By Conn Hallinan - Nov.8, 2011
Why is the Obama Administration creating obstacles and
throwing cold water on talks with North Korea, and why is it binding itself to
right-wing South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, whose politics just took a
shellacking in the recent race for mayor
of Seoul?
The answer seems to be a convergence of U.S. concerns over
the growing power of China, a desperate battle by American arms manufacturers
to fend off military budget cuts, and a fantasy by President Lee of a uniting
the Korean Peninsula under the banner of the South.
Consider the following:
The day after Stephen
Bosworth, U.S. special envoy on North Korea, described two days of talks in
Geneva between the Americans and North Koreans as “very positive and generally
constructive,” U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
dismissed the possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough. “I guess the word
skepticism would be in order at this time as to what may or may not happen in
those discussions.”
Panetta was in Seoul as part of a weeklong swing through
Asia firming up U.S. alliances in the region. The Secretary not only blew off
the talks, he threatened the use of atomic
weapons. The U.S. he said “will insure a strong and effective nuclear
umbrella over the ROK [Republic of Korea] so that Pyongyang never misjudges our
will and capacity to respond decisively to nuclear aggression.”
Unless it is raining, President Lee is a dangerous guy to
whom to hand an umbrella. According to the Guardian (UK), a Wiki leak cable from the U.S. Embassy says “Lee’s more conservative
advisors and supporters sees the current standoff as a genuine opportunity to
push and further weaken the North, even if this might involve considerable
brinkmanship.”
According to Peter Lee in the Asia Times, “Lee’s
dream” is of “unifying the entire peninsula and its population of 75 million
under the banner of the democratic, capitalist South in alliance with the
United States, replacing Japan as the primary U.S. security and economic
partner, and confronting China with the prospect of a major pro-western power
on its doorstep while reaching out to the sizable Korean minority in China’s
northeastern provinces.”
While at first glance Lee’s “dream” would seem more
poppy-induced than policy driven, South Korean -U.S. joint maneuvers have war
gamed scenarios that envision a North Korean collapse and a subsequent
intervention by Washington and Seoul. In August of last year, an 11-day drill
involving 56,000 South Koreans and 30,000 Americans—Ulchi Freedom
Guardian— practiced exactly that.
According to the Korea
Times, Gen. Walter Sharp, commander of U.S. forces in Korea, the exercise
was aimed at responding “to various types of internal instability in North
Korea,” which is a rather different mission than the one that Panetta was
talking about during his Seoul visit.
And the North is not the only target in these exercises.
During a visit to Italy in October, Panetta
said, “We’re concerned about China. The most important thing we can do is
to project our force into the Pacific—to have our carriers there, to have
our fleet there, to be able to make very clear to China that we are going to
protect international rights to be able to move across the oceans freely.”
Coincidently, naval forces, with their $5 billion aircraft
carriers, numerous support vessels, submarines, and high tech aircraft are
expensive, big-ticket items that arms companies are fighting to keep in the
military budget.
The month before the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drill, the U.S.
and South Korea carried out a major naval exercise in the Sea of Japan and the
Yellow Sea that included the aircraft carrier George Washington Certainly China
had no
illusions about the objective of the war game. “In history, foreign
invaders repeatedly took the Yellow Sea as an entrance to enter the heartland
of Beijing and Tianjin,” said Maj. Gen. Luo Yuan, deputy secretary general of
the Academy of Military Science. “The drill area is only 500 kilometers away
from Beijing,” adding a metaphor from Mao that seems to lose something in the
translation: “We will never allow others to keep snoring beside our bed.”
It was the second time in less than a year that an American
carrier had taken part in maneuvers in an area China considers a “military
zone.”
Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have
continually put pre-conditions on any negotiations with the north, including
ending Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program and accepting responsibility for the
sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan in September, 2010 that killed 46
sailors.
This past January when Kim
Jong-il said Pyongyang was “ready to meet anyone anytime anywhere,” U.S.
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said that before any talks, North
Korea “needs to demonstrate its sincerity” by getting rid of its nuclear
weapons and admitting to culpability in the Cheonan incident.
A
delegation to North Korea aimed at easing tensions, featuring former
president Jimmy Carter, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, former Irish
president Mary Robinson and ex-Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland,
was ignored by Washington and dismissed by South Korean Foreign minister Kim
Sung-Hwan as a “purely personal” trip.
According to Seoul, the Cheonan was sunk by a North Korean
torpedo, but that conclusion is hardly a slam-dunk. The team of “international
experts” that examined the evidence was handpicked by the South Korean
military, and Russian and Chinese experts who examined the evidence are not
convinced. Indeed, a
poll commissioned by Seoul University’s Institute for Peace and Unification
Studies found that only 32.5 percent of South Koreans were confident in the
findings.
North Korea is hardly going to unilaterally give up its
nuclear weapons while its two major enemies are designing war games to
“stabilize” Pyongyang in the advent of major unrest. The recent NATO bombing of
Libya certainly caught the attention of the North Koreans, who essentially said
that it would never have happened if the Gaddafi regime had not abandoned its
efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Libya is “teaching the international
community a grave lesson” an unnamed Foreign Ministry official told the Korean
Central News, “The truth that one should have power to defend peace.”
South Korean President Lee and the U.S. have put the onus
for current standoff with North Korea on China. “I think China can do more to
try to get North Korea to do the right thing,” argued Panetta, while Lee
said he hoped that “China will continue to play an important role in
denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and leading North Korea to reform and
openness.”
According to the New
York Times, President Obama told Chinese President Hu Jintao that unless
Beijing took a “harder line” toward North Korea, the U.S. would increase its
buildup of military forces in Northeast Asia.
There is no question that Beijing has influence in
Pyongyang—China is North Korea’s main trading partner—but the
theory that the Chinese can simply dictate to the North Koreans is a myth. In
any case, since China is convinced that the U.S. military buildup in Asia is
directed at them, not impoverished North Korea, why would Beijing expend
political capital to aid potential adversaries?
The North Korean regime is an odd duck, with a system of
succession more akin to the 12th century than the 21st, and
a penchant for bombastic rhetoric. But is it a threat to other countries in the
region? By the terms of a 1953 treaty, the U.S. would come to South Korea’s
defense if the North attacked, and the Pyongyang government is well aware of
what would happen to it in a confrontation with the U.S.
If the U.S. is seriously interested in denuclearizing the
Korean Peninsula, it should ratchet down its joint war games with South Korea
and stop threatening to use nuclear weapons on China’s doorstep. The U.S. may
view North Korea’s nukes as destabilizing, but it was not Pyongyang that
introduced nuclear weapons into the region, but the Americans.
The six-party talks, which collapsed in April 2009, may or
may not resolve the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula, but they are the
only game in town. Instead of throwing up roadblocks, and casting its lot with
the increasingly unpopular South Korean president, the Obama administration
should be pressing to reopen the discussions as a way to dampen tensions in the
region and bring the North Koreans to the table.
Read Conn Hallinan at
dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com, and middleempireseries.wordpress.com