Beyond the rhetoric of US-South
Korea unity By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON - The show of politeness
between presidents is done, and now US and South
Korean officials are getting down to what may be
the impossible task of finding a common policy
toward North Korea.
Presidents George W
Bush and Roh Moo-hyun agree, yes, let's get North
Korea to return to six-party talks on its nuclear
weapons, but they left the hard part to diplomats
to try to settle
fundamental differences on how
to achieve that goal.
The United States
remains as it has been throughout the Bush
presidency, tough but not so tough as to want to
risk a second Korean War. South Korea under Roh,
as under his predecessor Kim Dae-jung, who came up
with the whole idea of inter-Korean reconciliation
in the first place, favors what the critics see as
a policy of appeasement.
How much Bush and
Roh are ready to push their opposing views is far
from clear. If their recent summit accomplished
nothing else, it at least showed the importance
placed by both sides in maintaining at least the
appearance of supporting the US-South Korean
alliance.
It was because Bush and Roh had
clearly not hit it off in previous meetings, the
last at Kyongju, capital of the ancient Shilla
kingdom, in November during the gathering of
national leaders in Busan for APEC, the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group, that they
wanted to go through the motions of another
attempt at getting along with one another.
The South Koreans, according to those
close to the interaction between the White House
in Washington and the Blue House in Seoul, were
miffed that Bush should go to a lot of trouble to
talk to other world leaders on the telephone while
overlooking Roh. Advisers on both sides saw a
summit, however inconclusive, as the way to smooth
relations between Bush and Roh. Then, in the
afterglow, negotiators could get down to serious
business.
If last week's summit was
carefully scripted to avoid any sign of an open
rift, say analysts here, the leaders, in their
anxiety to put on a show of unity, may have been
too self-consciously nice. If they had had a
moment to disagree, according to this argument,
they might have come closer to terms than now
appears likely.
South Korean negotiators
thought they had scored a tremendous victory when
Christopher Hill, one year ago on September 19,
2005, signed off on the memorandum of
understanding under which all six parties in
Beijing - the Russians, Chinese, Japanese,
Americans and North and South Koreans - all agreed
the North would give up its nuclear-weapons
program in return for consideration of the energy
aid that the North was promised, but never got,
under terms of the failed 1994 Geneva framework
agreement.
Not even the fact that the
North the next day said it needed that aid before
doing a thing about its nuclear program was seen
as a deal-breaker. All six parties met again in
Beijing two months later to talk about
"implementation" of the memo. The fact that those
talks got nowhere was again not really alarming
considering that Hill had gone on talking on the
sidelines to the chief North Korean negotiator,
Kim Gye-gwan.
Those talks went into recess
- "suspended", it was said - until the parties met
again in two or three months. The suspension
turned into a breakdown, though, when the US
Treasury Department told Banco Delta Asia in Macau
- and other financial firms dealing with Pyongyang
- that they could no longer deal with US firms as
long as they served as conduits for circulation of
North Korean counterfeit US$100 "supernotes" as
well as arms and drugs from North Korea.
Now, so it seems to South Korean
officials, the US remains all too eager to pursue
a policy of brinkmanship that may lead if not to
war, at least to a crisis in which North Korea
wields the threat of nuclear warheads and the
long-range missiles to deliver them to targets
across the Pacific.
Nothing makes the
South Koreans more nervous than the specter of the
US edging day by day to stiffening economic
restraints that have already infuriated the North
Koreans - and appear to have done real damage to
the financial well-being of the few thousand
military and party hacks surrounding Dear Leader
Kim Jong-il.
It's as though the US, having
found a way to hit North Korea where it hurts
without increasing military pressure, now wants to
see how much harder it can hurt it economically
before Pyongyang sees the light and says, "Okay,
now let's talk." So far, though, North Korea has
reacted quite the opposite way, revving up
tensions by appearing to be on the verge of
test-firing the long-range Taepodong-2 and then
firing off seven missiles in early July.
The fact that the fearsome Taepodong
fizzled just 42 seconds off the pad was scarcely
comforting considering that the other six
missiles, mid-range Rodongs and short-range Scuds,
tested fine. With a little more work, another
Taepodong should also become a viable weapon for
use by North Korea or export to Middle Eastern
clients, which have been buying Scuds for more
than 20 years.
Now Pyongyang is hinting,
through carefully planted stories and comments by
North Korean representatives in Japan, that it
also has the right not just to manufacture nuclear
warheads but to test one of them.
The US
has countered - not militarily but with a finely
tuned program for squeezing North Korea
economically. The United Nations Security Council
resolution, a fairly weak document, adopted in
response to the missile tests was just the
beginning. The idea was that the resolution,
vaguely banning anything that would aid and abet
North Korea's missile or nuclear programs, would
provide a basis for getting other countries to cut
off financial dealings as well as trade remotely
construed, directly or indirectly, as
military-related.
Hill, mouthing
platitudes about all working together to get North
Korea to return to six-party talks, got nowhere in
an ill-considered attempt before the Roh-Bush
summit to persuade China and South Korea to agree
to such sanctions. Senior officials in both
countries repudiated the idea, suggesting instead
that the US go easy on the financial restrictions
imposed to stop the counterfeiting.
The
US, however, has other cards to play. One of them
is to reimpose sanctions in place before the
signing of the 1994 Geneva agreement and then
North Korea's agreement in 2000 to place a
moratorium on missile tests. These sanctions
included the freezing of North Korean assets in US
financial institutions and a ban on import of
North Korean raw materials.
US Treasury
Secretary Henry Paulson, at a meeting of Group of
Seven finance ministers and leaders of central
banks in Singapore, expanded on the point, asking
his ministerial counterparts to act against
"terrorist and illicit finance" conducted
specifically by North Korea and Iran. All of them,
it said, should work to cut off funds going
through front companies to buy and sell components
and technology for weapons of mass destruction as
well as acts of terrorism.
The North
Koreans, rhetorically, have just about gone
ballistic in response. North Korea's No 2, Kim
Yong-nam, president of the presidium of the
Supreme People's Assembly, declared at a meeting
of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana that his
country would never yield to sanctions, and the
North Korean media have carried commentaries
claiming that the US, not North Korea, is guilty
of counterfeiting.
The US has stepped up
its own rhetoric. A White House report says North
Korea must "end all involvement in criminal
activity" as a "prerequisite to entry into the
international community".
Against this
escalation of rhetoric, Seoul hopes to persuade
the US to back off from escalation of financial
measures. South Korea's nuclear envoy, Chun
Yung-woo, is seeing Hill this week, talking up the
"comprehensive" approach in the verbiage scripted
for Roh and Bush at their summit.
That
approach won't resolve anything either, of course,
but at least it will put off the kind of stronger
response from North Korea that the South fears
most. North Korea had no trouble encouraging such
fears by warning the South of the dangers of going
along with any US demands for sanctions.
In the war of words, nobody is really
certain how much credence to put on the rhetoric.
But South Korea, in the aftermath of the Bush-Roh
summit, at least hopes to convince the US of the
risks of taking chances.
Journalist
Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and
the confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia -
for more than 30 years. (Copyright 2006
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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