South Korean President Lee Jae Myung broke from precedent by urging President Trump to ease sanctions on North Korea in an exchange that would put a halt on its weapons programs. Lee told The New York Times in a Friday interview that he sees "significant value" in trading between sanctions and freezing North Korea's development...
Page A2From§Eachthe matinee edition — 22 September 2026
Ally asks Washington twice in one week to ease sanctions on regime bragging about incurable-headache missile
As it ran on the front
It's Tuesday, and this is now the second time this week the ask has landed in print. Start where the receipts start: September 12th, North Korea fires ballistic missiles into the sea, and its government calls the trilateral drill by the U.S., South Korea, and Japan a threat — the shooting is the answer, but the injured party, on paper, is Pyongyang. Since then the same government has put a name on a weapon, the Hwasong-11Ma, and told reporters it gives enemies what it calls an incurable headache. That's the boast sitting in the room every time anyone in Seoul or Washington talks about this regime.
Then the beat that made me pick this back up. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung sat for an interview and asked, on the record, for the United States to ease sanctions on North Korea — his word for the trade was "significant value," relief in exchange for a freeze on the weapons programs. The New York Times ran it on the 21st. The Hill picked it up the following day, the same ask, riding the same missile boast, now filed a second time by a different wire.…
…(cont) Lay it out in order and don't blink. Drill. Missiles. A threat, called that by the government that fired them. A weapon named, boasted about, aimed rhetorically at the people on the other side of that boast. And then the ally closest to it going to two different newsrooms in two days to ask Washington to loosen the sanctions on the government that just made the boast — because the relief itself, in the president's own word, carries "significant value."
Value to who. Not to anybody reading about an incurable headache over coffee. The value sits in whatever gets traded once the missile story rolls off the front page — a freeze here, a concession there, priced out like a commodity. Every time this regime tests something and brags about it, somebody senior in an allied capital treats the brag as an opening bid, not a warning. That's the ask, in print, twice, a day apart. Nobody had to leak it. They put it on the record themselves.
I keep folding this page back up the same way I folded the last one. The weapon doesn't change. The boast doesn't change. What changes is who's being asked to look past it, and how many times a week they're willing to ask.
“They're not asking for peace, they're asking for a price cut on threats — sanctions relief priced like a stock discount while the regime brags about a headache weapon built for the rest of us. Two interviews, one week, same ask: ease up on the outfit that just told you what it built for your skull. That's not diplomacy, that's a negotiation happening over our heads, priced in somebody else's currency.”
“Look, easing sanctions isn't rewarding bad behavior, it's called incentivizing denuclearization — that's just how you get a freeze instead of another test. Sure, the timing looks bad next to the missile boast, but you can't let optics dictate — did I just say optics? That's not spin, that's just how security architecture works, okay?”
Earlier in this story
- South Korea asks Trump to ease sanctions on the regime that just promised it an 'incurable headache' By Lou · the milkman edition, 22 September 2026
The receipts
· North Korea fires ballistic missiles after condemning military drill as threat from the morgue, 12 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.