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The other sheriff
By
Marc Erikson
North Korea's official Korean
Central News Agency reported on Sunday that Pyongyang
"is ready to abandon in practice its nuclear program
which the US is concerned about at the phase where the
US hostile policy is fundamentally dropped and its
threat to us removed in practice", quoting a spokesman
for the North Korean Foreign Ministry. The spokesman
also reiterated North Korea's willingness to accept
"written assurances of non-aggression" as offered by US
President George W Bush last month at the Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation summit in Bangkok, explaining that,
if the US "finds it hard to accept" a non-aggression
treaty, "we can modify even the phraseology of the
principle of simultaneous actions, taking US concerns
into account".
The ministry's statements come
amid preparations for a second round of six-way talks
involving the US, North Korea, China, Japan, South Korea
and Russia on resolving the standoff over North Korea's
nuclear-weapons program and are miles apart from
Pyongyang's defiant declaration at the conclusion of the
August Beijing talks that further meetings were
meaningless and that it would not participate. What has
changed so drastically over the past two months to
occasion such a remarkable about-face?
What has
changed is that there is a newly assertive sheriff in
the neighborhood - and I don't mean Bush's favorite,
Australia. Though deeply disappointed and upset over the
lack of progress at April three-way and August six-way
talks in Beijing, China's new leaders have redoubled
their efforts since then to find a solution to the
nuclear standoff. The stick-and-carrot approach they
have chosen appears to be making an impact.
When
Wu Bangguo, chairman of the Standing Committee of the
National People's Congress and the No 2 man in the
Communist Party hierarchy, traveled to Pyongyang on
October 29-30 accompanied by a high-level delegation
drawn from different ministries, he - on one hand - made
it unmistakably clear to Dear Leader Kim Jong-il and his
ruling clique that China will not tolerate a
nuclear-armed North Korea. Sizable new Chinese troop
deployments in Jilin province on the North Korean border
since the summer will have served to underline Wu's
point. But - on the other hand - Wu also had ranking
economic officials brief Kim and his minions in detail
on the massive economic progress China has made since
the beginning of market reforms in the late 1970s, thus
holding out the prospect of economic betterment if North
Korea complies with nuclear-disarmament demands.
The Bush administration has long urged China to
take the lead role on North Korea. But China's doing so
has little or nothing to do with pleasing George W. It
is acting to safeguard its own essential strategic
interests and is playing by its own rules and precepts.
North Korea poses the first test of the strategic mettle
of new Chinese leader Hu Jintao, his new politburo
standing committee, and his government. That explains
part of the urgency with which Beijing has tackled the
issue. But the substantive strategic concerns are of far
greater moment.
China aspires to an overall
regional leadership role commensurate with its economic
clout. That implies reduction of the US military
presence in East Asia and prevention of Japanese
military resurgence. But both implied aims can only be
realized if and when the North Korea issue is settled
peaceably, verifiably, and in a lasting manner.
Otherwise, the US will stay, Japan will rearm and
acquire ballistic missile defenses, and that - in turn -
could lead to degrading of China's military threat to
Taiwan, as the island might come under a missile-defense
umbrella based in Japan and offshore.
Lest they
be accused of endangering Taiwan's unification with the
mainland, China's new leaders must get Pyongyang to come
to heel. However, China will do this on its own terms -
and those may not necessarily be to Washington's liking
or comfort. China regards it as in its best interest to
preserve something akin to the status quo on the Korean
Peninsula, minus North Korean nuclear weapons or
materials. But in driving toward that goal, it will make
every effort to maintain friendly relations with North
Korea and help preserve the Kim Jong-il regime. It will
also not be averse to subtly encouraging the growing
policy rift between Washington and Seoul, arguing that
any North Korea settlement reduces the need for US
troops in the South. The fact that China has much to
offer South Korea in economic terms will help nurture
closer Seoul-Beijing ties.
China's strategic
ambitions are helped by two factors. The US is already
stretched to the limit in Iraq. It can ill afford
endangering a potential North Korea settlement by
pursuing the regime-change course hawkish elements in
the Bush administration have been pushing. The US has
also become acutely aware that military options
advocated by the likes of former Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey are utterly
unfeasible. "North Korea is the longest-running failure
in the history of American intelligence ... It is simply
a much harder place to gather intelligence than Iraq or
Iran ever was," said Donald P Gregg recently. And he
should know, having served as both CIA station chief and
US ambassador in Seoul.
US intelligence failures
in Iraq were glaring enough. The notion that US
intelligence would know and provide reliable targeting
information to the military on North Korean nuclear
sites hidden in any one of literally thousands of
underground tunnels and caves is plain absurd. There
is no military option, and without that, there is
no regime-change option. It appears that with his
October 19 Bangkok offer of security guarantees for
North Korea, Bush has acknowledged as much. China has
taken note and will make the most of the opportunity of
playing the role of regional arbiter - and hardly with
the aim in view of simply helping Washington out of a
bind. Settlement on China's rules will establish it as
the confident new regional security guarantor and
"indispensable power" in East Asia (to borrow a
Madeleine Albright term).
(Copyright 2003 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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