South Korea: The weak link

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Volatility is increasing on the Korean Peninsular whatever Vice President Cheney accomplished in his recent visit to the area. It requires more attention from the Bush Administration, mired down in defending its Iraq policies and amidst an increasingly bitter presidential election campaign.

Having chosen aligning North Korea’s neighbors to halt a go-for-broke nuclear weapons race in East Asia, it now faces some uncomfortable realities. Not the least is the increasing alienation of South Korea from its U.S. alliance.

It has not been a sudden process. Despite close ties to the American media and the Clinton Administration, Washington views of former President Kim Dae Jung’s “sunshine policy” had come a cropper long before he left office. Under the table payments to meet North Koreans, failed private and public sector economic schemes, Pyongyang’s continued archetypical propaganda and infiltration provocations – all indicated how foolish were hopes the 50-year-old ultra-Stalinist regime could be “bought off”. The failure of President Clinton’s “framework” to end North Korea’s weapons program [notwithstanding former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s dance party with Dictator Kim Jong-il] was the culmination.

The Bush Administration [with its famous denunciation of “the axis of evil”] turned its back on this policy. When it looked for alternatives, given the vulnerability of Seoul’s third of South Korea’s population under the barrels of North Korean artillery, and its preoccupation with Islamic terrorism, Bush chose to try to build an alliance by those threatened. It was argued, logically, a nuclear-clad North Korea was not only a threat to Japan [threatened by a missile overflight in 1998], Russia [tenuously holding on to its Siberian territories], to China [which had to see, logic held, it had built a Frankenstein on its doorstep], as well as American interests in East Asia for peace and stability.

Most of all, logic would hold, it was North Korea’s former victim, the South, that had most to lose. But not only did South Korea’s Kim hang on his bankrupt clichés, but he promoted a successor who believed even more fervently in a compromise with the North. Erratic, amateurish, churlish [he made a totem of the fact he had never visited the U.S.], Kim’s successor, President Kim Roh Moo-huyn has compounded his predecessor’s foibles.

In one of history’s bad sociological jokes, Roh and his Taliban advisers [as one of the Korean government professionals called them] have just won a massive electoral victory based on appeals to the new youth culture in South Korea. He pushes even harder for accommodation with the North whatever the price. But unlike his more naïve young followers [unemployed often because they refuse to dirty their hands], there is a cynical but fallacious calculation. Roh shares the view of his Chinese interlocutors, namely the greater threat is the implosion of the economic and intellectually bankrupt North Korea. For China, it would mean greater difficulties in its northeast “rust belt”. Already the amazingly entrepreneurial three million ethnic Koreans there [with some quarter of a million refugees from across the border] have become restless. Beijing recently replaced its People’s Armed Police [increasingly the dumping ground for demobilized People’s Liberation Army “surplus”] there. PLA military had to police a breakdown in the “security organs” which saw North Korean refugees bound into diplomatic cantonments from Shenyang to Chieng Mai and shoot-outs between Chinese police and North Korean military black marketeers.

That’s why the horrendous railway disaster on the North Korean-Chinese border takes on new meaning. If it were, indeed, only a stupid accident as Pyongyang, Seoul, and Washington publicly are insisting, then it is another indication Pyongyang’s lifeline is shredding. None of the several explanations indicate anything less than a virtual collapse of rail traffic management on the most important lifeline bringing in the 80 percent of North Korea’s fuel and food from China. If, on the other hand as there is considerable circumstantial evidence, it was a failed attempt to blow Kim Jong-il right out of his caviar and French sweets into the anonymity of history’s tyrants, it is more evidence how fragile the situation is on the peninsular: Chaos in one of the surviving Communist states with primitive nuclear weapons?

Some of Roh’s advisers have said they fear a North Korean implosion more than they fear a nuclear-armed neighbor. Certainly, they are traumatized by the possibility of inheriting what they fear would be an economic black hole [like the former reunited East Germany ]. They had rather fantasize Kim is moving toward liberalization [by permitting the starving to swap vegetables in local markets] – or that “the China boom” which has made Beijing its No. 1 trading partner is going to rescue their still unreformed economy.

Whatever these pipe dreams, as the U.S. tries to put together an alliance of like-minded to pressure Pyongyang – with the threat of UN sanctions, an embargo, even eventual military action – it now has as a principle obstacle the South Korean leadership.