WASHINGTON - If words were launched as missiles rather than missives, the
United States and North Korea would be firing salvo on salvo in an escalating
war in which much of the North would be in ruins and parts of the US in flames.
As it is, the war of words they're waging gets more intense by the day with the
dreaded "nuclear" word being used with alarming frequency.
It was one thing for North Korea to declare its need for nuclear weapons to
"bolster defense" against the US, say it was producing ever-more plutonium for
atomic bombs and reveal its nascent program for enriching uranium for still
more bombs.
It was quite another, however, for US President Barack Obama, darling of the
American liberals, to sign a joint statement with
South Korea's conservative President Lee Myung-bak pledging commitment to "the
US nuclear umbrella".
That's the verbal commitment of waving a red flag in front of a bull, bandying
about a term that's going to provoke a torrent of snarling invective from North
Korea on a scale far more venomous than the North's response to the latest
United Nations Security Council sanctions for detonating a nuclear device
underground on May 25.
It's a phrase that US officials may bandy about in briefings but avoid putting
in formal statements for presidents to toss out if only because it connotes
such an obvious threat. If you're going to talk about a "nuclear umbrella",
after all, does that mean you're poised to drop one of them without much prior
notice?
The phrase was sneaked in, almost deliberately buried, in a declaration issued
in the names of both Obama and Lee after their meeting in Washington on Tuesday
under the flowery title of "joint vision for the alliance". After a great deal
of verbiage that seemed to be the presidential equivalent of a love-in, after
promising to maintain "a robust defense posture, backed by allied
capabilities", the statement got to the real point.
"The continuing commitment of extended deterrence, including the US nuclear
umbrella, reinforces this assurance."
Those were the words the South Koreans wanted to hear. It was one thing for the
United States to promise to defend South Korea, as it has since preserving the
South in the Korean War, and it was fine for American commanders to talk about
a nuclear umbrella over the region, but South Korean leaders wanted it in
writing.
If much of the rest of the "joint vision" was boilerplate, the emphasis on the
"nuclear umbrella" was not. Regardless of whether Obama would ever pull the
nuclear trigger and order a strike, say, on the North Korean nuclear facilities
at Yongbyon, the message was obvious: in a showdown, we've got a lot more nukes
than you do, and we're willing to use them if that's what it takes to stop your
nonsense.
In fact, when it comes to who's really holding the nuclear club, Obama saw no
reason to recognize North Korea as a nuclear power at all - the same view
adopted by the US after the first North Korean nuclear test in October 2006.
The "joint vision" as envisioned on Tuesday by the American and South Korean
presidents, standing side by side in the Rose Garden outside the White House,
represents a triumph of diplomacy for South Korea at a critical juncture. Lee
is under pressure not only from a militant North Korea but also from a militant
political opposition that just can't get over the fact that he defeated a
leftist candidate in the December 2007 presidential election, reversing a
decade of liberal leadership of South Korea.
Lee this time did not go to Camp David, the presidential hideaway in the
Maryland woods north of Washington, as he did for his first summit with US
president George W Bush in April of last year. Lee was flattered at the time by
the invitation, evidence of the rapport that he hoped to build with the White
House in contrast to the uneasy meetings that his left-leaning predecessor, Roh
Moo-hyun, had had with Bush over the previous five years.
Against the din of the latest North Korean rhetoric, however, this summit was
far more meaningful than the first. The fact that American liberals think so
highly of Obama added to the significance. Obama could speak out in language
that critics of Bush would have automatically denounced in knee-jerk unison had
he dared to say anything so tough.
No way, said Obama, could North Korea go on in "a pattern" of behaving "in a
belligerent manner" and then waiting to be rewarded. "We are going to break
that pattern," said Obama. More menacingly, he said that "belligerent
provocative behavior that threatens neighbors will be met with enforcement of
the sanctions in place" - a reference to the UN Security Council sanctions
calling on nations to search ships and planes suspected of carrying materiel
for weapons of mass destruction or the missiles for delivering them to distant
targets.
Such language was a far cry from the talk that had marked the later years of
the Bush administration, not to mention that of his Democratic predecessor,
Bill Clinton.
This president did not have to refer to the failed Geneva agreement of 1994,
which Clinton and his top aides like to say had headed off the danger of war.
Nor did he allude to the two agreements of 2007 that promised the North untold
billions in return for disablement and dismantlement of everything to do with
its nuclear program.
Obama and Lee did pay ritual obeisance to the concept of six-nation talks,
hosted by China, which resulted in the 2007 agreements. With North Korea
declaring it will "never" return to the six-party process, such palaver has
receded into the tortuous history of diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula.
Now all sides appear to be waiting for an "incident" - the actual search of a
North Korean vessel, the "act of war" to which North Korea has promised to
respond with equal force. In the meantime, just hours before the summit, North
Korea played another card, that of the two women arrested on March 17 as they
were reporting for Current TV, the Internet cable network, along the Tumen
River border between North Korean and China.
It did not seem coincidental that North Korea should have chosen this moment to
come out with an explanation, via Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency, of
why the women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were arrested. They had crossed the
frozen Tumen River and shot video inside a courtyard on the North Korean side,
all in a campaign to "smear" North Korea, said KCNA.
Just where Ling and Lee, each sentenced to 12 years in prison, fit into the big
picture was not clear. KCNA said the reason it was reporting on what they had
done was so the world would know "the American crimes were committed at a time
when an unprecedented confrontational phase is building up on the Korean
peninsula against the United States".
KCNA said the producer cameraman, Mitch Koss, and a Korean-Chinese guide had
escaped, but neither is talking. The incident did not appear to have come up in
talks between Obama and Lee or parallel conversations between their aides.
There was, of course, no way to corroborate that version. No one doubted,
however, the veracity of KCNA's claim that "we are following with a high degree
of vigilance the attitude of the US, which spawned the criminal act against the
DPRK" - the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Ling and Lee, it seemed, had come to symbolize to North Korean strategists the
US-led response to North Korea's emergence as a nuclear power, recognized or
not.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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