N Korea's ace threatens US-Seoul
alliance By Donald Kirk
LONDON -- The volley of missiles fired by
North Korea confronts Washington with a challenge
that no amount of yakking in the United Nations or
tut-tutting in Washington is likely to answer. The
maestro of North Korean strategy, Kim Jong-il,
believes President George W Bush has no cards to
play, as one South Korean analyst put it, and
North Korea can do whatever it pleases to grab
attention.
While bogged down in Iraq, all
the United States is doing for now is issuing
statements while privately urging its South Korean
ally to back down from its policy of
reconciliation with North Korea. At the least,
South Korea may be expected to ignore North
Korea’s request for half a million tons of rice to
feed its near-starving
people, whose interests
Kim would prefer to sacrifice on the altar of a
show of military power.
Amid the rhetoric
and histrionics, Kim Jong-il, step by step,
appears likely to raise the stakes. He’s already
got six to eight, possibly more, nuclear warheads,
and it’s safe to assume that North Korean
scientists and technicians are developing the
means to put them on warheads capable of reaching
targets near and far.
Right now the target
with the most to fear is Japan. The failure of the
long-range Taepodong-2 to go anywhere is less than
comforting news to the Japanese considering the
success of the other missiles - short-range Scuds
and mid-range Rodongs - on test flights into the
waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
North Korea earns about $1.5 billion a
year exporting these missiles, and some of their
components and technology, to markets mainly in
the Middle East. While notoriously inaccurate,
they can menace Japan any time while scientists
and technicians correct the flaws that make the
Taepodong an unreliable instrument of war.
Understandably, the Japanese are more
outraged than anyone else by the North Korean
display. The Japanese response may have an impact
that Kim may not have anticipated. Pressure is
building inside Japan to do away with article nine
of Japans’ post-war "peace constitution"
forbidding Japanese forces from going to war
against foreign enemies for anything other than
the defense of the Japanese islands. Japan already
has mounted SAM3 missiles on Aegis-class
destroyers and is installing American Patriot
missiles, all to ward off any real threat from
North Korea and, in case of some future
conflagration, possibly China as well.
The
pressure for a shift in Japanese policy is sure to
increase, especially since Japan in recent years
has become increasingly conservative. One result
of this pressure is that the US-Japan alliance,
strained during periods when the Japanese
perceived no real need for American military
support, has tightened. Japan and the US appear
likely to grow still closer militarily as they
build up defenses at sea and on land.
The
renaissance of Japanese military strength will
increase tensions throughout the region, notably
between China and Japan and between South Korea
and Japan - not to mention China and South Korea
versus the United States.
In fact, Kim's
greatest success may have been to deepen the
divisions that raise serious questions about the
future of the US-South Korean alliance.
The launch of the North Korean missiles
hardly fazed South Koreans, who saw the whole show
as just another one of those gestures that may
make headlines for a few days but bear little
relevance to daily life on the streets of Seoul.
"We're worried but not that worried," one South
Korean told Asia Times Online. "If South Korea
were still in the World Cup, this wouldn't even be
the top news."
Under the circumstances,
South Korean leaders would just as soon avoid
taking sides in the great debate in the United
Nations on sanctions against North Korea. Why
exacerbate tensions, South Korean officials
reason, by supporting sanctions while China and
Russia are sure to veto them, turning debate in
the UN into another meaningless war of words?
In fact, it may come as a shock to
Americans, but many South Koreans would be likely
to defend North Korea’s right to test-fire
missiles - and even to have nuclear warheads - if
needed for "defense" against the Japanese. Japan’s
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has regularly
antagonized Chinese and Koreans by visits to the
Yasukuni Shrine honoring Japan’s war dead,
including war criminals responsible for conquering
much of the rest of Asia and plunging Japan into
World War II.
Memories of Japanese
colonial cruelty are deeply implanted in the
collective psyche of Koreans, North and South, as
well as Chinese.
The United States may try
to exercise a kind of pax Americana, negotiating
and temporizing, but North Korea is sure to keep
on testing missiles - and developing nuclear
warheads and other weapons of mass destruction -
while demanding significant American concessions.
As of now these include one-on-one negotiations -
that is, direct talks between US and North Korean
diplomats - as well as the lifting of restrictions
put into place by the US Treasury Department in
response to North Korean currency counterfeiting.
Christopher Hill, the US envoy on North
Korea, is now visiting Asia, stopping off in
Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo, trying to build up
pressure for North Korea to return to six-party
talks in Beijing on its entire nuclear weapons
program. Within that framework, he argues, he
would be glad to chat it up yet again with his
North Korean counterpart, Kim Gye-gwan, just as he
did when the parties last met in Beijing last
fall.
North Korea has chosen to boycott
the talks while demanding the US lift economic
"sanctions" against counterfeiting. The US denies
having actually imposed "sanctions". Rather, the
US Treasury Department bars foreign firms from
doing business with US banks and other
institutions if they also do business with North
Korea. The most visible result was the decision by
Banco Delta Asia in Macao to freeze North Korean
accounts, through which North Korea had been
shipping counterfeit $100 "supernotes".
The United States says it has no choice
but to stick to its refusal to negotiate
one-on-one and to do whatever it can to stop North
Korean counterfeiting. China, earning billions in
foreign exchange from its enormous trade surplus
with the US, may see the need to exert serious
pressure on North Korea to stop testing missiles
and developing nukes.
Alarmingly for the
region, the US-Japan alliance assumes ever more
importance. The US may conceivably wind up with a
restraining influence on a renascent Japan. At the
least, Japan is already acting unilaterally,
cutting off the single link by sea between North
Korea and Japan. The Japanese may also block all
commerce and communications while tightening
restrictions on Koreans living in Japan, an
historic focal point of Japanese ire.
The
Japanese response is sure to have a terrible
rebound effect. Neither China nor South Korea will
sympathize. If North Korea suffers still more
economically as a result, Kim may regard the loss
as an investment well spent. North Korea can only
benefit from sowing discord among its powerful
neighbors.
One question Kim might ponder
is how long he can impose harsh dictatorial rule
at home even as military forces build up against
him. While his technicians try to figure out how
to aim their missiles at specific targets, US and
Japanese forces have far more accurate weapons to
bring to bear against North Korean bases and
missile sites in case the region plunges into war.
Here too, however, North Korea may count
on another weapon - that of public opinion in
South Korea. While North Korean missiles are of
little real concern in Seoul, attack by the US and
Japan on North Korean bases would risk massive
protests in the South, rendering US bases there
either useless or untenable. Kim, in such an
event, would have succeeded in his goal of the
destruction of the US-South Korean alliance.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been
covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces
in northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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