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3 US learning hard Korean
truths By John Feffer
another, put North Korea high on
their agendas. And when the neo-conservatives had
more influence over US policy, it seemed as though
North Korea would merit attention for its abysmal
human-rights record, its failure to safeguard
religious freedom, and its decidedly undemocratic
system.
But the Iraq war has exposed the
flimsy nature of the administration's efforts at
democracy promotion. Nor is an
abysmal human-rights records a
serious impediment to an improvement in relations
(just ask President General Pervez Musharraf in
Pakistan). And religious conservatives seem to be
focusing more on Darfur these days than Pyongyang.
The US government cares about primarily
one thing: North Korea's nuclear weapons. At some
level, North Korea knows this. It is reluctant to
give up its nuclear program less because of its
deterrent capability, which is modest if it exists
at all, than its capacity to draw the US to the
negotiating table.
One cheer for
reunification Reunification of the Korean
Peninsula will cost a lot of money. And some young
people would like to dismiss North Korea as their
parents' unfinished business. But still, most
Koreans support reunification. Since the US is
South Korea's No 1 ally, Seoul might be forgiven
for assuming that Washington, too, wants only one
Korea. Americans fought a war over the Korean
Peninsula. Wouldn't they also struggle to unify
the peninsula peacefully?
Unfortunately
for Koreans, the US government is deeply
ambivalent about reunification. The regime-change
scenario initially embraced by the Bush
administration entailed the collapse of the North
and its absorption by the South. But South Korean
leaders have explicitly rejected such a scenario -
because of its implicit hostility toward the
current North Korean government as well as the
projected price tag. In its stead, the South
Korean leadership supports slow-motion
reunification that gives North Korea a chance to
rebuild itself before entering a more substantive
economic and political partnership.
This
gradual reunification holds several risks for the
US. Washington worries that a reunified peninsula
might embrace neutrality, severing the close
relationship between South Korea and the US. The
negative US response to South Korean President Roh
Moo-hyun's proposed "balancer" role for his
country revealed this underlying anxiety.
Worse than neutrality, of course, would be
a reunified Korea falling into the Chinese orbit.
This reassertion of the past, namely the tributary
relationship that Korea once had with China, would
tip the region decisively away from the US. The
dominance of China in Korean trade relations -
China is South Korea's largest trade partner and
provides the lion's share of North Korea's food
and fuel imports - has already made the Korean
Peninsula economically dependent on its larger
neighbor, and Chinese influence continues to grow.
A third scenario - let's call it the Rose
of Sharon scenario - involves an upsurge in Korean
nationalism accompanying reunification and a
decision to avoid neutrality and keep both China
and the US at arm's length. In the wildly popular
South Korean novel The Rose of Sharon Blooms
Again, North and South Korea cooperate on
building nuclear weapons to counter a threat from
Japan.
Fiction perhaps, but with Japan in
the process of shrugging off its pacifist
constitution, both North and South Korea are very
concerned about the remilitarization of their
former colonizer. The two Koreas may not cooperate
on retaining or reacquiring a nuclear capability,
but they may very well turn against the US for
working hand-in-glove with the Japanese on the
acquisition of a "normal" military. A reunified
peninsula could tilt toward a strong Korea-first
policy.
Finally, reunification is not
popular inside the Washington Beltway - except in
the ritual paeans given by Korea hands and State
Department officials - because the current status
quo appeals to the US. South Korea is a key US
point of entry to East Asia, an important base of
military operations for actions to the south, and
so far a captive purchaser of US military
supplies. The US, in other words, still cares
about South Korea.
A distinct and
threatening North Korea also serves as a
justification for missile defense in the region,
as well as the current panoply of offensive
weaponry. Erase the division of Korea and the US
will suddenly seem like an ally without a purpose.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization survived
the end of the Cold War, but there was
considerable buy-in from European powers. It is
not so clear that a US-South Korean military
alliance would survive reunification (or even
substantial steps toward that goal).
Asian CSCE? No thank you!
Northeast Asia is one of the most
militarized and least institutionalized regions of
the world. In other words, there are a whole lot
of weapons, plenty of outstanding conflicts, and
no regional mechanisms for addressing these twin
scourges. Periodically, leaders will propose that
East Asia follow the model of the Conference on
Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).
This innovation of the 1970s brought together
the countries of Eastern and Western Europe, along
with the Soviet Union and the United States, to
discuss security, trade and scientific exchanges,
and human rights across the Cold War divide. The
model is particularly applicable to Northeast
Asia, for it offers a way to pursue on parallel
tracks a number of sensitive issues in a deeply
divided region.
China has proposed turning
the six-party talks into a kind of CSCE, and
indeed one of the working groups in the six-party
talks focuses on a peace and security mechanism
for East Asia. Influential US figures such as
James Laney, former US ambassador to South Korea,
and political scientist Francis Fukuyama have
backed a permanent forum for addressing security
issues in the region. In his new book Failed
Diplomacy, a former Bush administration point
person on North Korea, Charles Pritchard, devotes
an entire chapter to enumerating what such a forum
would look like.
Of course, the Bush
administration has routinely supported the notion
of greater regional peace and stability. But is an
Asian CSCE the preferred US government means to
that end?
Washington does not look at East
Asia multilaterally, however much US officials,
such as Colin Powell in 2004, have tried to argue
otherwise. The US is anchored in the region
through bilateral alliances - with Japan, South
Korea, and to a certain extent Taiwan. This
bilateralism allows the US, much the larger
partner in all these cases, to control the
security equation more easily. Washington can also
do what it often accuses Pyongyang of: playing one
country against another, as it has done to a
certain extent with Japan and South Korea.
The US doesn't want to be squeezed out of
Asia, even if the Bush administration's recent
actions seem to indicate otherwise - for instance,
the cancellation of the US-ASEAN summit and
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's decision not
to attend the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations Regional Forum.
An Asian CSCE
would create a multilateral network of greater
equality, reducing what the Chinese like to call
great-power "hegemonism". As the more vigorous
multilateral actor in the
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