It has been announced that North Korea will be a central issue during President
Hu Jintao's state visit to the United States this week.
This is not because of the intrinsic importance of the impoverished, barely
nuclear power. It is because North Korea is the place where two competing
visions of North Asia - China's and the United States' - conspicuously collide.
In the US view, North Korea is one of the final battlefields of the Cold War -
the inspiration for a league of capitalist democracies to band together to
oppose proliferation and aggression. North Korea also serves as a useful
stalking horse for anxieties about another
communist state, China, while giving the US, South Korea and Japan a reason to
unite and arm themselves without directly confronting Beijing.
In China's view, North Korea is an object lesson in the importance of moving
beyond traditional security alignments and mindsets - with the United States at
their center and China as their object - toward a new, negotiated accommodation
between a certain rising authoritarian, mixed-economy superpower and its free
market competitors in Asia and the Pacific.
North Korea is not merely a symbol, a blank slate on which competing experts in
international relations seek to inscribe their theories. It is a place where
significant national interests and aspirations - South Korea's drive to lead a
reunified peninsula, Japan's quest to forestall a slide into regional
irrelevance, the US desire to maintain a respected and decisive role in Asia,
and China's efforts to wedge Japan and South Korea away from the United States
and shift the regional power balance in its favor - converge to give North
Korea's tottering autocracy a disproportionate space on the world stage.
At least superficially, 2010 was a good year for the US-led alliance and its
framing of the Asian security question.
Chinese assertiveness in regional issues antagonized and united the governments
and populations of South Korea, Japan, and the US and focused a great deal of
unfavorable attention and pressure on China for its support of North Korea.
However, tough talk, continuous military exercises, and a tableau of
shoulder-to-shoulder steadfastness by the US, South Korea and Japan were not
enough to deter China from its determination to assert its interests on the
Korean peninsula and its vision for a new, much more China-centric security
order in North Asia.
It transpired that China's undiplomatic behavior was not a matter of simple
communist clumsiness and arrogance; it appeared to reflect a calculated
decision that the benefits of trying to shoehorn China into the West's good-guy
template had been exhausted, and it was time for the Beijing to insist on the
interests and prerogatives it deemed important, even if it alienated its
neighbors and the United States.
There does not appear to be an effective immediate riposte to the China that
can say No, at least in matters pertaining to its near beyond of the Korean
Peninsula.
In 2011, the US axis is laboring to cope with Chinese intransigence over North
Korea, and the splits that Beijing's actions threaten to widen in the alliance.
It could be asserted that the fundamental rot at the heart of the US-led
alliance is that North Korea is not really a threat. North Korea is eager for
rapprochement with its enemies and food and energy aid to prop up its
autocracy, not a regional carnival of death and destruction that would have
Pyongyang at its heart.
The North Korean bogeyman is undoubtedly an adequate justification for the
policies that benefit the US and its allies in their efforts to maintain an
enhanced military presence and update their security doctrines.
In an article entitled portentously if inaccurately, North Korea's Imminent
Threat (an imminent threat, like troops massed on one's border, permits a
pre-emptive strike per international law; we're not there with North Korea),
Heritage Foundation analyst Bruce Klingner found inspiration for a regional
security makeover in Pyongyang's antics:
Mr Gates' remarks this week
will be something major and new only if they trigger greater efforts to defend
against Pyongyang's growing missile threat. Here's hoping that greater pressure
in Washington from the new Republican Congressional leadership can convince the
Obama administration to reverse cuts to U.S. missile defense budgets and
programs. And that that pressure can spill over to Tokyo and Seoul too to
change their respective stances on missile defense. [1]
However,
North Korea is probably not sufficiently serious threat to compel a war-like
unity of purpose and effort between the US, South Korea and Japan in the
absence of a rock-solid consensus to confront China.
A statement by a South Korean legislator highlights some of the difficulties in
hyping the global threat posed by North Korea. In shades of the Saddam Hussein
killer drone story, Song Young-sun stated that North Korea could deliver a
nuclear payload either with its missiles or vintage aircraft:
"The
heavier the payload, the shorter the range of a missile," Song said. "But South
Koreans should be aware that they are living right next to North Korea."
The second-term lawmaker pointed out that the North may simply drop nuclear
bombs on the South using its airplanes, such as the AN-2 Colt and IL-28. The
AN-2 is a propeller-driven biplane made mostly of cloth and wood, and the IL-28
is a Cold War-era Soviet ground attack aircraft.
According to a 2010 Pentagon report, the AN-2 has "truly lethal potential", as
it gives off virtually no signature on radar, making it difficult to identify
in the event of troop infiltration missions.
Song claims that the North possesses some 300 AN-2s, which can carry 10 to 15
heavily armed soldiers across the inter-Korean border.
It can even land on golf ranges, as it only needs a 250- meter runway. [2]
Once one gets beyond a shared desire by South Korea, the US and Japan that
North Korea somehow disappear, consensus evaporates.
South Korea desires reunification; Japan fears reunification - and the economic
powerhouse it will spawn.
The United States is letting it appear that it is exploring Beijing's idea that
reaching an understanding with China is perhaps more important than the
aspirations of the Korean people or the anxieties of Japan.
The Chinese, for their part, are holding firm on North Korea's viability and
industriously pounding wedges into the alliance in an effort to convince all
concerned - even the United States - that their best interest lie in giving
China a leading role in North Asian security affairs, preferably through a
series of bilateral relations instead of via a free world versus red dragon
cage match.
In order to sweeten the pill for the United States, the Chinese media were
filled with unctuous assurances that the Chinese military had neither the
capability nor the interest to supplant the United States in Asia, thereby
implying that the prospect of Chinese goodwill should figure in US strategic
calculations as much as current assurances of South Korean and Japanese
support.
Global Times tried to frame the choice for the United States in a positive way.
An editorial entitled China no challenger to US on West Pacific stated:
China
should also take US anxiety into consideration. The US is used to being the
leading player on the world stage, accepting global obedience. China's effort
to improve its own national security isn't compatible with the West Pacific
order at the moment. China needs to explore a new road to collective security
in the region.
Despite the need to step up its military buildup, China should not set a
long-term goal of comprehensively surpassing the US. This is both impractical
and even risky.
China should endeavor to dispel military contention out of its national
competition with the US, which best facilitates China's interests. [3]
There is a certain amount of urgency to the Chinese effort.
The United States is currently pole-axed by two disastrous wars and a
catastrophic recession and not in search of new, challenging strategic
adversaries.
However, it will probably not be flat on its behind forever; and North Korea,
that supremely useful geopolitical asset and roadblock to a reunified,
pro-Western Korean nation, will most assuredly not be around forever, either.
In the run-up to Hu's state visit to Washington, therefore, China is making a
big push to revive the six-party talks, thereby asserting that Washington
should be talking with Beijing at least as much as Seoul and Tokyo; and the
United States and its allies are anxiously pushing back.
China's geopolitical coup de main was the unveiling of an apparently viable
Stealth fighter, the J-20, just before US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates'
visit to Beijing, as a symbol of China's first-order importance as a strategic
interlocutor.
Gates professed to shrug off the significance of the J-20 (although he had
reportedly previously predicted that China would not master stealth fighter
technology before 2020).
The US government and its friends in the media made a noble effort to turn
lemons into lemonade by characterizing the J-20 leak as a sign of dangerous
disarray and apparent loss of Communist Party control over the People's
Liberation Army (PLA). However, it is more likely that the J-20 coup was an
considered assertion to the US and the world of China's upgraded military
muscle, perhaps carefully choreographed by heir-apparent Xi Jinping. [4]
Gates professed that the biggest threat to US interests was not the possibility
that squadrons of J-20s would be sharing the western Pacific with US, South
Korean and Japanese aircraft.
Instead, he chose to highlight the danger that North Korean inter-continental
ballistic missiles (ICBM) could pose to the United States in five years, a
concern echoed by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Michael Mullen.
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