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Our Game With North Korea
Commentary Magazine

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by Arthur Waldron, Ph.D
Published on February 1st, 2004
ARTICLES

FOR THE world generally, few possibilities can be more frightening than that North Korea will succeed in developing nuclear weapons. Possession of such an arsenal will certainly accelerate the existing arms race in Asia, tipping the balance in favor of similar initiatives in South Korea and, most importantly, Japan. That is worrying enough; but matters would not end there. Pyongyang is a crucial node in the international network of proliferation that already includes China and Russia as primary providers, Pakistan and North Korea as active disseminators, and Iran and perhaps Saudi Arabia among the final consumers. No less unsettling is the prospect that North Korea will sell nuclear weapons to international terrorist groups.

Clearly this is an issue of profound concern to the United States--though not, it must be added, one that we can resolve on our own, or for which credible military options exist. Actual strikes against North Korea pose a real danger of unleashing a second Korean war in which tens of millions might die. But diplomatic approaches are no more promising: people who know North Korea do not believe that state will ever give up its nuclear weapons, no matter who asks or who threatens.

If no good solutions exist to these problems, there are nevertheless mistakes that can be avoided and ways to make even a fragile peace more likely. Unfortunately, the trend of American diplomacy since the end of last summer shows signs of veering in the wrong direction. Even as talks with Pyongyang were collapsing amid recriminations, the President assured us that a peaceful negotiated solution was possible and perhaps even not all that difficult. When North Korea threatened a nuclear test, Colin Powell noted, "They've said things like that before." Whatever may account for such inappropriate-seeming nonchalance, there is now a detectable shift in U.S. policy away from our initial demands for North Korea's actual disarmament toward the possible acceptance of something less.

That is exactly the trajectory followed in its time by the Clinton administration, with disastrous results. Unless this trend is corrected, we may find that what we thought was the road to peace in Korea leads not to resolution but to an ever more nightmarish future.

ALL STARTED bravely enough. At the outset of George W. Bush's presidency, our clearly articulated goal was to bring the North Koreans to the negotiating table and force them to accept the dismantling of Pyongyang's nuclear program "in a verifiable and irreversible way." Then, in the President's State of the Union Address of 2002, North Korea was named along with Iran and Iraq as a member of the "Axis of Evil." By April 2003, with U.S. forces occupying Baghdad, the Bush policy appeared to be bearing fruit: as representatives of the United States and North Korea met in Beijing with the Chinese, the British Guardian newspaper reported that "the swift U.S.-led victory in Iraq had prompted North Korea to talk."

By mid-summer, however, with control in Iraq now looking like a shaky proposition, Washington was seeming much less invincible. A few weeks before the opening in Beijing of six-party talks involving the United States, China, Russia, both Koreas, and Japan, Under Secretary of State John Bolton delivered, in Seoul, a rigorous analysis blaming the nuclear problem squarely on North Korea's Kim Jong II, whom he described correctly as a "tyrannical dictator." But then the White House distanced itself from its own diplomat's remarks, and Bolton, the specialist theoretically in charge of our arms-control policy, was soon playing a less than central role in setting strategy. This was a portent of things to come.

On August 27, the six-party talks, on which Washington was evidently staking great hopes, got under way. They were, by all accounts, far from smooth: tensions were high in the negotiating chambers, and a seemingly unbreakable deadlock quickly developed between, on the one hand, Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington and, on the other, Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang. The only product of the talks was a vague agreement to convene again.

In Washington, little was said publicly. But, in spite of the powerful evidence provided by the talks themselves that a diplomatic solution would likely prove elusive if not impossible, the search for such a solution intensified. Hard-line rhetoric was out, and our negotiating position began to wobble.

Domestic politics was probably the decisive factor. Understandably, the administration was not eager to let North Korea join Iraq as a possible target for the President's Democratic rivals, among whom the greatest traction was being achieved by those most critical of Bush's foreign policy. The changed circumstances then led to two potentially treacherous steps. First, the United States subtly softened its position on an important North Korean condition: we would no longer reject outright Pyongyang's demand for a unilateral security guarantee, but rather were suggesting that such a guarantee might in fact be provided, if in a multilateral fashion. Second, we began an utterly transparent attempt to woo China over to our side and to enlist Beijing's good offices in pressuring the North Koreans.

For its part, North Korea did nothing to relax its stance. During the talks, it had spoken of carrying out a possible nuclear test. In early October, it announced that it had extracted enough plutonium from reactor fuel rods to produce perhaps five bombs in addition to the one or two it was already believed to possess. Later, Pyongyang threatened to initiate a war if further talks either broke down or became indefinitely prolonged.

American allies watched this drama closely. Japanese in particular were disturbed. To the influential commentator Yoichi Funabashi, it seemed more than possible that the U.S. might end up accepting the North Korean nuclear capability as fact, just as it had done previously in the cases of India and Pakistan. "When that happens," he wrote, "only Japan will face the danger of being totally exposed." A commentator on Australian radio speculated that unless Japan's absolute requirement of North Korean nuclear disarmament were met, it might well be compelled to regard the American guarantee to provide nuclear deterrence to Tokyo as worthless, and proceed to "develop the bomb in a matter of months." The speed with which Japan seemed to be breaking a longstanding taboo on discussion of its own nuclear potential was a clear sign of how rattled American allies had become. Although the American ambassador to Japan protested that "There is a diplomatic solution to the situation in North Korea," his reassurance was hardly reassuring.

WHEN BUSH woos, he does not stint. In late October, the Financial Times of London featured a photograph of the American President and China's Hu Jintao; they were dressed in identical Chinese costumes, and they were smiling and shaking hands. On December 8, the President, in a muddled statement the exact meaning of which is still being construed, warned the democratically elected president of Taiwan not to hold any referendum on future relations with China to which China itself objected. At the same time, Bush referred to China and the United States as, according to the New York Times, '"partners in diplomacy' committed to stamping out terrorism and fostering stability on the Korean peninsula."

In return, then, for our more or less explicit agreement with Chinese demands concerning Taiwan, we were evidently hoping that China would somehow bell the North Korean cat. Quite apart from the apparent undermining of a friend, did this make sense? The answer is no--not least because, rightly or wrongly, Beijing itself is far less concerned about the North Korean nuclear program than are the United States and its friends and allies.

North Korea is one of the dwindling band of real Communist dictatorships. It is also the regime for which China sacrificed almost a million of its own soldiers in the Korean war. China's leaders continue to commemorate that conflict not as the avoidable tragedy it was but rather as a great Chinese victory over American imperialism. What is certainly true is that, since the death of Kim II Sung and the end of the Soviet Union, North Korea has become more dependent on China than ever before.

Surely, then (one can hear the logical response in Washington), Beijing realizes how dangerous North Korean nuclear weapons are, and surely this confirms the wisdom of cooperating with Beijing to solve the problem? Alas, things are not so simple. Yes, the North Korean nuclear program is a threat, including preeminently to Beijing. Some Chinese understand this: a delegation of Chinese scholars told their American colleagues in October that "North Korea's nuclear program is a greater danger to world stability than the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq." But other Chinese disagree. Near year's end, the Chinese foreign minister, Li Zhaox-ing, was quoted as stating that "we believe the Korean issue is between the DPRK [North Korea] and the United States. China is merely to play a mediating role, actively and patiently." Still others evidently think that China has a positive interest in a North Korea that creates trouble for the United States and its friends.

In any event, in the years of the "agreed framework" during the mid- to late 1990's, Beijing declined to share with successive American administrations the knowledge it almost certainly possessed of North Korea's clandestine nuclear program, and in the most recent round of talks it has consistently named Washington, not Pyongyang, as the problem. Evidently, those now setting the course in Beijing see an advantage to drawing in the United States, South Korea, Japan, and other powers as guarantors of a status quo in North Korea that, while almost certainly not in their interests, is thought to be in China's. In the meantime, Washington's all-too-obvious hope that Beijing will ride to the rescue has given China a degree of leverage on unrelated issues that it is exploiting to the full.

BUT LET us suppose that Beijing were to decide differently, and that, for reasons of its own security, it did see a need to stop Pyongyang's nuclear program. What could it do? Unfortunately, not much. Contrary to what some seem to imagine, Beijing cannot simply tell Pyongyang what to do. Koreans know themselves; they are particularly mindful of the fact that, under the Qing dynasty, they were a Chinese vassal state, and they intend to be one never again. As for bringing pressure to bear, China might, of course, halt all economic aid to Pyongyang--but this would probably cause the collapse of the regime and send millions of impoverished North Koreans fleeing into China. Or Beijing could conceivably attempt to rearrange the North Korean political leadership, perhaps by means of a military coup--which would probably fail and would certainly alienate, for a very long time, Koreans both North and South.

Might China actually use force? That seems most unlikely. A straightforward attack would probably lead to a ghastly and unsuccessful war, with South Korea perhaps drawn in on Pyongyang's side. Special-operations forces? Such commandos would have little more chance of actually finding, let alone destroying, North Korean weapons than would Americans, and they would be every bit as likely to be cornered and killed in the maze of well-defended tunnels that crisscross North Korea.

TRY AS we may, then, to persuade China to deliver us from our predicament, we must consider the likelihood that it will not, and therefore what our own approach should be. At the moment, that approach rests on two words, both beginning with "d": diplomacy and defense.

The diplomatic scenario has been spelled out in minute detail in scores of places, from policy papers to the pages of foreign-policy journals like Foreign Affairs. It boils down to the hope that North Korean nuclear and missile capabilities can be removed through an intricate dance in which trust is gradually established and the regime in Pyongyang then proves willing, through a series of ever more consequential exchanges, to give up its military programs entirely in return for security guarantees and massive aid.

The Clinton administration carried out just such a dance. It led to the 1994 "agreed framework," which provided for disarmament in phases, with the West supplying aid that included fuel oil and two nuclear reactors ostensibly not capable of producing weapons. "While that was all going on," the long-time Asia specialist Richard Solomon recently attested on the PBS News Hour, "we thought the situation was improving." But, unbeknownst to the White House, "the North Koreans had started a covert nuclear program . . . and the dilemma that the Bush administration is facing now is how to deal with a regime that repeatedly violates or doesn't implement agreements they've reached." Diplomacy, in other words, failed.

What about defense? Every strategist knows that, by itself, even a good defense is not enough. But the sad fact is that, while their Chinese and North Korean adversaries boast impressive offensive capabilities, America's democratic allies in Asia are limited to a not very robust defense and to the hope that the United States will step in, at massive cost, to save them from any attack. This sort of imbalance is highly dangerous, and invites testing.

South Korea was saved from Communist domination some 50 years ago by dint of much bloodshed, including the blood of Americans. Today its capital, Seoul, faces a life-and-death threat not just from the missiles and nuclear weapons under discussion here but even more urgently from huge numbers of North Korean artillery pieces, em-placed so as to be able to destroy that city simply with barrages of conventional munitions. This threat has existed for years. Against it, Seoul has no defense, although it is beginning to develop, with our reluctant acquiescence, a deterrent force of conventional ballistic missiles with a range limited to North Korea.

Japan's security is similarly tenuous. For all its economic and technological might, Japan does not possess on its own the military wherewithal to counter the threats growing in the lands and waters around it, not the threat from North Korea, and certainly not the one from China.

Taiwan, which outstrips Australia in population and number of men under arms, and is only slightly smaller in GDP, is likewise powerless to strike back against attack. In its case, such an attack would come from a China that has targeted on it some 496 ballistic missiles, already in place.

When Japan and Taiwan ask us how they should react to the steady and threatening buildup of offensive weapons against them, our response has been: "Don't worry, we are developing defensive systems that will stop all of those missiles before they can hurt you." Then we call on them to pour their resources into this enterprise. But the enterprise will never work, or at least not completely. Like its close analogue, anti-submarine warfare, missile defense can be effective, but it can never be 100-percent effective. If one North Korean Nodong missile of the type currently in service were to slip through the missile-defense shield that Japan has just decided to begin building, and were it to hit, say, one of Japan's 53 nuclear generating stations, even with a conventional warhead, the result would be disaster.

Nor is the United States itself capable of stopping the ballistic-missile threat that already exists in Asia. Suppose that, for some reason, North Korea or China began launching the missiles each now possesses. What could we do, other than fire missiles back and thus catastrophically escalate the war while inviting attack on the continental United States? Even if we were to send both the entire U.S. Navy and Air Force into Asia, such deployments, however massive, would be powerless to stop the missiles or prevent the damage they would inflict. Worse still, U.S. forces would themselves become targets of missiles, resulting in a wider war of a scale and destructiveness that is difficult to imagine.

Our own security depends on a balance of power in Asia, to which our alliances with Japan and South Korea are crucial. Yet even as the conventional and nuclear capabilities of their adversaries grow alarmingly, the United States is unable credibly to defend either of those two treaty allies, or our democratic friend Taiwan, and neither can they defend themselves on their own. This fact imperils the alliances themselves, as it would any alliance. It is no accident that our two closest historical allies, France and Britain, have both insisted on maintaining their own, entirely autonomous nuclear forces--as has Israel.

THIS BRINGS us back to China. In effect, Beijing is seeking to use America's current difficulties to shift the balance of power in its favor. In recent decades China has repeatedly sought a mul-tipolar global arrangement, one in which it could amplify its power by belonging to no alliance itself but maneuvering opportunistically as circumstances dictated. The United States and its allies currently prevent Beijing from doing this as much as it would like, but now the American hope for a Chinese role in "fixing" Korea has created an opportunity to practice a recommendation first made by the great strategist Sun Zi some two-and-a-half millennia ago:fajiao, "attack alliances."

We, for our part, have played into China's hands by increasingly assessing our moves in the Korea negotiations more by the reactions they elicit from our potential adversaries, namely Pyongyang and Beijing, than by the effect they have on our allies Tokyo and Seoul and on Taiwan. Hence the danger: that the Bush administration, facing powerful political pressure to "do something" about the problem, will be tempted to cease insisting on a treaty that will actually serve the security needs of our friends and allies. Rather, we may settle for another sham treaty--one that has been concluded in proper multilateral fashion and bears the signatures of the leading states but that at best defers the central and critical issue of North Korean disarmament until some unspecified point in the future.

So far, at least, the Bush White House seems not to have stepped over this fateful line. The main evidence is the clear difficulty in arranging a second meeting of the six-party negotiations, initially announced for December 2003, later for January 2004. As host of the talks, China wanted at least the appearance of success, and so it reportedly drafted a plan according to which the United States and its allies would assist North Korea diplomatically and economically at once, receiving in return vague assurances of disarmament somewhere down the line. But at year's end Washington had not bitten, instead continuing to insist on "verifiable and irreversible" disarmament.

This was encouraging, but temporary. The problem remains very much in place, and so does the temptation for the White House to continue on the path of embracing China. If in fact we do end up accepting a sham treaty, the trust upon which our alliances rest will be shattered and the alliances themselves, crucial to our own security, jeopardized. Without a credible structure to secure them, our allies will have little choice but to try to ensure their security by the uncoordinated and unilateral development of their own potent offensive capabilities. The result would be the disintegration of the fundamental structures on which depend both regional and American security, and their replacement by an international free-for-all.

WHAT THEN should we do? The answer has two parts, one general, the other specific to Korea.

In Asia as in Europe, America has a primary interest in peace. That is best assured by a local balance of power, one designed to prevent the outbreak of a small war that can grow to involve us (like the Nazi invasion of Poland, or the Japanese annexation of Manchuria). Maintaining such a balance involves a third word beginning with "d," albeit one that is scarcely ever heard in discussions of the North Korean issue: deterrence.

States are prevented from attacking others not by economic ties, not by treaties or confidence-building measures, and not even by advanced missile defenses, but by fear--fear that the country to be attacked possesses the capacity to inflict unacceptable damage on the attacker. That is a capacity available to both our potential adversaries, China and North Korea, but denied by conscious American policy to our allies and friends.

The most prudent thing for us to do now is therefore to strengthen the deterrent, which is to say the offensive, powers of our allies and, by creating a regional balance, greatly increase the odds against war. This must be done with steadiness and deliberation, and above all cooperatively, but essentially it means working with our friends and allies to develop a genuinely shared offensive capability such as NATO possessed during the cold war. The consequent ability to negotiate from strength would almost certainly increase the possibility of a peaceful solution.

This, however, is not a popular position these days. Rather, we are regularly told that instead of building strength, we should practice military restraint, in which case the Chinese and North Koreans will assuredly reciprocate by restraining themselves in turn. Just so, during the cold war, many voices suggested that the appropriate response to the Soviet missile buildup was to limit our own military, thus setting an example that Moscow would emulate.

The prescription did not work then and is unlikely to work now. The USSR continued to build forces even after it had matched what we possessed, and China and North Korea are behaving similarly. Far from mutual restraint, today we face an arms race in Asia that, by shifting the balance of power, brings with it the possibility that the United States will be forced actively to intervene, just as it had to do on the Korean peninsula so many decades ago at such great and unnecessary cost.

As for Korea specifically, it is important to grasp that the North, upon which our attention is tightly focused, is not the primary source of the new and dangerous military imbalance. The real source is China. Hence, the fundamental strategic question is not whether North Korea will be disarmed but whether China, which already possesses ample nuclear and missile forces, will be balanced--by the United States, by Japan, by India, or by a coalition of democratic countries that may now be coming into being.

We should also understand that when it comes to Korea, U.S. and Chinese interests are very much at odds. Here, the fundamental issue is the unification of North and South Korea, a goal to which all Koreans would seem to aspire and which we should support. At roughly 84,000 square miles, a united Korea would be a bit smaller than West Germany before reunification and more than half the size of Japan. Its population and economic power would be formidable, and so would be its military, combining the strongest components of today's North and South and possessing strong land and air forces, ballistic missiles, and most likely, nuclear weapons. With the fleet of advanced German diesel submarines that South Korea is now building, a united Korea would have the potential of controlling not only the narrow waters leading to the Sea of Japan from the south but also, and even more importantly, the critical sea routes that lead from the Pacific Ocean and the Yellow Sea into the Bohai Gulf--to Tianjin, the port upon which Beijing itself relies.

Not surprisingly, China fears Korean reunification and seeks to enlist us to prevent it. If we make the mistake of focusing too hard on the nuclear issue and ignore the larger strategic context, Beijing may succeed in getting us to help maintain a divided Korea. Only by keeping the larger situation firmly in mind can we achieve our overriding interest in a regional balance of power. Toward that end, Korean reunification, provided that it is democratic, is something we should be encouraging, and during the period of its emergence we should seek to bring both Koreas closer to ourselves and our existing democratic allies and away from China.

If that is the desired goal, the risk is that the Bush administration may become so wrapped up in a relatively minor corner of the whole situation--Korea--that it will make sacrifices of genuinely major interest. If so, it will truly and disconcertingly be following the path of the Clinton administration during the eighteen months of crisis that culminated in the sham of the "agreed framework."

The situation of the two administrations is eerily similar, and so are the domestic political dynamics. President Clinton was reportedly so sobered by a briefing explaining the requirements of a military operation to end the North Korean program that he abandoned his formerly hard-line rhetoric and turned to negotiations whose outcome was worse than failure. President Bush, for his part, having taken an even harder line, finds himself in a position where the last thing he needs is a crisis in Northeast Asia. One may guess that his advisers are telling him (as Clinton's advisers told their President before) to solve the problem quickly--or, this being nigh-impossible, to create, speedily, the appearance of a solution or of a process leading to one.

There is, unfortunately, much to suggest that the White House is giving such counsels a hearing. For the sake of peace, we must hope that is not so.

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