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Nowhere has Bush II’s attempt to redefine American strategy from a muddled Clinton inheritance been more difficult than in Korea. When Sec. State Colin Powell faces Pyongyang’s Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun at the ASEAN summit in Hanoi on his current East Asian round, he will be tested even more than in his recent lacklustre Mideast encounter. As has so often been the case, the right handle on an extremely complex Korean situation could be key to larger East Asian stability and peace.
In a sense, Washington is hostage to the success of a half-century of Washington
policy — despite horrendous and costly U.S. mistakes. Nowhere have Americans achieved more in the postWWII period — based, of course, on the unequaled drive of a talented people. South Korea’s 50 million people live in a viable, thriving, modern, industrialized society with representative government and its own rich inherited tradition, unthinkable only a few short decades ago. It has every prospect of establishing a reunited Korea as one of the world’s leading nations.
But all of this is poised on the razor’s edge. A failed totalitarian society — only those few of us who have visited there can appreciate the North Korean regime’s depravity — is in its last stages in Pyongyang. But just as East Germany might have launched a devastating blow against the West in the final hours of that monstrous regime’s existence, so North Korea is unpredictable. In a final chaotic struggle, its military potential could wreak havoc — Seoul’s 12 million people lie, literally, under North Korea’s guns, hostage as may be our debilitated “tripwire” U.S. expeditionary force, still there almost a half century after the Korean War.
While the South has been producing prosperity for its people, North Korea has produced that 20th century grotesquerie of civilian impoverishment but murderous military technology. Only days ago while the world got a peek at a North Korean family’s dramatic escape from starvation [ironically to neighboring northeast China], Pyongyang’s leaders tested a new long-range missile engine. It is a testimony to Washington’s confusion that while the North Korean family’s saga largely escaped notice of the American media, Dep. Sec. of State Richard Armitage told reporters North Korea had not violated its self-proclaimed moratorium on testing missiles until 2003.
Initially Pres. Bush’s common sense approach was to question the bonafides of a regime that has violated every civilized norm. The Clinton Administration had tried to square the circle of expanding U.S. commitments, insufficient resource allocations, and an inherent incapacity for civilian direction of the military [because of the President’s persona]. As part of that program, a series of questionable agreements with North Korea were intended to halt its missile and nuclear technology development, and their proliferation to other conflict areas — and to seduce North Korea’s new leadership into joining the post-Communist world.
It is true that Clinton was supported, enthusiastically in the case of South Korea’s Pres. Kim Dae Jung, and more warily by the Japanese, as primary participants in the East Asian relationship. Beijing, anxious to have South Korean economic collaboration but to maintain its supposed special relationship with North Korea — and to regain its traditional role as Korea’s suzerain — signed on as an ostensible guarantor. But it is not clear that Pyongyang is doing more than using negotiations to get through what it hopes is a temporary economic catastrophe. Little in the agreements permits Ronald Reagan’s old formula: trust and verify.
Adding to the confusion is Pres. Kim’s inconsistencies. Those of us who have
known him through the years are not surprised. His sometimes-heroic struggle for leadership, his incredibly successful wooing of [especially the U.S.] media, his promises to give South Korea the next step up toward good government, all have come a cropper. His oldstyle wardhealing politics and his failure to grapple with the post-Asian Financial Crisis economic issues, have been mirrored in his opportunist efforts in international affairs. He [and some other Korean Machiavellians] seems to think that it is 1900, that Korea can play a game among the major powers to guarantee its independence and progress. [To believe the EU has a role in Korea is really to believe in the tooth fairy!] But such a policy could well bring on another disaster like that which put Korea under a bitter Japanese occupation for a half century by further muddling U.S. policy which must, inevitably, seek intimate collaboration with Seoul — and even its inspired tutelage as the longtime ally who knows whereof he speaks.
More than ever, U.S. policy on the Korean peninsula must be like good kim chee, that wonderful, potent, but odiferous and bittingly spicey Korean condiment: it needs some time to ferment, it needs the pepper of military resolve and strategy, and a garlicly standoffishness is a healthy smell if it keeps the worms away.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.