COMMENT A three-handed approach to Pyongyang
By Sung-Yoon Lee
The United States has called on its two allies in Northeast Asia for a trilateral response to North Korea's November 23 shelling of South Korea. Last week, top diplomats of the US, South Korea and Japan huddled together in Washington and pronounced "solidarity" among themselves and promised "consequences" for North Korea in the event of further provocations.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, on a visit to Seoul and Tokyo, even called for "trilateral action", meaning combined military exercises among the three nations.
Indeed, the three countries should counter North Korea's
choreographed cycle of aggression with a long-term, tripartite strategy of their own. However, beyond diplomatic rhetoric or politically sensitive military drills, the three nations should establish a Trilateral Task Force to put pressure on Pyongyang over time with the view toward seeking a peaceful, stable, single, free Korea - if only for the sake of gaining greater leverage vis-a-vis the Kim Jong-il regime in the short term.
Despite provocations ranging from small slights to major breaches and aggression, Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo have never jointly meted out on North Korea any real punishment.
Pyongyang always keeps to its script. In fact, Pyongyang is the most improv-resistant actor on the world stage, seldom, if ever, deviating from its strategic playbook. It's ploys include:
Minor insults like firing a missile off its eastern coast just hours before South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun's inauguration on February 25, 2003; inviting the New York Philharmonic to play in Pyongyang on February 26, 2008, the day after President Lee Myung-bak's inauguration just to steal the limelight from Seoul, and instigating a naval attack on June 29, 2002, the same day that South Korea was to play - on home ground - for an unprecedented third or fourth place in the football World Cup. But also bigger strategic offenses like firing a missile over Japan on Aug 31, 1998 (Sunday, to capture global headlines for the full week) and on April 5, 2009 (also Sunday), or the seven-rocket salute on July 4, 2006; conducting its first nuclear test on October 9, 2006, on the eve of the North's communist party founding day, and a second nuclear test on May 25, 2009, US Memorial Day.
Such a thoughtful, proactive strategy of provocation warrants an equally serious, sustained, joint counter-strategy by the three democracies. The North Korea problem - nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, proliferation, money laundering, counterfeiting, drugs trafficking, human-rights violations, attacks on South Korea - is a function of Pyongyang's strategy of survival. The Kim clan, beset by extreme economic stresses and facing an incomparably better competitor Korean nation across the border, cannot afford to abandon its essential tools of existence. In effect, North Korea presents a comprehensive problem to which a clear timeline for resolution is not readily applicable.
Hence, the task force should focus on the two most glaring contradictions in the North Korean system: first, the dependence on nuclear blackmail and illicit earnings as instruments of regime preservation in the face of a collapsed economy and, second, the unfeasibility of operating in perpetuity a prison camp nation through extreme repression and information blockade.
To this end, the task force should take up as a matter of priority the enforcement of United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1718 and 1874, especially the provisions prohibiting the transfer of material and financial resources in and out of North Korea that may be diverted to North Korea's nuclear weapons and missiles programs.
The task force would establish a uniform, politics-proof standard of practice in this regard. It would support and strengthen US financial regulatory measures against North Korea's illicit activities already in place through intelligence sharing and joint operations. Curtailment of South Korea's transfer of hard currency into North Korea through suspect projects such as the Kaesong Industrial Park and Mount Kumgang tours - hostage magnets just waiting to happen - should take effect immediately.
Furthermore, the task force would highlight the acute North Korean humanitarian crisis through drawing world public attention to the issue and increasing support of radio broadcasts and other information operations into North Korea, as well as continued facilitation of North Koreans resettling in South Korea and the US.
The task force would sponsor, through third parties, reports, publications, international conventions, transmissions and dissemination of information related to North Korea's multifarious nefarious human-rights abuses throughout the United States, South Korea, Japan and in European countries.
The more people in democratic societies think about the North Korean regime as a threat to humanity and less as an idiosyncratic abstraction, the more they will be resolved not to allow their leaders to resort to politically expedient measures with each future provocation or defer Korean reunification. For the South Korean leadership, breaking the taboo of potential economic costs of reunification should be a high priority.
For the task force to be effective, it must remain immune to North Korean protestations, provocations, or calls for negotiations, or the internal politics of the respective three nations, or spurts of bilateral issues of contention within the tripartite partnership.
It's time to acknowledge that while status quo maintenance in the Korean Peninsula has worked in deterring war over the past 57 years, it has all but failed in deterring North Korea's ever-growing strategy of brinkmanship. It is also time to accept that relying on China to resolve the North Korea problem has produced few returns over the past two decades. As Pyongyang presses ahead in 2011 on its proven path of provocation-for-compensation, Beijing will, as usual, counsel patience, exhorting Washington and Seoul to let bygones be bygones and embrace the future.
In early 2011, the Kim Jong-il regime will be particularly prone to flaunt its military achievements as it celebrates three red letter days in close succession: the birthdays of the crown prince on January 8, the reigning leader on February 16, and the dynastic founder on April 15. Rather than launch another direct attack on the South, the Kim regime will be more likely to exercise its "sovereign right" and conduct another weapons test. How will Pyongyang's three target nations respond to its next provocation?
The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed nearly 200 years ago, "If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us."
Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo must come together and at long last show Pyongyang that they, too, are able to draw lessons from history and even take measures - belatedly but resolutely - that carry consequences beyond righteous rhetoric.
Sung-Yoon Lee teaches Korean politics at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He is a Research Fellow of the National Asia Research Program, a joint initiative by the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
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