PRESS RELEASE
Report from Korea to EIR
Sept. 7, 2017 (EIRNS)—South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s meeting in Vladivostok with President Putin and other Russian officials presented an extremely promising approach to South Korean-Russian cooperation in the development of the Russian Far East. This emphatically includes in that process the revival of triangular cooperation with North Korea, reviving the effort to connect Russia and China with South Korea by rail through the North, as well as other economic and political means to assure North Korea of both its security and its economic development.
On the danger of war on the Peninsula, the source said that this is considered to be almost totally unreal in South Korea, by all political factions, as it is clear that Kim Jong-un knows that starting a war would be the end of North Korea as a state. He added that it is understood by most political circles that the hysteria around the "North Korea threat" within the U.S. is largely due to the "ulterior motive" of the neocons to envelop China militarily.
He did report that a rumor was being circulated (which he discounts) that on September 9, the date of the founding of North Korea, all the North Korean leaders will be gathered for the event, and that the much-discussed "decapitation" which U.S. and South Korean military forces have practiced in their exercises, could take place on that date. However, he said that he and most people believe that wiser minds in the U.S. would not allow any pre-emptive war on the North.
While the proposed triangular cooperation has strong support from the population in South Korea, a government official in a former administration in South Korea told EIR that the economic policies being adopted by Moon threaten to undermine that "peace through development" approach, as we have reported earlier here. The anti-nuclear policy being implemented by Moon has already shut down the nuclear plants that were under construction, and intends to prevent the renewal of licenses for all other plants when their initial licenses expire.
Also, Moon has appointed Jang Ha-sung as his chief policy advisor. Jang is infamous as an ally of the Wall Street hedge funds, especially Felix Rohatyn (Jang has a doctorate from the Wharton School), who has led the "stock-holder values" campaign to break up the family owned conglomerates (chaebol), which has been the means of forcing corporations to plow profits back to shareholders rather than into expansion, R&D, and similar productive investments. Jang was instrumental in the prosecution and jailing of the head of Samsung, Lee Jae-yong. The source said that this could prove to be a blow to both Samsung and to South Korea, since "the current economy depends to a great extent on Samsung."
