That’s where the armchair strategists, politicians and military people don’t have the answers. One problem is one can never can be quite sure what the Americans are thinking. President Barack Obama has surprised American leftists by seeming firm in his pronouncements on North Korea. He reaffirmed the alliance most recently by approving the order to send the aircraft carrier USS George Washington, a 97,000-ton nuclear-powered monster with 80 jet fighters on its decks, at the head of a U.S. strike force to participate in war games with South Korean warships in the Yellow Sea. The decision was intended to show the U.S. shoulder-to-shoulder with the South Koreans — willing to defy the Chinese view that the Yellow Sea is an extension of China — but what will the U.S. do if the conflict widens and South Korea asks the U.S., with its powerful Seventh Air Force at Osan, south of Seoul, to join the fray?
The U.S strategy all along has called for diplomatic appeals that recognize Chinese power while stressing how much the U.S. wants to avoid hostilities. The American ambassador, Kathleen Stephens, in line with a U.S. diplomatic offensive initiated after the North Korean barrage on hapless Yeonpyeong Island, clearly believes China holds the cards. “We hope China will work with us to send a clear and unmistakable message,” she told a luncheon of American business people, and persuade the North “to end their provocative actions.”
Those remarks did not stop the commander of the 28,500 U.S. troops in Korea, General Walter Sharp, from outlining plans for combating immediate as well as long-range threats against “a belligerent North Korea armed with nuclear weapons.” He promised “more combined exercises” with South Korean forces “in strategic locations” as U.S. and South Korean forces sought “ways to further strengthen our exercises to deter a whole range of attacks.”
The best response to asymmetric warfare is to pinpoint supply points, gun positions and harbors and go after them with air strikes and artillery rounds. South Korea had fighters zooming overhead during the Dec. 20 exercise, but would they really hit targets in the North in response to a North Korean response? What if North Korea then turned its artillery on the Seoul-Incheon complex? Might the North also fire at population centers across the DMZ — or maybe stage a single attack on a South Korean guard post? How will the U.S. and South Korea respond then?
Eventually, in the view of American and South Korean commanders, the U.S. and South Korea have to set a “red line” that marks the point beyond which they will not let the North get away with more surprises. They believe they have to challenge North Korea, supported by its Chinese ally, to accept the risk of a war that would serve no one’s interests. By now, North and South Korea have both raised the stakes with challenges that are making it difficult for either side to back down. However North Korea fulminates, South Korean analysts believe South Korea had to go through with the exercises as planned.
The North Korean threat of reprisals came at a great moment for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. In Pyongyang on a long weekend visit, with a CNN team in tow, he urged his hosts not to stage a repetition of last month’s attack on Yeonpyeong, in which two South Korean Marines and two civilians were killed. He also yearned to glimpse the North Korean nuclear complex in Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, where North Korea has nearly completed a facility with a 20-megawatt reactor for producing highly enriched uranium. North Korea showed off the facility in November, two weeks before the Yeonpyeong attack, to a U.S. delegation led by nuclear physicist Siegfried Hecker.
The uranium program marks a major step beyond North Korea’s production of nuclear devices with plutonium at their core, extracted from a five-megawatt reactor at the same complex. The North has already conducted two underground tests of plutonium devices and is believed gearing up to test a uranium device within a few months. The presence of the CNN team, led by Wolf Blitzer, adds to the impact of Richardson’s visit. It all amounts to tremendous propaganda — for North Korea and for Richardson.
But how much could Richardson do to soothe tensions? North Korea has long challenged the Northern Limit Line, set by the U.S. and South Korea after the Korean War, claiming waters well south of the line. Richardson, on the basis of three previous visits to Pyongyang, hoped his trip would “make a difference” in efforts to bring about peace. How much difference was far from clear.
In any case, there was no way for South Korea to postpone the exercises in response to North Korean threats, however severe. Politically, South Korea’s President Lee Myung-Bak did not want to risk another round of severe criticism for the weak response to the attack of Nov. 23 in which Marines fired about 80 shells at ill-defined North Korean targets while the North rained more than twice as many on Yeonpyeong.
The issue seemed like one of face — and a major test for South Korea’s new defense minister, Kim Kwan-Jin, former chairman of South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff, who has threatened concentrated attacks, including air strikes, on North Korean positions. Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency called him “a puppy knowing no fear of a target” in a commentary on the South’s “madcap exercises” — fine rhetoric that suggests the contempt of North Korean militarists.
But what does North Korea really want? One interpretation is Pyongyang is making a supreme effort to get the attention of Washington and Beijing — and obtain direly needed aid in renewed negotiations. The mission of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg to Beijing last week showed yet again the primacy of China’s perceived role in bringing pressure on North Korea to end the confrontation.
To some analysts, the trains were hurtling down the tracks toward each other, passing yellow warnings and red stop signals. “It’s as though they are about to crash,” said Choi Jin-Wook at the Korea Institute for National Unification. “North Korea can’t avoid it, and South Korea can’t avoid it.” In both halves of the divided peninsula, leaders had to worry about their constituencies — for Lee, conservatives thirsting for vengeance, for Kim Jong-Il, militarists dedicated to his “military first” songun policy — and third son Kim Jong-Un’s role as his father’s anointed successor.
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