North Koreans Watching Fox
This post operates on sanity-preserving ground rules: No referring to: think-pieces, think-tank analyses, journalistic hot takes, outraged or absurd Tweets (other than those thumbed out by POTUS),...
View ArticleThunderclouds Over the Honeymoon: Xi, Kim, and the Trump Summit
Amid the welter of diplomatic moves that have occurred in and around the Korean peninsula in 2018, the two meetings in quick succession between the North Korean leader and China’s...
View ArticleNotes on North Korean Musical Exchanges and Internal Narratives
A lot of people seem to be interested in North Korean cultural diplomacy these days, so the (often peer-reviewed/probably badly flawed/usually enormously fun) work which I have been doing on this issue...
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New Book Reviews: Espionage in Republican China, and Britain’s Role in the...
My two new book reviews engage with the intelligence history of two chaotic decades in China, and the British role in the Korean War, respectively. Review of Panagiotis Dimitrakis, The Secret War for...
View ArticleOn Red Lines and Reunification: Recent Remarks by the CIA Director on North...
[UPDATED on 5 February 2018:] Donald Trump surely makes the North Korean state nervous. But when CIA Director Mike Pompeo actually emerges from his operations bunker in Virginia, he tends to speaks...
View ArticleResources on North Korean Music Diplomacy
One strand of my ongoing academic work as a historian of Northeast Asia concerns music and cultural diplomacy in and by North Korea. My published online work on this topic generally does a few...
View ArticleTrump, Nixon, and Gambling on the Korean Peninsula
This essay fragment was written in December 2016, and has not previously been published. If you’re a gambler, the odds are good that Donald Trump will face a North Korea crisis at some point in his...
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Right of Reply: Kim Jong-un’s Rejoinder to American Threats at the UN General...
I imagine that most people did not expect Kim Jong-un to make a direct statement to President Trump — I certainly didn’t. But the North Korean leader has done so, adding yet another layer of surprise...
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North Korea as Cinematic Enemy: Donald Trump and ‘Olympus has Fallen’
I’m a historian of contemporary Northeast Asia, which means that narratives having to do with the Cold War or with peace and war in the region today interest me, even when they’re awful. In 2013, I...
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Writings and Media Work: July 2017
For whatever reason, July has been a particularly active month in the various cockpits where I do my work — coffee shops, trains rocketing between Leeds and London, my university office, and British...
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Napalm and Invasion: North Korean War Memory and British Sources
In a recent post on his black-and-white personal blog, the North Korea scholar B.R. Myers criticizes a recent ream of journalistic think pieces about the function of Korean War memory in the DPRK. The...
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Reflections on the History of Chinese-North Korean Relations, and US-DPRK...
Sometimes we need to modify the questions we ask. The question “Is the Chinese Communist Party going to cut off North Korea?” results in a fairly predictable string of analyses — usually adding up to...
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Comment on the North Korean Missile Launch
I was on BBC television this evening (via the Leeds studio) discussing the North Korean missile launch with Celia Hatton, who, fortunately for me and the BBC, is a veteran ‘China hand’ with years of...
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North Korean Human Rights: Rex Tillerson as Blank Slate
Will the Trump administration maintain and extend US pressure on North Korea on the human rights front? Will the Executive Branch aim to extend and intensify US criticism of and dialogue with Chinese...
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Pre-emptive strike plans in Korea
In response to a question from a reporter about Operational Plan 5015: In a certain sense, the North Koreans are the victims of their own inflated rhetoric and propaganda about their missile &...
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Bypassing Beijing? North Korean Foreign Relations in April and May
Responding with appropriately prepared shock to the 15 April rocket launch, assessing the crescendo to the big Party Congress in early May in Pyongyang, adding to the noise over the defection of “the...
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Full Comment on the Latest American Detention in Pyongyang
I was interviewed for a story in TIME magazine [full citation: Charlie Campbell, “The Detention of a U.S. Student in North Korea Underscores the Risks of Travelling There,” TIME Asia, 25 January 2016]....
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Preparing for Doomsday, or October 10, in North Korea
North Korean state media has begun to really ramp up the name-calling at South Korea again. In response to South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s complaint that the ROK was not consulted about the...
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Occupying North Korea, Witnessing Massacre? Military Sources and the Question...
The North Korean state claims that US troops arrived in Sinchon, Hwanghae province, on 17 October 1950 and promptly began butchering civilians, culminating in over 35,000 dead by the time of their...
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North Korean Purges and Scuttlebutt
A few days after publishing a 2500-word analysis of the Hyon Yong-chol purge aftermath (an abbreviated version of which was published by the Guardian), I spoke with Steve Miller of the Asia News Weekly...
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