North Korea: An offer China
wouldn't refuse By Sung-Yoon Lee
As representatives of the United States,
China and North Korea wrangle over the conditions
for resuscitating the six-party soliloquy contest
- otherwise known as the occasional multilateral
forum in which the US, China, Japan, Russia and
South Korea aim to denuclearize North Korea -
President George W Bush might consider presenting
his Chinese counterpart with a plan for a quid
pro quo. This is needed if there is to be a
change in the status quo on the Korean Peninsula
and if the North Korea
nuclear problem is to be
resolved once and for all.
Pyongyang's
strategy of creating crises and reaping rewards
has kept the communist hereditary dictatorship
afloat for the past 60 years. However, it is in
the end an inherently unstable policy prone to
self-defeating entrapment. As long as the US does
not regress into appeasing North Korea, the
terminal point for such a path of national
survival strategy is likely to be
"self-containment"; that is, a near-disaster
situation that will push China to favor a policy
of destabilizing the North Korean regime over an
armed conflict breaking out in its Northeast Asian
back yard.
While China is not yet ready to
take that bold step and pull the plug on its
dependent neighbor, the US would do well to
persuade China to contemplate benign scenarios for
disrupting the existing situation in the
peninsula. In light of North Korea's unrelenting
intransigence - from the seven-rocket salute on
America's 230th birthday to its nuclear test on
October 9 - it behooves the US to propose to China
a discreet grand bargain, in concert with ongoing
diplomatic efforts at the United Nations Security
Council and the useful mirage of progress that is
the six-party talks.
The totalitarian
North Korean regime's nuclear test should have
provided all parties concerned - at least those
who favor logic and empirical evidence over
political ideology and pious hope - with a moment
of clarity: the international community can now
dispossess itself of the solipsistic presumption
that with the right mix of incentives and
patience, the Pyongyang regime can be coaxed out
of its nuclear obsession.
Building a
nuclear-weapons program, short of waging war, is
the most expensive and potentially the most
lucrative project a state can undertake. It is an
all-encompassing enterprise involving years of
planning, building, extraction and allocation of
resources. A state, especially one like North
Korea - an illegitimate contender in the
pan-Korean contest for legitimacy on the Korean
Peninsula, economically moribund and perpetually
dependent on foreign aid, and encircled by
overwhelmingly richer and stronger states - does
not set off down the nuclear path on a whim or
leave it for short-term rewards.
The North
Korean nuclear saga is a 20-year crisis in the
making. Pyongyang knows apparently better than any
other that carrots from the outside world are
perishable, while nukes do not carry an expiration
date. By dangling before its interlocutors the
possibility of denuclearization, it is actually
North Korea that has been assuming over the past
20 years the role of the cheerful shepherd waving
a phantom carrot before the very nose of the
docile donkey that is the international community.
Yet neither is this a tenable situation
beyond a fixed period of appeasement and
frustration - the time will come for a subsequent
stage of looming catastrophe that will propel the
principal actors to take drastic action.
The US and China have at least on one
occasion "cooperated" in fundamentally changing
the status quo in Korea. By signing in July 1953
the armistice to the Korean War, the countries
were able to place a tight but temporary lid over
the perpetual powder keg that was the Korean
Peninsula. Now, North Korea's self-invited debut
on the world's nuclear stage calls for the US and
China to take another drastic step to change the
situation, one that is intrusive enough to
cauterize the root cause of the comprehensive
North Korea problem.
Over the past two
millennia Korea has served China as a buffer and
cultural satellite and the bloodiest of
battlegrounds. In the late 19th century, China saw
Korea as the "antidote to the poison that is
Japan", and since 1945 China has taken advantage
of the division of Korea in safeguarding its
geostrategic interests in the region and beyond.
Historically, China has made great
sacrifices to protect its interests in Korea,
crossing the Yalu River and onward south to
Pyongyang and Seoul to fight a protracted war
against Japan in the 1590s and against the United
Nations forces in the 1950s. It must be a hard
pill for China to swallow to conceive of a unified
democratic Korea closely aligned with the US just
beyond its northeastern border.
Yet as a
major trading nation of the world, China has a
compelling stake in preventing nuclear
proliferation and protecting the integrity of the
international financial order. The more
prosperous, pragmatic and less ideologically
driven China becomes, the greater incentive it
will have to accept and support Washington's
determination to resolve North Korea's unbound
financial crimes.
Although at present
Beijing is not ready to inflict on Pyongyang a
political blow, continuing on the trajectory of
North Korea's provocation and America's undaunted
response calls on all parties involved to make
assumptions and preparations for the approaching
convergence of Chinese and US interests on the
Korean Peninsula.
Bush could assure the
Chinese that in the event of regime collapse in
Pyongyang, the US would welcome the stationing of
Chinese troops north of the 38th parallel, and
that Washington would work closely with Beijing,
as it did with Moscow 60 years ago, in
coordinating its own troop deployment and a
schedule for withdrawal from Korea.
Chinese leaders can also take comfort in
that even after reunification, most Koreans in the
North and in the South would remain favorably
disposed toward China. South Koreans have been
trying wholeheartedly to embrace China since the
normalization of relations in 1992, and even a
unified Korea could but remain beholden to China's
economic and political influence. For China, a new
relationship with the US and a unified Korea would
also bring Japan closer into its own orbit,
further spurring and stabilizing its ascendance in
world affairs.
The task at hand for the
US, then, is to assure China that in the event of
a change in the status quo in North Korea, China's
economic, political and strategic interests in the
region would not be challenged, and that, to the
contrary, the US would vigorously compensate China
for its cooperation.
A brave new
partnership awaits the US and China in the
opportunity to finally cut the last confounding
Gordian knot of the Cold War.
Dr
Sung-Yoon Lee is associate in research at the
Korea Institute, Harvard University. The views
expressed herein are excerpts of his public
presentation at The Heritage Foundation on October
13.
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