North Korea's strategy unmasked

By Edward Neilan
Special to World Tribune.com

TOKYO--Like a long-running soap opera or a low-budget samurai movie series, the plot of North Korea's negotiations with the outside world never varies.

The excitement comes with the wondering when the forces of the United States will call Pyongyang's bluff and retaliate. But it never happens.

Japan's recurring nightmare, on the other hand, is that it awakes to find U.S. planes engaged in air strikes against North Korea. Despite provocation, Japan has lobbied backstairs for years against any sort of use of force in retaliation against North Korean acts. Possible China involvement, complications within Japan's huge Korean minority, possible unleashing of a refugee flood are among the reasons given.

Now many Japanese security thinkers (perhaps a gratuitous description) are worried anew lest the Kosovo experience may give rise to Pentagon inspiration to finally "do something" about Pyongyang. In the run-up to the next U.S.Presidential election , it is certain that there will be calls for a stronger policy.

This brilliant new book OVER THE LINE: NORTH KOREA'S NEGOTIATING STRATEGY, By Chuck Downs with a Foreword by James R. Lilley. (The American Enterprise Institute Press, Washington D.C. 1999, 284 pp. US$39.95), does not advocate "shooting from the hip," but arms the reader with the inside of North Korea's actions, if not thinking.

Describing the book as an"unmasking" of North Korea's negotiating strategy would be almost humorous if the subject were not so deadly serious. The North Korean negotiating behavior has been constant for almost 50 years, since the Armistice which ended shooting started by the North's invasion June 25,1950 . The Pyongyang style has been extremely visible but few have paid attention.

Downs, whose career as an analyst on defense and security issues spans two decades in the Pentagon and at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, writes:

"Today, North Korea's negotiating objectives are as much at odds with the rest of the world as they have been at every point since the founding of North Korea. The United States seeks an accommodation in order to avoid the violence it fears might accompany North Korea's decline. North Korea, to the contrary, seeks to deny accommodation, and uses both collapse and the threat of war in what is merely the latest, not in its view the last, round of talks between the regime and the world North Korea resents."

The process can be never-ending. In Downs' view :

"There will almost certainly come a time when it will appear that an accommodation can be reached, and the negotiations with North Korea will begin anew. At that point, it is certain North Korea will want something in exchange for its commitment to participate in future talks. What is uncertain is whether the West will have the resolve to deny what the regime requires."

Author Downs may have spent more days at the truce village of Panmunjom than I but it is doubtful. During the late 1960s and early 1970s it was a favored destination for reporters expecting some announcement of U.S. retaliation.

The January 22,1968 seizure of the USS Pueblo; infiltration of North Korean commandos across the DMZ with orders to assassinate South Korean President Park Chung Hee in January 1968; the shooting down of a U.S. Navy EC-121 reconnaissance aircraft over the Eastern Sea on April 15,1969; the August 18,1976, axe-murders of two U.S.officers were incidents for which I figured there would be some retaliation.

Nothing happened. And my interest in Panmunjom faded. The place is a symbol of all the things Downs talks about in his book.

In the long view, some analysts believe North Korea can survive neither all-out war nor all-out peace. Either one would end their control. They need a perpetuation of tension, internally and externally. This line is substantiated by Downs' research.

Before this valuable volume was published, Asian scholars had been left with great gaps in their research because the material was too cumbersome

Edward Neilan (eneilan@crisscross.com) is a veteran journalist, based in Tokyo, who covers East Asia and writes weekly for World Tribune.com.