Towards the
End of Confrontation In Korea
By JONATHAN POWER
The disintegration of the last
Stalinist redoubt continues apace--and is still way ahead of
schedule. That is if one assumes, as the world did a mere
ten years ago, that even the "liberal" Soviet satellite
states, such as Poland and Hungary, would not turn to
democracy for another generation. The fall of one man
communism before the end of the millennium, now probably
imminent in North Korea, could not have been supposed until
we learnt by living experience how friable the Berlin Wall
really was.
Yet both South Korea and the U.S.
behave for far too much of the time as if North Korea is
still a behemoth to be feared, a piece of reinforced
concrete that is impenetrable to the ideas and influences of
the outside world. No one in their right mind, remembering
the Korean War and the subsequent years of terrifying sabre
rattling and terrorism by the Pyongyang leadership, is
advocating a lowering of the guard but that does not excuse
the chances missed for diminishing the intensity of the
conflict. On many occasions there were possibilities for
diluting the paranoia of paramount leader, Kim il Sung, and
his son, the present leader, and for edging North Korea into
a more liberal minded world. Often, in fact, policy has
served to exacerbate the differences, harden North Korea's
intransigeance and close the door to dialogue and the
opportunities for evolution.
The outside reporting that has been
allowed in North Korea the last 12 unusual months seems to
come to a unanimous conclusion: here is a state on its
knees. It is Orwell's "Animal Farm" transmuted into Orwell's
"Down and Out in Paris." Both industrial and agricultural
production are on the edge of oblivion and even the much
feared military is depleted of modern weaponry and
demoralized by lack of training and resources. Its nuclear
industry that had western strategists screwing themselves
into contortions to prove that it was able to produce bombs
and missiles that would wreak havoc far and wide is, in
reality, in the infant stage. At the most, North Korea can
produce only basic bombs (and even that is unclear) and
certainly not ones that could be delivered any significant
distance accurately, say to Japan, on the nose of a rocket.
Incredible though it now seems, it is
only three years ago that the U.S., frightened out of its
mind by this crumbling pygmy, went to the brink of war.
President Bill Clinton ordered the dispatch of substantial
military reinforcements to South Korea and the Pentagon
prepared plans to attack the North's nuclear facilities.
From the wings, former presidential national security
advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and former CIA director, Robert
Gates, advocated a quick bombing of the North's nuclear
reprocessing plant.
Only former president Jimmy Carter's
last minute intervention pulled Clinton's chestnuts out of
what could have been (if Robert Gates was correct) a nuclear
fire. He went to Pyongyang, met Kim Il Sung face to face,
denounced his country's own attitudes and persuaded Kim to
freeze his nuclear programme.
If Clinton had been wiser he would
never have permitted the situation to spin so out of control
that Carter's rescue mission became necessary. He allowed
himself to be maneuvered by the more intransigent,
confrontational elements in the American body politic and by
South Korea's national security apparatus, still stuck in
its 1950s time warp, into grossly misreading Kim's
intentions. As Leon Sigal makesplain in his new book,
"Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea,"
"at any time from 1992 on North Korea could have extracted
enough plutonium to make five or six nuclear weapons. It did
not. For a country supposedly hell-bent on bomb making its
self-restraint seems difficult to explain."
North Korea's bluster was probably no
more than an attempt to trade in its putative nuclear weapon
program for what it needed more--security and political and
economic ties with the U.S. For a while under President
George Bush, the White House appeared to understand this and
began to woo the North. It withdrew America's nuclear
weapons from the South and it cancelled for a year the
large-scale military exercises it regularly conducted with
the South. But Seoul's military president, Roh Tae Woo, kept
the pressure on Washington to go no further and even
compelled Washington to back track just as the White House
had braced itself to make some useful pledges to Pyongyang.
With Clinton newly installed in Washington and the Roh
presidency entering its last days South Korea stepped up the
tactics of confrontation, precipitating the nuclear
crisis.
The hard liners in Seoul have
continued most of the time to set the pace, apart from the
brief interlude of Carter's magnificent diplomacy. Roh's
successor, Kim Young Sam, although democratically elected,
won only 40% of the vote and has never felt strong enough to
loosen the bonds with the military and security services.
Now, however, with elections only two months away it looks
as if the South may produce in Kim Dae Jung, the front
runner, a president who would end the conservatives'
neck-lock on South Korea's foreign policy.
This, together with the continuous
deterioration of the North's economy and, hopefully, the
maturing learning curve of the Clinton foreign policy team,
offers at long last light at the end of the Korean tunnel.
The reward for clever diplomacy will be the end of Stalinism
and militarism in the North even quicker than is bound to
happen anyway.
November 5,
1997, LONDON
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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