South Korea makes waves with China
pacts By Kosuke Takahashi
TOKYO - Alarmed at North Korea's
unstoppable nuclear and missile development
programs, South Korea, Japan and the United States
seem to have elevated trilateral security
cooperation.
But that's only on the
surface. Just like ducks that appear calm above
the water but are paddling furiously, relations
between the three countries on the subject of how
to handle China and North Korea are generating a
lot of unseen turbulence.
Earlier this
week, South Korea abruptly announced it was
negotiating a military agreement with China, a
fierce enemy during the 1950-1953 Korean War and
North Korea's long-time ally. What surprised the
media was the fact this move came just days
after Seoul suspended
the signing of a similar military pact with Tokyo.
Is Seoul just trying to get closer to its
largest trade partner China? Or by shifting its
axis of cooperation from Tokyo to Beijing, is it
aiming to play a "balancer's role" between Japan
and China, a position that former South Korean
president Roh Moo-hyun used to advocate?
"South Korea's left-wing opposition
parties and groups have been attacking the Lee
Myung-bak administration on forging military pacts
with the former colonial ruler Japan so far,"
Hideshi Takesada, a professor at Yonsei University
of South Korea, told Asia Times Online. "So by
bringing up the subject of a military pact with
China, it wants to say 'Hey, we are not
negotiating only with Japan, but also with many
nations such as China.' It tries to dodge a public
backlash that military pacts with Japan have
caused."
Takesada pointed out that Lee had
already become a lame duck ahead of the
presidential election in December and that he was
losing his centripetal force, thus pandering to
populist policy measures.
Takesada, a
former executive director of the National
Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo, the
Japanese Ministry of Defense's think-tank, sees
almost no chance that Seoul could make a military
deal with China because this would provoke a
fierce backlash from Pyongyang.
"From
South Korea's perspective, such an attempt is to
defuse China's concerns that the increased
military cooperation with Japan might work as a
containment against China," said Hyon Jooyoo, an
assistant professor in the Department of Political
Science at Trinity University in San Antonio of
Texas. "It seems to me that South Korea tries to
find a middle ground between Japan and China by
forming a similar contract with Beijing."
"Increasing military cooperation with
Japan is significant to Seoul but South Korea
should not make it antagonize China," Hyon said
while visiting Keio University in Tokyo on
Wednesday.
South Korea and Japan have
reached the final stages of talks on two
agreements: an Acquisition and Cross Servicing
Agreement (ACSA) and general security of Military
Information Agreement (GSOMIA). The ACSA would
allow exchange of fuel supplies or vehicles during
United Nations peacekeeping or disaster relief
operations. The GSOMIA would establish a bilateral
exchange of sensitive military information such as
that regarding North Korea's weapons of mass
destruction, including its nuclear program.
Military experts say that South Korea's
military pacts with China, even if realized, would
rank a notch lower than its military accords with
Japan, as they may limit the scope of cooperation
between Seoul and Beijing.
In China's
rise, Seoul is beginning to see more economic and
diplomatic opportunities than military threats.
"Thinking about North Korea, China is
very, very important for Seoul," a senior South
Korean diplomat told Asia Times Online.
For left-leaning political elites in
Seoul, China is a key partner to form a bridge
between them and Pyongyang. On the other hand, for
conservative South Korean leaders, China is a
strategic collaborator to pre-empt North Korea's
military and diplomatic provocations.
Discord between the US and South
Korea It's true that tightening bilateral
security ties with Tokyo is a very sensitive topic
given latent anti-Japanese sentiment among South
Koreans regarding the 1910-1945 colonial rule of
the Korean Peninsula. But it is the US, which has
urged Japan and South Korea, its strongest allies
in the Asia-Pacific region, to create
unprecedented military pacts for sharing
information and equipment.
In December
2010, Mike Mullen, serving as the chairman of the
US Joint Chiefs of Staff, stressed the
significance of trilateral cooperation between the
US, Japan and South Korea at a press conference in
Tokyo. Mullen said North Korea's shelling of a
South Korean island a few weeks early, which
killed two troops and two civilians, had created a
"real sense of urgency".
Even so, South
Korea has not fully met the US request. Instead,
why is it seeking a military agreement with China,
especially when Washington seems to have formed
the US-led alliance of encirclement against
Beijing, involving Japan, Australia and the
Philippines?
Yonsei University's Takesada
said that a recent visit by US officials to
Pyongyang, without letting Seoul know of it, may
have hurt South Korean officials' feelings.
According to South Korea's Chosun Ilbo
newspaper, a US Air Force Boeing 737 flew from
Guam to Pyongyang with the officials on April 7,
six days before North Korea's April 13 long-range
rocket launch in an apparent bid to halt the test.
The newspaper said the aircraft passed
through South Korean airspace and might have been
carrying Sydney Seiler, a National Security
Council adviser to President Barack Obama, and
Joseph DeTrani, director of the National
Counter-Proliferation Center.
The US
government did not notify South Korea's military
air traffic controllers of the flight. As a
result, the controllers initially had trouble
identifying the aircraft and eventually found it
was heading to the North, according to a report
last week by Reset KBS, an online broadcasting
channel.
"Seoul should have got indignant
at the US, as it felt a loss of face because of
this secret deal between the US and North Korea,"
Takesada said.
US State Department
spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on May 22 did not deny
the news report, saying "we don't have any comment
on that report at all".
A report from
Pyongyang on the same day was more bothersome to
the State Department.
North Korea's Rondog
Sinmun reported, "Several weeks ago, we informed
the US side of the fact that we are restraining
ourselves in real actions though we are no longer
bound to the February 29 DPRK-[Democratic People's
Republic of Korea]-US agreement, taking the
concerns voiced by the US into consideration for
the purpose of ensuring the peace and stability of
the Korean Peninsula necessary for focusing every
effort on the peaceful development."
"From
the beginning, we did not envisage such a military
measure as a nuclear test as we planned to launch
a scientific and technical satellite for peaceful
purposes," it said.
If North Korea's claim
is true, the US has not publicized this fact at
all, just stressing North Korea's provocations by
violating UN resolutions in the past few months.
There is a possibility that the Obama
administration will go for unilateralism to seek a
rare foreign policy success concerning North Korea
in its final months in office before the US
presidential election in November. This would
undoubtedly give South Korea and Japan the chills.
Kosuke Takahashi is a
Tokyo-based Japanese journalist. His twitter is
@TakahashiKosuke
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