, snowballing market is a threat to the regime," says Lim Kang-taeg, senior research fellow at the Korean Institute for National Unification, a government-sponsored think tank in Seoul. "This is a significant blow leveled at the market, and will help the government tighten up control...