Special Report on The Koreas: Jaw-Jaw

THE KOREAS

Jaw-jaw

Sep 25th 2008
From The Economist print edition

The international consequences of North Korea, and all the talk about it

THE divided peninsula is the biggest and nearly the last manifestation of a cold war that ended almost two decades ago. The division, with huge armies facing each other across the border, was not entirely or even mainly of Koreans’ own making. Until the modern era Korea, the Hermit Kingdom, had kept to itself, its isolation underwritten by the ruggedness of its coast and its land border with China. But starting in the late 19th century Korea became the contesting ground of great powers. The Japanese fought to deny influence first to China and then to Russia, annexing the country outright in 1910. Japan’s colonisation until defeat in 1945 was a brutal one, even if it helped lay an industrial base. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans were forcibly conscripted into the Japanese army or sent to work as slave labour in Japanese mines.

AP

Token of good intentBefore the end of the second world war, the United States and the Soviet Union had, without troubling to consult Koreans, agreed to partition Korea into respective spheres of influence and military occupation. In 1945, on the day of Japan’s surrender, the line was drawn along the 38th parallel. The Republic of Korea (that is, South Korea) declared independence on August 15th 1948, with the approval of its American godfather. On September 9th the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) emerged out of the Soviet occupation. Both states have just celebrated their 60th anniversary.

In June 1950 North Korea invaded and overran much of the southern part of the peninsula. An American-led United Nations force pushed it back across the border, making gains deep inside North Korea. That led Mao Zedong to order China into the war. By 1953, after immense physical destruction and the deaths of 3m soldiers and civilians, the two sides had fought themselves to a standstill along the original border. An armistice was signed and a buffer established: today the “demilitarised zone” (DMZ) is the most heavily militarised border in the world.

Technically the combatants remain at war, but the north has lost nearly all outside military help. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia dropped its material support for North Korea. China, for its part, has made clear it no longer feels bound to come to its defence. Though the north’s armed forces are huge, swallowing up a third of the national budget, they are also backward. By way of compensation, North Korea has amassed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons as well as a handful of plutonium bombs, and its missile technology to deliver its warheads is improving. At least rhetorically, the regime of Kim Jong Il keeps the country on a near-permanent war footing, forever giving warning of imminent imperialist attack by America or, on occasion, Japan.

It does so mainly to boost its own legitimacy at home, yet there is little doubt that North Korea feels beleaguered, even if its own behaviour is chiefly to blame. About 30,000 American forces are stationed in the south, many of them in a huge base in downtown Seoul. Until 2012 the United States will remain in overall command in case of a war or the collapse of the north. Those numbers will fall (and the base will be closed) as part of plans both to reconfigure America’s military presence in the Pacific and to hand back command of South Korean forces.

Even so, President Lee Myung-bak has reasserted South Korea’s alliance with America as the cornerstone of its foreign and defence policy, and his country has American nuclear guarantees. The United States is racing to equip South Korea (as well as Japan) with destroyer-based missile-defence systems to counter the nuclear threat. South Korea’s military spending has risen by more than 70% since 1999, and though troop numbers are to be cut, the savings will be spent on ship-to-air missiles, unmanned spy planes and new fighter planes. North Korea is hopelessly outclassed, and any war would result in its utter destruction. That is why more than anything its regime wants security guarantees from America—especially after George Bush named North Korea as part of his “axis of evil” in 2002.

Knocking heads together
Though the chief burden of making the peninsula whole will fall to South Korea, historical responsibility and strategic necessity have brought together China, America, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas in the so-called “six-party process”, which since 2003 has been aiming, step by reciprocal step, to persuade Mr Kim to abandon his nuclear weapons and programmes in return for material aid, security guarantees and American diplomatic recognition.

American hawks condemn the exercise for allowing a monster regime to blackmail the outside world. The talks’ defenders, none of whom has illusions, point to progress, however glacial—for North Korea never passes up the chance to miss a deadline. Alexander Vershbow, America’s outgoing ambassador to South Korea, says that the latest round of talks, which began in March 2007, has produced few unpleasant surprises. The north has allowed international inspectors into the Yongbyon nuclear facility and shut down the main, Soviet-era reactor there. This summer it blew up the cooling tower that is the most visible mark of its nuclear-weapons programme. America sent the first instalment of 500,000 promised tonnes of grain. Others have provided oil.

Now the sticking-point is North Korea’s promise to produce a full list of its nuclear programmes. America has complained that the means of verifying what North Korea has declared to date fall short of what is required—not least because the declaration makes no mention of existing nuclear bombs, a suspected programme for enriching uranium or proliferation in the Middle East. Piqued, the north threatened in late August to suspend the dismantling of the Yongbyon facility. As The Economist went to press, the two sides appeared to be stalled. But any deal would probably entail Mr Bush accepting less than cast-iron assurances on verification if he wants the prize of a commitment to freeze North Korea’s plutonium programme before the end of his term. In return, America would, at long last, remove North Korea from its blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism. That would pave the way for the country to join multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and embark on reforms.

The hawks will scream. But Yu Myung-hwan, South Korea’s foreign minister, says verification is the key issue, and without agreement “the six-party talks will collapse.” That, he worries, will deprive the world of the best means for “coaxing North Korea into our sphere”.

Even if agreement is reached, the next phase of the talks—persuading North Korea to give up its existing weapons—will be far harder. Mr Vershbow argues that whatever the doubts about Mr Kim’s intention to give up his weapons, the six-party process offers the only means of “getting him to change his cost-benefit analysis”.

AFP

Six-part danceSo the question-mark over the six-party process is whether giving up nuclear weapons and coming out of his shell are compatible with the survival of Mr Kim’s regime. Mr Vershbow says coyly that the collapse of North Korea’s regime is not his government’s policy. China dreads such a collapse, which would risk releasing a flood of refugees and causing chaos along its border. South Korea’s “sunshine policy” vis-à-vis the north, launched by Kim Dae-jung a decade ago and continued by Roh Moo-hyun, aimed for engagement not in order to hasten collapse but rather to postpone it for as long as possible, using money and material aid—$500m in bribes alone, it turned out, for Mr Kim’s historic summit in 2000 with Kim Jong Il, and unconditional food aid under Mr Roh.

Mr Lee’s line is tougher. He came to office saying that aid should depend on progress in the six-party talks and even on human rights. That caused North Korea to throw a hissy fit and cut all communication with the south. Matters worsened in July, when a North Korean soldier shot dead a South Korean tourist at the Mount Kumgang resort, where the north earns much-needed hard currency. Still, government officials in the south expect North Korea to come back to the negotiating table. They too stress a policy of engagement and even predict that Mr Lee will hold a summit with Kim Jong Il before his term is out. Mr Lee is just as wary as his predecessors of a sudden implosion of the north.

Nightmare scenarios
Forecasting collapse of the north has been unfashionable ever since a flood of false predictions after the death in 1994 of Kim Il Sung, the country’s political and spiritual father since 1948. At the time most Western experts argued that Kim Jong Il utterly lacked his father’s legitimacy and could not last. Loyalty to Kim Il Sung had been forged by a guerrilla war against Japanese imperialists waged in Manchuria. In creating a state cult around himself, Kim blended communism with something that, with rich irony, most closely resembled Japan’s emperor system between the wars: he became a neo-Confucian sun king, the nation’s moral as well as political father.

In predicting that Kim Jong Il could not pull off the dynastic succession, the experts were wrong not just because the state retained its grip on all the instruments of repression to keep the masses in line; they also underestimated the moral authority of the Kim family among the ruling elite. The band of Manchurian guerrillas who had attended the state’s birth appeared bound by almost chivalric oaths of fealty, trust and reciprocal obligation. These oaths passed to a second generation, and the families of that early band of brothers now occupy nearly every significant position in the state.

No one can claim to know whether the regime is capable of surviving succession to a third generation, but the odds are surely longer. Though the state retains its monopoly of force, people at the bottom are now less frightened. At the top, chivalric ties are presumably getting weaker.

If Mr Kim has a succession plan, he has not announced it. His children do not appear to be the stuff of leadership. In 2001 his eldest son was caught entering Japan on a false passport in the hope of visiting Tokyo Disneyland; he later moved to Macau, China’s casino enclave. Of the two younger sons, still in their 20s, all that is known is that one is obsessed by Eric Clapton. Perhaps Mr Kim, an ardent family man, does not want a family successor. After all, the consequences of giving up power are certainly not a comfortable retirement in Monte Carlo. The North Korean gulag and the regime’s willingness to let 1m people die of hunger rather than loosen its grip on power amount to crimes against humanity.

Speculation has its bounds. Yet if collapse came, it could come quickly, posing a huge challenge for the region’s powers. It is assumed that South Korean troops would rush in to provide humanitarian help and restore law and order, but it is not clear how they would deal with factional fighting, or with floods of North Koreans heading south. American special forces would presumably be dropped in to secure weapons of mass destruction, but where would they look for them? Meanwhile, faced with refugees pouring over its own border, China might send in its own army. As Bill Emmott, a former editor of The Economist, puts it in his latest book, “Rivals”: “There would be little time to think, to discuss, to calculate. It is at such moments that a move by one country can be misinterpreted, or that a country might decide that it has to move quickly if it is to move at all and by doing so could miscalculate and bring the great powers into conflict. It is all an extremely risky thought.” Particularly so since, as Chinese, American and South Korean officials admit in private, so far they have drawn up only the sketchiest contingency plans among themselves.