Can We Dodge the Danger?
By Nicholas Eberstadt, James R. Lilley, Daniel Kennelly, Gordon Cucullu, Victor Davis Hanson

Time For An Amicable Divorce With South Korea

By Daniel Kennelly

 

Last October, the Pentagon announced plans to withdraw about a third of our troops from South Korea, and reposition the rest far away from the border that divides communist North from democratic South. In the heat of eleventh-hour Presidential politics, John Kerry lambasted George W. Bush for sending a message of weakness to North Korea. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. Repositioning and trimming our troops in South Korea is a signal that we are preparing seriously to deal with the danger posed by North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Il.

 

Though Mr. Kerry misunderstood the signal, both Pyongyang and Seoul received it loud and clear. The Korean Central News Agency (the ministry in charge of government doublespeak in Kim Jong Il’s regime) released a statement about the American move that, for once, was mostly true:

 

The U.S. claims that this action is aimed to fill up a vacuum caused by the cutdown of U.S. troops. But this is, in fact, nothing but a reckless measure for putting into practice its scenario for another war....  The massive redeployment of the U.S. troops in and around South Korea is in pursuance of the U.S. war strategy to wage a blitz warfare in Korea through a preemptive attack.

 

South Korea’s reaction to the U.S. announcement was also out of character. The current government in Seoul is the most anti-American in the short history of the Republic of Korea. It is a left-wing administration that has fanned public sentiment against U.S. troops. Yet suddenly this government issued statements making it clear it wanted to keep the U.S. garrison in place more than the Americans themselves did.

 

Was South Korea suffering a spasm of nostalgia for the good old days of the U.S.-ROK alliance? Were they suddenly scared that they would be left defenseless before North Korea’s million-man army? In fact, South Korea got the jitters primarily because it feared the move was an indication that the U.S. might confront the North—“forcefully” if necessary—over its nuclear weapons program. Moving U.S. troops away from the DMZ tripwire, and out of the reach of North Korea’s artillery and tactical missiles, is a sensible move if hostilities might be on the way.

 

For the moment, South Korea’s pacifists and appeasers needn’t worry. Its current status as “host” to our armed forces gives South Korea the diplomatic clout to scuttle any U.S. military moves against the North. But with every U.S. soldier that leaves the peninsula that veto weakens steadily.

 

In the carrots-and-sticks approach we have taken toward North Korea, the sticks are strategic bombers, such as the ones the Pentagon moved to Guam in the weeks before the Iraq war in spring 2003. (More heavy bombers were sent to Guam than were used in the Iraq war itself.) These bombers could quickly be supplemented by U.S. naval power. Any offensive strike against an out-of-control North Korea would thus originate primarily from the air and sea.

 

By contrast, our nearly 37,000 soldiers in South Korea—and the alliance that keeps them there—are purely defensive. The U.S. land force is tiny compared to South Korea’s 600,000 troops, and tinier still compared to the nearly 1.2 million North Korean soldiers on the other side of the demilitarized zone. Yet the presence of these U.S. Army brigades allows the North to hold us hostage, because the North would likely respond to any U.S. air strikes by firing thousands of missiles at our bases in the South. Simply put, therefore, our troop presence in South Korea no longer deters the North. It deters us.

 

Getting the U.S. out of a straitjacket

The U.S. is in a straitjacket in Korea. Two straightjackets, actually, one strategic, and the other diplomatic. The strategic straitjacket comes from Washington’s difficulty in choosing between two mutually incompatible goals: 1) denuclearization of North Korea, and 2) peace in the Far East. Given its irresponsible leadership, a nuclear North poses grave dangers, risks proliferation to terrorists, and presents a likelihood of long-running threats and instability. Yet there is no way to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear program without some risk of war. Both alternatives present terrifying aspects, and the U.S. government is deeply divided over what to do.

 

For the moment, the choice has been made for us. Our current alliance with South Korea—the diplomatic straitjacket—prevents us from acting. South Korea will never let us use our sticks. And our carrots have proven worthless in modifying the North’s behavior. Thus, we are currently stuck with a nuclear-armed North Korea. The Clinton administration tried the carrot approach in 1994 when it negotiated the “Agreed Framework,” a sweetheart deal for the North in which the U.S. promised to deliver hundreds of thousands of tons of fuel oil annually, and to build two 1,000 megawatt light-water nuclear reactors, in exchange for the DPRK freezing its weapons program. In November 2002, we learned that the North had secretly continued work on its nuclear weapons program, so the fuel shipments were halted. The lesson learned from this debacle was that the North Koreans refuse to trade away their nuclear program at any price.

 

Nor do we have any effective stick with which to modify their behavior. The South Koreans refuse to give their consent to any military move. They fight tooth and nail against even the mildest attempts to confront Kim Jong Il. It is their country that would most reap the whirlwind if hostilities broke out. Unfortunately, that has resulted in a pattern of appeasement, which, over the long run, raises the levels of danger progressively higher.

 

South Koreans’ dependence on the U.S. is a problem for them as well as us. After all, if not for the U.S. troops in South Korea, what reason would the North have to retaliate for a U.S. strike on its weapons program by attacking the South?

 

Why, then, do we continue to maintain some 37,000 ground troops in Korea? Bureaucratic inertia at our foreign policy institutions is no doubt one reason. For decades, the alliance was a strong force for stability in East Asia. The security umbrella that America held over South Korea provided a favorable atmosphere for the spread of commerce and democracy throughout the region.

 

But the transformation of East Asia is now an accomplished fact. It is time to shift priorities to an urgent new goal of keeping mega-weapons from proliferating into irresponsible hands. A realignment of our forces and some imaginative diplomacy can help us regain the military options we need as a fallback to make this happen.

 

And we can wriggle out of the straitjacket that currently immobilizes us against North Korea without endangering the South. Given the right mixture of military-to-military communication, dispersed bases, and forward-deployed forces in Japan and elsewhere in the region, America could rapidly come to the aid of South Korea in the event of a general war, without keeping our troops stationed in the shadow of North Korean rockets and artillery.

 

Let South Koreans defend themselves

Besides, the South Koreans are now grown-ups fully capable of taking care of themselves. Immediately after the Korean War, the South was a dirt-poor country facing a northern neighbor that was not only much more powerful militarily, but also richer, thanks to massive subsidies from the Soviet Union.

 

Today the situation is completely different. The Soviet Union is no longer around to hand out subsidies, and China is increasingly inclined to view the North as a distraction from its economic goals. North Korea is now an economic basket case that can’t treat its sick or feed its people. The DPRK military recently had to lower the minimum height of its recruits to 4’10”—one chilling sign of a chronically malnourished population. On pages 4 and 5 of this issue, Norbert Vollertsen describes first-hand today’s gruesome realities of daily life north of the DMZ.

 

South Korea, on the other hand, has grown swiftly by almost every relevant measure over the past half century. Its population is now twice that of the North. Its economy is one of the world’s largest, with a gross domestic product 30 times that of the North. It has the industrial, technological, and demographic basis to field a military that would rip North Korea’s million-man paper tiger to shreds.

 

It’s time to let the South Koreans defend themselves. Then Americans can get back to the critical task of defending our own country in the ways we judge best.

 

 

A Stiff Test for America

By Gordon Cucullu

 

Having been painfully attacked by terrorists, our country has recently pledged to hunt down and eliminate terror groups with global reach, and the countries that support them. North Korea floats naturally to the top of such a list. For years, the despotic regime of Kim Jong Il has supported terrorist operations and sold weapons of mass destruction to other rogue nations hoping to create havoc of their own. It would be entirely in keeping with North Korea’s character to sell weapons of mass destruction to non-governmental terror organizations. Hard cash, not morality or legality, carries the day in Pyongyang.

 

The crisis in North Korea, although now boiling hot, is not new. We’ve been dealing with it in one form or another for more than 55 years. We fought a war to thwart the aggressiveness of Kim Il Sung, where 54,000 Americans sacrificed their lives to keep South Korea free. Now we are coping with the aggression of his son Kim Jong Il.

 

Through these difficult times, America has exercised great restraint in coping with often-hysterical threats from North Korea. Our armed deterrence has worked: War has been averted on the Korean peninsula, and the South has grown economically mighty under our protection, while North Korea has rapidly decayed. North Korea has been reduced to a blustering, threatening bully, incapable of winning a conventional war. Thanks to its secret nuclear program, though, North Korea is now capable of turning Tokyo, and perhaps Los Angeles, into seas of fire.

 

With this new development, why focus on just another stopgap measure against North Korean scheming? Could the United States join with its regional partners to get rid of an atrocious dictator and his nuclear threats once and for all? Lifting the pall of a nuclear war, while liberating the oppressed North Korean people and reuniting the Korean peninsula under a democratic government and free-market economy is a worthy goal. But is it realistic?

 

North Korea’s army: fanged or toothless?

As North Korea’s economy and society have grown weak, so have its military capabilities. While the country still fields one of the world’s largest armies, its systems are decrepit, its tactics outmoded, and the motivation of the troops suspect. Two weeks of war would probably just about deplete North Korea’s military strength.

 

North Korea was much more formidable when it was supplied and backed up by two giant neighbors—the Soviet and Chinese armies. North Korea has added many short- and medium-range missiles to its bag of tricks, but their accuracy and payload capability are questionable, so these may be thought of more as terror weapons than as precise military tools. The only impressive trick left in North Korea’s bag is the nuclear threat.

 

In all other military systems, the North lags far behind the South. Even though the North spends a large percentage of its national output on defense, while the South spends less than 6 percent of GNP, the difference in available funding is staggering, due to South Korea’s economic bloom.

 

It is clear that North Korea could not prevail over South Korea in a straight battle, even if the latter fought alone. With the United States standing at its shoulder (adding not only force of arms but also strength of will to the often-vacillating South Korean political leadership), a North Korean victory is out of the question. If it were not for the unfortunate fact that Seoul stands only 20 miles from the North Korean border, defending against Northern aggression would not be a major issue. But as it stands, North Korea could inflict enough damage on the capital city (and the American and foreign community residing there) to make even a conventional battle costly.

 

If nuclear weapons were used, the devastation from a North Korean assault would be horrific. But such a scenario implies a North Korea willing to do something not even Imperial Japan was willing to do in World War II: commit national suicide. South Korea’s army of approximately 600,000 is well trained, excellently armed, and capable. Its air force is equipped with modern U.S. planes. Even without U.S. help, South Korean units are fully capable of crushing an attack from the North.

 

But while the courage and competence of the South Korean military is beyond question, the strength and nerve of South Korea’s politicians and public are quite another matter. Kim Dae-jung’s ballyhooed “Sunshine Policy” of detente with the North was all hogwash. Investigations disclosed that Hyundai and other major South Korean conglomerates paid massive bribes to the North Koreans as part of its execution, and that Kim Dae-jung was completely aware of what was happening. Kim remained a covert partner of North Korea even after he learned, toward the end of his five-year term, that the North was secretly enriching uranium for nuclear weapons. Even after the scandal was revealed, and his peace effort with the North exposed as a fraud, Kim continued to pressure Washington to be “reasonable” with North Korea, in the hope of protecting his personal reputation, regardless of the cost to his country and to the rest of the world.

 

Because of the South’s craven politics, Kim Jong Il in the North has been under little pressure to reform or abide by his nuclear weapons agreements. When caught red-handed violating their promises, the North Koreans admitted their transgressions but refused to apologize. Instead, they adopted bullying tactics. This embarrassed and confused the South Korean public.

 

As a result, South Korean politicians have moved toward a bizarre neutral stance that presumes to mediate between Pyongyang and Washington, declaring that both sides must make “concessions.” The North Koreans have thus made progress toward their longstanding objective of splitting South Korea from the U.S. To their shame, many South Koreans have responded positively to blatant North Korean appeals to “Han” ethnic chauvinism.

 

The South Korean public needs to be made aware of the consequences of their surrender. With American help, South Koreans have worked exceedingly hard and long to earn their independence and prosperity. It is their families and their country that will suffer most from a misstep now.

 

China’s headache

China is North Korea’s only remaining friend. Increasingly, that friendship brings nothing but irritants to China’s international development goals. If conflict flared, China would likely stand neutral, positioning troops along its border with North Korea to keep refugees out and be able to jump in to protect its interests. But it would never encourage or support war.

 

China is in a period of transition. Decades of relative prosperity are bringing slow political reform. China has become a nation that values economic growth and seeks a harmonious and stable relationship with its neighbors. An aggressive North Korea is a hindrance to China’s economic goals.

 

Ties between China and South Korea have never been tighter. A reunited Korea under the kind of leadership that South Korea has exhibited for more than a decade would not worry China. An independent Korea (with no love for the Japanese) could even serve as a buffer between ancient adversaries China and Japan. And Korean unification would accelerate industrial development in the now dirt-poor region of China that borders North Korea. From a purely economic viewpoint, there are no benefits to propping up the Kim Jong Il regime.

 

Economic reasons alone, however, may not be enough to persuade the Chinese to dump North Korea into the historical ashcan it so richly deserves. What may end up convincing China is the possibility of a nuclear Japan. If Japan felt so pressured by North Korea as to develop nuclear weapons itself, this would be a catastrophe in Chinese eyes. Japan would instantly jump up in regional influence.

 

Another geopolitical benefit to China of a peaceful Korea is that the number of U.S. troops in the area—currently 37,000 in South Korea and 40,000 in Japan—would be significantly reduced, probably to close to zero in Korea. A majority of the troops in Japan would also be drawn down, reflecting reduced regional dangers. For China, this could only be good news.

 

By far the gravest risk to China of a miscalculation in North Korea is the specter of millions—perhaps even double-digit millions—of Koreans fleeing across their border to escape a collapsing Kim Jong Il regime. There is no place else for North Korean refugees go but north. The southern border is stacked with soldiers and minefields, and oceans lie to the east and west, with very few boats available.

 

It is not merely the numbers of refugees that scares the Chinese government, but their abject poverty. The poor souls who flee North Korea are already at the edge of starvation, wracked by serious illness, and desperate enough to do whatever is necessary to keep themselves and their families alive. The potential for prostitution, slavery, and crime is high. Avoiding a refugee crisis is therefore one key to unlocking the North Korean conundrum.

 

There is a model here we could learn from. Thailand went through a similar but smaller crisis following the fall of Vietnam and the takeover by the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. Refugees of all kinds fled west into Thailand to escape the insane violence of the communist killing fields. The solution that worked in Thailand was a string of tightly supervised and controlled U.N. camps. Establishment of a similar safety zone where abused North Koreans could recover their mental and physical health, and participate in educational and job training programs to bring them into the twenty-first century, would allow the dictatorship of Kim Jong Il to collapse without creating a humanitarian and political crisis.

 

Establishing open sanctuaries in China would cause many North Koreans to vote with their feet. The huge resulting outflow of people would perhaps be enough to generate the overthrow of Kim Jong Il. But such a plan would require massive preparation, much like a war plan in complexity and thoroughness—except the purpose of this plan would be to prevent war.

Is China up for this level of responsibility? Many observers say no. This could be a test of China’s new strength and maturity as an international power.

 

The North runs out of options

The burning question, of course, is “Why would Kim Jong Il sit by quietly and let himself be pushed aside?” Yet the reality is that he is running out of options. Certainly, he holds the nuclear option. But that is akin to holding a huge revolver to one’s head and threatening to squeeze the trigger. As even Bill Clinton recognized, if Kim uses nuclear weapons, he and his country are both dead.

One of the biggest concerns has to be Kim Jong Il’s personal lack of sophistication. Can logic penetrate the delusional mind of Kim Jong Il? We know he sees the world through a warped lens of his own manufacture. He may really believe he is as strong as he says, that America is a soft and decadent country, that South Korea can be bribed or bluffed into submission. Are there actions that might help him see more clearly?

 

The history of negotiations with dictators—whether Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, or Kim Jong Il—teaches that a carrot without a stick is useless. Or worse, since a perceived unwillingness to use force encourages these lunatics to greater excess and aggression. So military action must remain one option. An open military option generally strengthens diplomacy, by keeping both sides focused on the imperative of agreement.

 

Yet there are times when a rogue state is so caught up in its own propaganda and inflated glory that even a military threat cannot bring it to rational discussion. The North Koreans will use what has worked in the past as a model for what they think they can win in the future. And, unfortunately, America’s history in recent decades may be harmful to negotiations. Our post-Vietnam reluctance to use military force—demonstrated in Somalia and many other places over a period of years—sent a message of appeasement and peace at any price to opponents around the world.

 

On the other hand, the U.S. victories in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate that the United States cannot be assumed to be a paper tiger. One hopes the North Koreans will recognize that, from this point forward, many Americans will reject blackmail, bribery, and appeasement. It would take only a few moments to transform North Korea’s “Dear Leader” to “Dead Leader.”

 

Why the neighbors must be present

When former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung effectively took the military option off the table in the last set of North-South negotiations, the North Koreans were able to steer negotiations quite comfortably. Not only that, but they got paid for it. Bribery investigations later showed that North Koreans were paid hundreds of millions of dollars just to show up at the conference table. The North Korean leadership probably thinks it can repeat this performance in today’s nuclear brinksmanship. Continued vacillation by the South Korean government is one of the primary reasons the United States wants negotiations that include the Japanese and other neighbors, and not just South Korea alone.

 

What critics of today’s U.S. position may not understand is that North Korea’s current goal is not to negotiate with the United States but to divide it from its allies. This is exactly what the North Koreans achieved in their talks with the Clinton administration: divide and conquer.

 

There are other reasons to maintain the current policy of multination talks. One is that one-on-one talks begin in a confrontational, win-lose format. The North Koreans come to the table in a highly defensive posture, programmed to mistrust and dispute any U.S. effort. They feel free to promise anything, and then to lie, cheat, and obfuscate to evade their commitments to their sworn enemy. On the other hand, a group conference that includes China, Japan, South Korea, and perhaps Russia will diffuse the confrontational aspects of a U.S.-N.K. negotiation.

 

China, Japan, and the United States are now the linchpins of the world economy. Given time, a reunified Korea would add an additional spur to global prosperity. It would be a blessing to all people if the region could focus on economic development with only minimal resources diverted to national security. For this reason, all local parties have incentives to unite for regime change in North Korea.

 

The United States will need to take the lead. A willingness to be strong and patient in the face of a dictator will be essential. Fortunately America has the leadership in place to handle such a moment. And Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate that America’s post-Vietnam phase of international vacillation is over. With some luck and determination, one more long-awaited moment of liberation lies on the horizon.

 

 

A Real and Present Danger

By Nicholas Eberstadt

 

North Korea is a state unlike any other on the face of the earth today. It is a political construct specially built for three entwined purposes: to conduct a war, to settle a historical grievance, and to fulfill a grand ideological vision. That vision is the reunification of the now-divided Korean peninsula under the unfettered rule of Pyongyang. The aim is unconditional annexation of South Korea, and liquidation of its government, so that Kim Jong Il might exercise total command over all Koreans.

 

If that vision seems preposterous to us, we must understand that the view from Pyongyang is very different. For more than half a century, North Korean statecraft has been predicated on a takeover of the South. The only “government mission” from Seoul to which Pyongyang grants diplomatic status is the so-called South Korean National Democratic Front, an invented resistance group supposedly based in the South, which regularly uses North Korean airwaves to denounce the Republic of Korea as an illegitimate colonial police state.

 

North Korea’s root grievance is the failure of the famous June 1950 surprise attack against South Korea—an assault that might well have unified all Korea on Pyongyang’s terms if not for America’s unexpected military intervention in defense of the Republic of Korea. The total-mobilization war state that Pyongyang has erected in the decades since (at painful cost in human regimentation, economic failure, and famine) is a response to this grievance, and an instrument for fulfilling this vision.

 

The war for which North Korea has prepared is not some theoretical contingency—in the view of North Korean leaders, their country is at war today, here and now. The battles of the Korean War were halted only through a cease-fire agreement in 1953; there has never been a peace treaty or formal end to the hostilities. From Pyongyang’s standpoint, the Korean War is ongoing—and North Korea’s leadership is committed to an unconditional victory, however long that may take, however much that may cost. The neutralization of the United States and removal of the U.S. alliance system in Korea is essential from Pyongyang’s perspective.

 

Against all odds, North Korea’s leadership still attempts to support a vast conventional military force via a dysfunctional and failing Soviet-style economy. This old-fashioned force cannot hope to prevail over the highly skilled, high-tech forces of the ROK-U.S. alliance that waits on the other side of the DMZ. To trump the United States, therefore, North Korea must acquire nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles capable of delivering them into the heart of the American enemy. This central strategic fact explains why North Korea has assiduously pursued its nuclear and missile development programs for more than 30 years—at terrible expense to its people’s livelihood, and despite all adverse repercussions in its international relations.

 

North Korea’s announcement this past February that it has nuclear weapons and intends to hold on to them “under any circumstances”—indeed that it intends to add weapons to its inventory—were greeted with shock around the world. This ought not to have been a surprise. The North Korean government did not join the world’s nuclear club suddenly, on a whim. This was the predictable culmination of decades of steady, deliberate effort in a multifaceted program for building weapons of mass destruction—not only nuclear weapons but also chemical and biological munitions and ballistic missiles.

 

Thanks largely to its short-range SCUD-style missiles and bio-chemical weapons, Pyongyang can always remind counterparts in South Korea that the enormous metropolis of Seoul is a hostage to fate, to be destroyed in a moment on Kim Jong Il’s word. Intermediate “Nodong” missiles capable of striking Japan (and American bases there) with nuclear warheads likewise put Japan’s political leaders on permanent warning of the possible costs of incurring North Korea’s anger, and the potential dangers of siding with the United States in any time of peninsular crisis. Finally, long-range missiles of the improved “Taepodong” variety could reach the U.S. in the near future—possibly already.

 

A failure to respond

Yet after more than four years in office, the Bush administration still seems to lack an effective strategy for dealing with North Korea. Thus far, it has merely confronted Pyongyang with an attitude. And the problem continues to grow worse. In the two-plus years since U.S. officials confronted North Korean counterparts over their illicit effort to enrich uranium to weapons grade, a worrisome dynamic has emerged. Pyongyang has quit the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. It has discarded all previous restrictions on its nuclear development programs. It has forcefully pushed ahead on reprocessing plutonium from its Yongbyon reactor fuel rods, and publicly declared it has “weaponized” those materials.

 

How have the U.S. and its allies neighboring Korea responded? With six-party talks that merely resulted in calls for further rounds of talk. This reactive American approach may be leading Pyongyang to conclude that it can deter and manipulate the U.S. with nuclear threats. Faced with a risk of atomic attack on the U.S. mainland, the question now arises: Might Washington hesitate amidst a crisis on the Korean peninsula? If so, America’s security commitment to South Korea would be critically undermined.

 

To date, the United States, its Asian allies, and the rest of the world community have demonstrated to Kim Jong Il that

he need fear no appreciable penalties for creating an atomic arsenal of his own. Consider the diplomatic ledger since October 2002. When the U.S. confronted North Korea with evidence of secret uranium enrichment, Pyongyang ignored the charge. The United States didn’t even acknowledge the incident publicly until reporters were set to break the story. Two and a half months later (and only after overcoming considerable resistance from South Korea), the U.S. finally arranged a cutoff of free oil shipments to North Korea—a penalty that deprived Pyongyang of a grand total of one tenth of its annual foreign aid.

 

In December 2002, purportedly in response to the free-oil cutoff, North Korea announced it would expel the inspectors at its Yongbyon nuclear facility and disable the “safeguards” for keeping watch over the facility’s plutonium. The Bush administration made some initial noises about taking the issue to the U.N. Security Council, but it eventually dropped the idea.

 

In January 2003, Pyongyang served notice of its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty represented North Korea’s last remaining legal commitment to refrain from developing nuclear weapons. The following month, it declared it had reactivated its Yongbyon reactor. The international reaction? Washington and the E.U. announced additional food shipments to the dictatorship.

 

In April 2003, North Korean officials privately warned the U.S. that Pyongyang already possessed nuclear weapons. They threatened test blasts, or international exports of their weapons, unless the United States provided a major package of benefits and concessions. How did the United States respond to this nuclear blackmail? By pressing for more conferencing: the six-party talks, at which South Korea, Japan, and Russia could join Washington, Pyongyang, and Beijing for further talk. Beijing and Moscow paid Pyongyang to merely show up.

 

Around the same time, Chung-in Moon, a senior security adviser to the current South Korean government, reported that he had met with North Korean officials and had spelled out for them certain “red lines” they must not cross. Those included “reprocessing nuclear fuel” and “selling plutonium abroad.” Within the month, the North Korean press announced that Pyongyang had begun reprocessing the plutonium from 8,000 spent fuel rods at Yongbyon. There were hints about developing a “war deterrent.” Seoul’s official response to this indisputable challenge? A series of timid mutterings. Several months later, South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun finally reacted in concrete terms—with a promise of massive new aid if only Pyongyang would give up its weapons program.

 

Until last year, many Western observers and policymakers seemed to feel that international trafficking in nuclear materials was the one red line North Korea would not dare violate. Now it appears that that line has also been crossed. The U.S. government has announced that North Korea provided Pakistan and perhaps even Libya with processed uranium after 9/11—possibly as recently as 2003.

 

As the alarming intelligence about the Libyan-North Korean connection percolated through Seoul, the South Korean government responded with a new outpouring of concessions and blandishments for the North Korean regime. Just this spring, Seoul formally de-listed North Korea as the “main enemy” against which its military forces were poised. Measures were taken to discourage North Korean refugees from fleeing south.

 

A change of course needed

“We don’t have any red lines” for dealing with North Korea, declared Colin Powell on camera in October 2004. His message was intended to be reassuring, but is in fact chilling. Far from deferring or mitigating the peril of conflict, such Western fecklessness toward North Korea only magnifies the scale of the expected disaster. For more than a decade, a combination of talk and bribery has been tried to no effect. We all know how the Clinton administration’s mid-1990s attempts to buy cooperation turned out: Pyongyang took the money and plowed it into new covert nuclear programs. The Bush administration’s passive-aggressive approach has hardly generated better results.

 

Some dramatically new policies toward North Korea are now called for. Success will, at a minimum, require the following: Define “success” and “failure” for North Korea negotiations. Washington needs to spell out clearly and in advance the outcomes that will constitute success in the multination talks, and those that will amount to failure. The administration must not be shy about declaring the process a failure if in fact it is. Rewarding Pyongyang for simply showing up at the talks should not count as a good result.

 

Increase China’s involvement. So far, Beijing has hedged on both sides of the North Korean crisis—sometimes acting as part of the solution, other times directly contributing to the problem. Washington has been far too complacent about China’s unprincipled ambiguity. If Pyongyang becomes a full-fledged nuclear power, dangers lie in store for Beijing. We should oblige China to face this, and expect more forceful and consistent Chinese pressure on Kim Jong Il.

 

Work around the pro-appeasement crowd in the South Korean government. U.S. policy on the North Korean crisis suffered a serious setback with the December 2002 South Korean presidential election—which allowed a coterie of leftist academics and activists to assume great influence over their government’s security policies. The core of this new government has proven implacably anti-American and reflexively in favor of appeasing Pyongyang.

 

For all intents and purposes, South Korea is now a runaway ally. It borders a state committed to its destruction, yet is increasingly governed in accordance with graduate-school “peace studies” desiderata—all the while relying on American troops to guarantee its safety in the face of such foolishness. Public opinion in South Korea is deeply—and quite evenly—divided on North Korea. Instead of bowing to South Korea’s appeasers, America should be speaking over their heads directly to the Korean people, building and nurturing the coalitions in South Korean domestic politics that will ultimately bring a prodigal ally back to its senses.

 

Be ready for extra-diplomatic action. Diplomacy may well fail in North Korea—in which case hard-line sanctions and military options must be ready. Such preparations will actually increase the probability of diplomatic success. If the threat to America from North Korea hasn’t been reduced four years from now, that will count as one of the most serious failures of the Bush administration.

 

No Easy Choices

By Victor Davis Hanson

 

The North Korean crisis offers only bad and worse choices for the United States. Kim Jong Il cultivates an air of lunacy, and threatens to nuke the Western critics who are more concerned with the plight of his North Korean people than he is.

 

Poor Japan is squeezed between nuclear China and North Korea. As a prosperous democracy that stays true to its nonproliferation pledges, its rewards are overflights of test missiles launched from a rogue state, coupled with the periodic venom of a bullying China.

 

Who can figure out the Chinese sphinx? Will it pressure its erstwhile Stalinist patron to calm down, in fear of antagonizing the United States and imperiling its own $300 billion trade surplus? More likely the ascendant Chinese are amused by the sheer blood sport of seeing their crazed vassal tie an exasperated America in knots. Is North Korea really out of control, and thus a threat to the breakneck development of China, or is it a useful surrogate to remind the Japanese and South Koreans who really holds the leash of this rabid dog?

 

South Korea suffers increasingly the postmodern maladies of the affluent—and cynical—West. Its citizens want pan-Korean solidarity, but not to the point of losing the one-sided benefits of their American alliance. University students demonstrate for Americans to get out of Seoul. But they don’t really want us to leave the Demilitarized Zone.

 

We are supposed to stay on the DMZ and endure the increasingly cheap and bothersome anti-Americanism of the “friends” we protect. We could leave in a huff, but we might then watch a successful democracy be blackmailed or shelled, sacrificing a half-century of achievement that cost billions of dollars and thousands of American lives. The more cynical might suggest that an ambivalent South Korea is hoping to finesse nuclear status on the cheap should its hoped-for unification with the North transpire.

 

So what is America to do? Bill Clinton, with help from the peripatetic Jimmy Carter, paid out billions in fuel and grain bribes—and the North developed nukes anyway. George W. Bush, slandered as the near-criminal unilateralist, seems to be about the only statesman now pushing for multilateral talks among all the concerned parties. If Mr. Bush was too alone in Iraq, his liberal critics now apparently think he’s not alone enough in talking to Kim Jong Il.

 

Other than retreating to Fortress America, there are three possible courses of action in the face of North Korea’s dangerous mix of crazed autocracy and the bomb. One choice is to accept the status quo: We could remain reactive, seeking to moderate rather than alter events. We would cease all bribery aimed at heading off further nuclear weapon development, and hope that China might soothe Pyongyang enough to buy us some time.

 

But time for what? For things inside North Korea to get so bad that the regime simply collapses? Time to finish our anti-ballistic-missile system that protects Seoul, Tokyo, and the West Coast? How many millions more would die before Kim Jong Il vanishes? Could the region live in the meantime with a nuclear North Korea actively testing nukes and issuing creepy threats?

 

A more muscular policy would prod China harder. It would remind Beijing that it broke the unspoken postwar covenant of the region. Each nuclear power—the Soviet Union, China, the U.S.—was supposed to rein in its respective surrogates. That means China keeps North Korea from nuclear weapons that could harm the Westernized world, while the United States makes sure China will not have to deal with a nearby nuclear Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.

 

A sober China should not want three more nuclear powers on its border, in addition to Pakistan, India, Russia, as well as the U.S. But China might call our bluff on unleashing our surrogates in the region. That could lead to an Asian rim armed to the teeth with nukes and other weapons.

 

The third, and most frightening, alternative is a blockade, followed later by a preemptive strike, once North Korea begins to test its nuclear-tipped missiles. We could end Kim Jong Il’s regime and free the North Korean populace. But it’s possible that thousands of Americans and millions of Koreans and Japanese would die in the struggle, or at least that Seoul might be left in rubble as the price of its freedom.

 

There are no good choices now—just the hard lesson not to allow a maniacal regime to acquire nuclear weapons in the first place. We may think North Koreans are crazy. But observers like the Iranians, for example, must be thinking they were crazy smart.

 

TAE contributing writer Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

 

Don’t Count on China or South Korea

By James Lilley

 

China’s involvement in Korea goes back at least 3,000 years. The Koguryo Dynasty, which stretched from the first to the seventh century A.D., was based in present-day North Korea and stretched deep into Manchuria. Koreans, therefore, argue that part of Manchuria historically belongs to Korea. The Chinese, on the other hand, argue that Koguryo was a peripheral part of China, hence North Korea is really part of China.

 

At the end of the sixteenth century, Japan was driven from Korea with some help from China. Three hundred years later, in 1910, Japan defeated China and seized Korea. The Japanese lost this dominance over Korea after World War II, when the peninsula was divided between a Chinese-controlled North and a U.S.-leaning South.

 

In 1950, China intervened militarily to save North Korea and prevent the emergence on its borders of a unified Korea allied to the United States. China maintained troops in North Korea until 1957 and provided massive military aid. The policy of full Chinese support for North Korea lasted until the late 1980s. Then, as China witnessed the rise of South Korea, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the deterioration of North Korea, it saw an opportunity to shift its policy and begin to influence South Korea, the probable winner of the peninsular competition. Over North Korean protests, China joined the Olympics in Seoul in 1988, and formally recognized South Korea in 1992. At the same time, it deftly managed the entry of both Koreas into the United Nations despite North Korea’s initial objections.

 

China now seeks to increase its influence on the Korean peninsula and gradually reduce the U.S. military presence there. But North Korea’s adventurism with weapons of mass destruction adds a volatile element. China depends on America as an important commercial partner, while also facing the U.S. as a strategic competitor over issues like Taiwan. China sees North Korea as a buffer, and as a useful distraction that keeps U.S. military power preoccupied.

 

These shifts in China’s position are magnified by major changes in South Korea’s approach to North Korea. Under president Kim Dae-jung, South Korea made renewed efforts to reconcile with the North. This culminated in the North-South summit of June 2000, which resulted in accelerated contacts and a series of ambitious development projects, most of which remain unfulfilled due to North Korea’s unpredictable behavior and inordinate demands.

 

 The South Koreans see reunification as a national issue. Their blood brothers in the North are failing economically, starving, and suffering. Yet they remain proud and defiant, demanding respect, dignity, and sovereignty—very Korean traits. South Korean leaders believe that connecting roads and railroads, expanding tourism, setting up industrial zones, and carrying out cultural and sports exchanges will bring the North into the modern world. This in turn would create conditions for a gradual peaceful reunification. So North Korea’s erratic and menacing behavior has been tolerated and excused by the South.

 

Both the North and the South share a suspicion of foreigners. The last thousand years of their common history have been scarred by colonization, war, invasion, and pillage by more powerful neighbors. Thus South Korea, like China, objects to even the threat of a U.S. preemptive strike against North Korean nuclear weapons.

 

The South Koreans understand that a strong U.S. military presence in their region is necessary as a credible deterrent. They also welcome the economic stability created by the American umbrella. They share the U.S. objective of North Korean reform, but they care less than we do about monitoring it.

 

Both the Chinese and the South Koreans want to manage North Korea their way, not ours. Our expectations for their help in any collective talks aimed at influencing North Korea, therefore, must remain modest.

 

AEI senior fellow James Lilley has served as U.S. ambassador to both China and South Korea.