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How to make North Korea a good
neighbor
By Tim Shorrock
WASHINGTON - With the leaders of South Korea and
Japan paying back-to-back visits to Washington to meet
with US President George W Bush, tensions continue to
mount on the Korean Peninsula over North Korea's
nuclear-weapons programs and the US refusal to sign a
non-aggression treaty with Pyongyang.
In the
United States, hawkish elements led by Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld are becoming more public about the need
for regime change in North Korea and the possibility of
a military strike if the multilateral talks that began
last month in Beijing fail to reach an agreement.
North Korea's admission that it has several
bombs, its veiled threats to export missiles and nuclear
weapons and its apparent involvement in selling drugs
and counterfeit money to other Asian nations have also
alarmed many US analysts who are in favor of direct
talks. This week, members of a task force assembled by
the Council on Foreign Relations issued a report saying
that if negotiations fail, the United States might have
to resort to economic sanctions, a naval blockade or
even air strikes.
In Japan, the possibility of a
nuclear-armed North Korea has emboldened conservatives
who have been pushing for years for a stronger military.
Last week, Japan's Lower House passed the first law
authorizing Japan's Self-Defense Forces to respond to
attacks from abroad. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party
is pushing for tougher policies that could include
sanctions and building a missile defense shield.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visits Bush
this week with those issues high on their agenda.
Meanwhile, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun
returned to Seoul after his trip to Washington last week
with little to show from his meeting with Bush. Roh
stuck to his formula to maintain economic cooperation
and Bush refused to take military options off the table.
But even South Korea is getting wary. Prime
Minister Goh Kun told his North Korean counterpart on
Monday that inter-Korean exchanges "will be hurt if the
North Korean nuclear issue deteriorates".
But
amid the gloom, there is growing interest among some
analysts that the solution to ending the nuclear
standoff and bringing North Korea into the global
community may lie in increasing economic and social
integration in Northeast Asia.
They believe that
a multilateral attempt by the three countries
surrounding Korea - Japan, Russia and China - to harness
energy, transportation and construction projects to
create an integrated economic zone could lead to
long-term peace and prevent a disastrous, destructive
war in Korea.
"If North Korea gets a big carrot,
North Korea will change," said Tamotsu Nakano, a former
official with the United Nations Industrial Development
Organization and chief researcher at KRI International
in Tokyo, a consulting firm that has studied the concept
in detail. "This region could change from a black hole
to a last frontier."
Nakano, a visiting fellow
at the Brookings Institution, laid out his proposal at a
Washington forum sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace
Foundation last week. He believes the region could begin
by tapping the huge reservoirs of natural gas in the
Russian Far East - which has more than 20 percent of the
world's reserves - and export it by pipeline to China
and through North Korea into South Korea. That would
accomplish two things, he said: lessening China's
dependence on coal, which supplies 40 percent of its
fuel needs, and bringing badly needed economic
development to North Korea through the pipeline.
"North Korea really likes this kind of project,"
he said. "If we lay a natural-gas pipeline through the
Korean Peninsula, North Korea could really get some
concrete confidence-building measures."
Nakano
sees many other possibilities of regional linkage,
including telecommunications, electric power grids and
tourism development. One problem for Northeast Asia,
Nakano argued, is the lack of coordination between
Russia and its communist neighbors on one hand, and the
United States, Japan and South Korea on the other.
The first group of countries has supported the
Tumen River economic zone in the region where Russia,
China and North Korea meet, while the latter have been
the moving force behind the Korean Peninsula Energy
Development Organization (KEDO), which was set up in the
1990s to build the light-water reactors designed to
resolve the first nuclear crisis with North Korea. That
project is now virtually dead, and the Tumen River
project has received little interest from foreign
investors.
So the Cold War structure still
remains in Asia, said Nakano. "We must integrate these
different types of projects" by combining KEDO-like
projects in North Korea with energy, transport and other
projects linking the five countries in Northeast Asia
plus the United States. To do so, Nakano said the
countries in Northeast Asia would have to start a new
international organization similar to Japan's proposals
a decade ago for a regional Asian bank - a plan that was
shot down by the US administration of president Bill
Clinton.
He estimated the costs of his proposals
at about US$10 billion a year for the next 10-20 years.
That would spark rapid economic development and "make
North Korea able to become a member of international
society", he said.
"Ten billion dollars is very
high, but compared to the war-engagement policy of the
Bush administration and the reconstruction job in Iraq
of $20 billion, that's a reasonable sum to pay for a
peaceful resolution of the crisis," he said. "It's much
better to start preventive diplomacy and cooperative
security."
In Washington, the idea of
integrating North Korea into the Asian economy through a
pipeline has been promoted by Selig Harrison, a
specialist on North Korea and the author of the recent
book Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and
US Disengagement (see review, A Korean exit strategy for the US,
February 1).
In an intriguing development on
Monday, the North Korean government signed a memorandum
of understanding with Asia Brown Boveri of Switzerland
to modernize its electric-power network. While such
projects may indicate that North Korea is interested in
engagement with other countries, they also underscore
that Northeast Asia's economic ties are much stronger
with countries outside of the region.
Tsuneo
Akaha, a professor at the Monterey Institute of
International Studies, said that economically, "Japan
and China and South Korea are integrated outside their
region far greater than inside."
He argued that
international relations in that corner of Asia are
"driven by states, not markets". He added: "Until this
dynamic changes, developing a market-based,
private-sector-oriented institution of a multilateral
nature will be extremely difficult."
(Inter
Press Service)
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