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Sol Sanders Archive
Monday, February 23, 2009

Hillary's soft power meets hard Northeast Asian realities

Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.

Hillary Clinton sounded almost like George W. Bush on her way into the critical first meeting with Chinese leaders. The question, as far as the region's number one contemporary political problem was concerned, is what to do about the rogue state of North Korea.

Her Annie Oakley-like riposte to Pyongyang's new blustering propaganda onslaught, its implied threat to fire off a new intercontinental ballistic missile in her honor during her first overseas diplomatic tour of East and Southeast Asia, were welcomed in a region not too sure about what the new Obama Administration might mean for them. She said more concretely than even her predecessors that no accommodation with North Korea's nuclear ambitions could go forward without meeting the needs of the relationship with America's ally, South Korea. She renewed promises, not kept by her predecessor, that aroused public opinion to an unprecedented degree over the kidnapping of Japanese citizens by North Korea over decades would finally be assuaged.   

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But her media briefers suddenly turned off the sound track as regards Korea after her meeting with the Chinese. Or so we are given to understand.

It doesn't take much speculation to come to a conclusion about why that was true.

Granted that the Americans, even on what would be largely an early protocol meeting, and the Chinese, had many other hot subjects. There are certainly the implications of the worldwide credit crunch and onset of recession are disastrous in both Washington and Beijing — although the latter, and some of its apologists, have been arguing it might withstand the worst.

But the silence on Korea is more than anything a measure of what realists — that is, real realists and not those Inside the Beltway who make it a professional ideology — have known for a good while. Beijing is not going to pull the rest of the world's chestnuts out of the North Korean fire. It was the wish fulfillment of the century for the U.S. foreign service officers who had dragged their chief, Condoleezza Rice, into the Six Power Talks that China would work miracles.

After all, it was argued that China, as much as Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the U.S., had a vested interest in a nuclear-free North Korean peninsula. Furthermore, the argument went, Beijing, as the principal trading partner [read that aid donor] of Pyongyang, its longtime friend and ally [as teeth to jowls] through thick and thin, could leverage its influence to the benefit of all the participants.

But that has not been the case.

Whether Beijing ever applied itself to the task or not remains for historians. But it is clear that through a series of minuets, Pyongyang has danced in and out of successive negotiations and agreements with the other countries in the negotiating process.

When Washington — with the mighty assistance of Japan — invoked sanctions, however trivial in size to the pre-bust world economy but critically essential to the North Koreans, Pyongyang seemed to be making concessions. But when Christopher Hill, the quintessential dapper, debonair and "nuanced" American negotiator, made concessions to the North Koreans, it immediately became clear that there was no agreement. They welched. Again, as has happened so many times in the 50-year history of Washington's relations with North Korea, the agreements have not been worth the paper they were written on.

It has long been speculated — with some unofficial Chinese sources confirming it — that Beijing fears more than anything else that the North Korean regime despite its Prussian-like aspects might suddenly implode. [The Chinese Communist Party ideologues had made a Talmudic-like study over the years of the sudden disappearance of the Communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe, especially their longtime favorite, Ceauscescu's Romanian Communist paradise.]

That would suddenly present a bewildering crisis for Beijing, which now presumably has time for only one gigantic problem: its rapidly disintegrating economy, the Chinese Communist Party's only rationalization, with the end of Maoist-Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, for the regime's repressive existence.

Short term, there would be the flood of refugees into what has been over several decades the troubled northeastern border with its huge ethnic Korean minority on China's side of the Yalu River of Korean War fame. Longer term, a united Korea — even if Seoul's fears of a repetition of the East German debacle for a united Germany were realized — is something that Beijing does not care to contemplate. [Nor, in fact, do its other neighbors.] That might even be a united, powerful Korea with a nuclear weapon and state of the art missiles technology developed in the North [with the assistance over the years of both the Soviets and the Chinese].

For the Chinese, not Hillary's speculations about the succession crisis which all know exists in North Korea but few, if any, know where it is at any given moment. Publicly going on record in any manner about what stew is being cooked in Pyongyang was like giving a munitions factory worker a defective cigarette lighter.

The evidence for all this was that none of the Hillary rhetoric of the pre-China stopover was repeated.

One can only guess that her rather non-diplomatic speak [it was all in the papers, after all, she said in rationalizing complaints that must have flooded in] of the succession struggle in Pyongyang irked if not terrified the Chinese. One has to assume that Beijing knows more than the rest of us about what is really going on with Kim Jong-Il, his illnesses, his appearances and disappearances, his bizarrely dysfunctional family, the royal succession [which the Chinese Communists in their Maoist era ridiculed]. But one also has to assume that they know better than we how the best laid plans of mice and Koreans can go astray in the plots of a North Korean dictatorship. [We hear, for example, that a drunken brawl among the military elite — the kind of hard drinking that only Koreans can manage — and a subsequent traffic accident which is hard to perform on the desolately empty streets of the North Korean capital — led to a purge and a new line of succession speculation.]

All of this is, of course, speculation.

But it does seem to lead us back to the collapse of the Six Party talks in the final days of the Bush Administration. Wedded as the Obamaites are to multilateralism — not that Hill didn't finally accede to Pyongyang's demands for bilateral meetings — Clinton cannot turn her back on the Six Party Talks, at least not yet.

The appointment of Stephen Bosworth, a veteran foreign service officer, as Hill's replacement would seem to confirm this at least temporary diagnosis of the problem by Clinton and the Obama Administration. Bosworth has a long history of seeking compromise with such worthies as the Sandinistas even before he became a great supporter of the Kim Dae-Jung presidency in South Korea as U.S. ambassador in Seoul. Kim, and his successor, Roh Tae-Woo, spent a decade wooing North Korea for a compromise on the whole host of issues — including Pyongyang's missile and nuclear proliferation as well as its attempt to arm itself with nukes. The result: zilch.

The current level, even by North Korean standards, of propaganda abuse which is being leveled at South Korea and the U.S., is an obvious outgrowth of the election of the current South Korean incumbent, Lee Myung-Bak. Lee has not only seemed impervious to the vicious personal attacks, but has steadfastly held to his program of negotiating in good faith but firmly with his northern brethren. That was not a task made easier by Hill's tendency to ignore both the South Koreans and the Japanese for their hardline stand, the extra-parliamentary activities of the left in South Korea egged on by Pyongyang, and the onset of even more difficult economic problems for Seoul policymakers.

But Clinton stood and said the right things with Lee.

And the Clinton grand tour has been a great propaganda success, at least for the American media for which it seems very much intended. Americans are said to love the fact that she seems to have wowed TV audiences in Indonesia as well as renewed warmly her acquaintanceship with the Empress of Japan.

It has been a demonstration of American "soft power" at its best. Perhaps.

But one hopes that Clinton is learning that discretion may be the better part of valor in diplomacy as in other facets of life. She returns to Washington, but in the case of East Asia, with a dossier containing the hard facts of life: A bankrupt — economically, culturally, and politically — North Korean regime uses its potential for developing weapons of mass destruction and selling them around the world in order to support a possibly mortally wounded regime. To abandon that overall strategy for one of compromise — even with the promise of massive aid toward a new kind of economy — could spell the death knell of the regime as it has existed since World War II. They know that in Pyongyang. And they know that in Beijing.

That's why there was such a sudden quiet about North Korea in the press room.


Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), 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 and East-Asia-Intel.com.

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