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A SENSE OF ASIA

The North Korea diplomatic 'breakthrough' (screwup?)


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By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Sol W. Sanders

Friday, February 23, 2007

There is, of course, the old cliché: war plans are obsolete the moment the first gun is fired. For those with a sense of history and at least some partisan neutrality, present Iraq events are quintessentially an example. Similar miscalculations [and resultant horrors almost too bitter to remember] punctuated World War II from Pearl Harbor to Normandy, even to MacArthur’s vaunted postwar Japan Occupation.

But beyond mistakes are miscalculations, sometimes ensuing from success.

Thus ripples are rolling out, already, from the purported breakthrough in North Korean negotiations. The dapper, wisecracking, diplomat’s diplomat [with all that may imply for those critical of diplomacy], Christopher Hill has moved chessmen. [“The most flagrant stab may be a phoney...and then again, it may not be, after all. A good player who decides to go in for an unambiguous stab should still mend his fences by apologizing, pointing out that it was essential for his survival, and trying to negotiate a new deal.” – Christopher Sharp, “The Art of Diplomacy” http://www.diplomacy-archive.com/resources/strategy/articles/art_of_diplomacy.htm].

But, as happens, in the worldwide amphitheater where American actions and feints play out, a host of consequences arise which were probably not anticipated in the lather of dealing with always obstreperous North Koreans.

Most immediate, of course, is in Japan. Uncharacteristically, Tokyo has been toughest among four neighbors and the U.S. trying to walk the North Koreans back from nuclear weapons. No issue has aroused Japanese public opinion more in the postwar period, perhaps, than the tragedy of ordinary citizens grabbed off streets and beaches by Pyongyang’s agents in some demented intelligence plot.

To learn fellow citizens were held over decades virtually unknown and anonymously by the Korean Communists — children, adolescents, adults — has aroused Japan’s generally apolitical majority. Pyongyang’s “apology” — the Japanese may never know how many and to what fate were taken — and the return of some abductees and bogus ashes of others, has only exacerbated the issue It is little wonder, Prime Minister Shinto Abe made it his issue in his run up to prime minister. Pyongyang’s full disclosure on “the abduction issue” has been a principle Japanese bargaining tenet for any recipe for settlement.

Despite Washington’s assurances that would be the case, Hill finessed. “Abductions” were not included in what the anti-American media in Japan call “secret bilateral negotiations in Berlin” [despite repeated Bush Administration assurances it would take only the multilateral path]. They obviously stop in the way of North Korean agreement, theoretically at least, to freeze their nuclear ventures.

Abe, while publicly endorsing the American move, has refused participation in funding food and fuel to tease the North Koreans — shivering in a very dark cold winter — toward the next steps, that is, destroying their bombs and facilities to build more. Despite their always suspect nature, newspaper polls show a Japanese public while unhappy with Abe’s foreign policy, overwhelmingly endorsing his refusal to aid North Korea and sympathy for tightening economic screws.

It all comes at a bad time. Abe’s new government has specialized in shooting itself in the foot – grim comparisons with his predecessor, matinee idol Junichiro Koizumi. Furthermore, there’s little evidence Abe is getting his PR act together: he and his foreign minister contradicted one another on new economic strictures against North Korea within 24 hours in the midst of a visit by Vice President Richard Cheney.

The leftwing, anti-American Asahi newspaper and other naysayers among Japan;s chattering classes are weeping crocodile tears at a supposed breach in the Washington-Tokyo alliance, one, incidentally, they have always opposed. That, of course, despite almost daily announcements of growing military and economic collaboration – from settlement of old U.S. garrison problems to dispatch of the latest American fighter for a Japan living with the nightmare of the 1998 flyover of a North Korean missile. Despite the scare headlines — from a foreign Tokyo press corps too often living on Asahi translations — Cheney probably accomplished the necessary, reassuring the Japanese and tightening some bolts.

But Abe has an election for the upper house this summer which could, were he and his coalition partner to lose, cause him [and inferentially the U.S.] new problems. The opposition Japan Democratic Party is a collection of strays from left and right left over from the Koizumi Revolution with no real program and little capacity to govern.

The Korean “breakthrough” has had its effects elsewhere, no doubt. CNN is campaigning with anonymous Tehran officials, goldplating the mullahs’ line they are only seeking peaceful atomic energy several decades ahead of Iran’s exhaustion of the second largest oil and gas reserves in the world. Obviously, the Iranian leadership — despite its own horrendous problems and divisions — have caught the Korean wave. If “secret Berlin” bilateral were possible for a North Korea with bombs, certainly this is the hour to urge on the U.S. Democratic Party’s leadership [and the half-forgotten Baker-Hamilton commission] calling for bilateral talks with Tehran.

A not unforeseen consequence here, of course, would be to let the feckless Europeans [who have beefed up their trade with Iran in the years of negotiations over nuclear weapons] off the hook, throw the problem completely into the U.S. lap — as has happened from Kosovo to Iraq.

It comes, too, as Moscow has pulled out all stops in an anti-NATO propagandafest to intimidate the Poles and Czechs from hosting U.S. anti-missile defenses — aimed as much as anything else to anticipating Iran’s threat to Europe with its growing arsenal of hybridized Chinese-North Korea-French missiles.

It may not be exactly the butterfly wing effect. But it comes pretty close.

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.

Friday, February 23, 2007


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