Tag: South Korea

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Trump Administration Orders Pride Flag Taken Down From Embassy

(image via US Embassy in South Korea/Instagram)
The Trump administration has ordered the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, South Korea, to remove a rainbow flag hung in support of LGBTQ Pride Month. The instructions to remove the Pride Flag reportedly came from the offices of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has a long history of anti-LGBTQ positions. The embassy in South Korea was also ordered to take down a banner in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. CNN reports the two banners hung from the embassy building’s facade were originally placed there thanks to Ambassador Harry Harris. The Twitter account for the U.S. Embassy in Seoul proudly shared photos of the Pride flag and Black Lives Matter banner prior to their removal. https://twitter.com/USEmbassySeoul/status/1267243731565948928 https://twitter.com/USEmbassySeoul/status/1271745253863649280 The State Department cited the Black Lives Matter movement’s status as a non-profit organization as the reason for removing the BLM banner because “the US government does not encourage contributions to the group or promote any specific organization.” But no reason was given for removing the Pride flag. According to CNN, the Pride flag was removed on Monday just hours before the landmark ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court which affirmed federal protections for LGBTQ Americans in the workplace. You may recall the Trump administration rejected requests from U.S. embassies to fly Pride flags from embassy flag poles last year. At the time, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said Pompeo had no issue with rainbow flags being flown as long as it wasn’t from the embassy flagpoles. “Secretary has the position that, as it relates to the flagpole, that only the American flag should be flown there,” said Ortagus. The embassy in Seoul worked around the denial in 2019 by hanging the flag on the outside of the building, but clearly, that approach didn’t fly this year. Contrast all this with the Obama years when the government granted blanket permission to fly rainbow flags during June in honor of LGBTQ Pride Month. Additionally, President Obama issued presidential proclamations recognizing June as Pride Month all eight years of his administration. (source: CNN, NBC News)

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Trump: “There’s A Substantial Chance” North Korea Summit Won’t Work Out

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Donald Trump

The New York Times is reporting Donald Trump’s much-ballyhooed summit meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-Un, may not take place as scheduled.

“There’s a very substantial chance that it won’t work out,” Mr. Trump told reporters before a meeting in the Oval Office with South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in. “It may not work out for June 12.”

Mr. Trump expressed continued enthusiasm for the diplomatic encounter, saying he believed it could usher in a period of prosperity for North Korea. But he acknowledged that recent statements by North Korea had cast a pall of uncertainty over the timing of the meeting, which is set for Singapore. He appeared as baffled as anyone else about what might come next.

“We’re moving along. We’ll see what happens,” Mr. Trump said. “There are certain conditions we want to happen. I think we’ll get those conditions. And if we don’t, we won’t have the meeting.

“If it doesn’t happen, maybe it will happen later,” he added. “Maybe it will happen at a different time. We will see. We are talking.”

According to Vox, a big part of the problem is South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

Moon is a leftist who took office in May of last year, back when Trump was threatening war with North Korea. He made a deep and concerted effort to try to broker negotiations between Trump and Kim to defuse the tension, and part of his strategy was making grandiose promises about what talks could accomplish — even floating the possibility that Trump could win a Nobel Prize to entice him to the table.

The problem, as Kelly points out, is that this was always a kind of shell game: Moon could never change the fact that the US and North Korea want fundamentally different things. Basically, he argues, this was a gambit to try to convince Trump not to go to war with North Korea — one that may yet fail.

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North Korea Threatens To Cancel Summit Over U.S./South Korea Air Force Drills

North Korea has suspended talks with South Korea and declared that next month’s summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Trump could be cancelled over upcoming joint Air Force drills taking place in South Korea with the U.S. Air Force.

North Korea has always expressed displeasure at the annual joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises. But apparently, with the U.S. summit so close on the calendar, North Korea must have had different expectations this year.

From The Washington Post:

The South Korean and U.S. militaries had scaled back and played down the exercises, declining the news media the usual access to the drills. North Korea barely said a word about the drills during the computer simulation exercises that took place through April.

The two-week-long Max Thunder drills between the two countries’ Air Forces, an annual event that began on Friday, have, however, clearly struck a nerve in North Korea.

“This exercise targeting us, which is being carried out across South Korea, is a flagrant challenge to the Panmunjom Declaration and an intentional military provocation running counter to the positive political development on the Korean Peninsula,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency said in a report published early.

The Max Thunder exercise involves about 100 warplanes, including eight F-22 radar-evading fighters and an unspecified number of B-52 bombers and F-15K jets, according to the South’s main Yonhap News Agency. During last year’s Max Thunder exercises, U.S. and South Korean fighter jets flew an average 60 sorties a day to showcase their firepower.