North Korean
End Game
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- By the day the reports of the magnitude of the
famine now overwhelming North Korea become both more vivid
and more disturbing.
Yet, as is so often the case, Mao Zedong's dictum that
"power grows out of the barrel of a gun" has enough truth in
it to ask if the regime's hold on power is in serious
question. The regime could well survive whatever the cost in
human suffering and devastating economic decline, always
using as a stick to beat back the intrusions of the rest of
the world the threat of abrogating its nuclear freeze
agreement and adding nuclear weapons to its already sizeable
arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.
Yes or no. Is this how it will be, or will the regime
just collapse one night as it did in East Germany? It is an
unanswerable question and one can make a persuasive case
either way. Thus it would be unwise, not to say unrealistic,
to ask either South Korea or its intimate ally, the United
States, to lower its guard. The worst case scenario--a last
ditch attack on the south is a possible one and must be
prepared for. Indeed, it is continuously prepared for and
nothing extra needs to be done.
What is missing, however, is applied energy on the other
side of the equation--a set of policies that work on the
assumption that internal collapse has started, the
institutions that govern North Korea are rotten from the
inside out, that the leadership is seriously divided and
that, therefore, the outside world, in particular the U.S.,
can use its influence to bring the end to a quicker close,
with less pain to the people of North Korea and with less
danger to the world outside, in particular South Korea and
Japan.
It is American policy that has to be the pace-setter. yet
it is still too much bogged down in a Cold War mind-set. If
President Bill Clinton's advisors had had their way North
Korea's nuclear installations would have been bombed three
years ago--a dangerously counterproductive exercise that
would not have damaged the stores of bomb-grade plutonium if
they exist, since presumably the North Koreans hide them
deep underground.
Only former president Jimmy Carter's private intervention
pulled the Administration's chestnuts out of what could have
been a terrible fire, one that might have made South Korea's
capital, Seoul, a literal ruin. Yet Carter's success in
engineering the nuclear freeze agreement has been undermined
all along, first by Congress's refusal at a critical point
to release the funds to pay for the oil promised in return
and, second, by the Administration itself not honouring its
commitment to end the economic embargo.
Right now the Administration is having a hard time even
implementing traditional U.S. famine policy--when there are
hungry mothers and children feed them. So far it has
weathered the attacks from the Republican right and from
South Korea and has given the United Nations World Food
Programme's relief efforts the aid it needs. But now it
faces renewed pressures to ensure that future food aid be
made contingent on the volatile on again, off again
political talks with the North Koreans in New York.
Washington's objective should be kept clear--to diffuse
by whatever means are at hand the isolationism of the
regime. Food is one means, talking is another but one
shouldn't be made dependent on the other.
It would help if Mr. Clinton would spell out how he sees
the situation. Once Congressional, media and public opinion
understood how down on its knees North Korea is then perhaps
they would be more reserved about pushing for another round
of knockout blows.
North Korea is essentially friendless. Moscow has
terminated its security agreement and now chooses to sell
its most advanced military equipment and technology to
Seoul. China has switched its main economic and political
interest from the north to the south.
Yet it doesn't seem to take much for Seoul and then
Washington to react in a Cold War Pavlovian manner every
time something upsets them. When last September the North
Koreans foolishly sent a submarine carrying 26 armed agents
into South Korean waters the previous conciliatory gestures
made by the North were simply forgotten, substantial though
they were--the curtailment of missile exports, allowing U.S.
airlines to cross the North's airspace and agreeing to
cooperate in finding the remains of American servicemen
killed during the Korean war.
Subsequently, North Korea made an unprecedented public
apology for the submarine incident. Surely it is more than
clear that at least one powerful faction in the North's
divided leadership is seeking some sort of
rapprochement.
Mr. Clinton has to be more open to this accommodation if
he is to will it along. This means standing up to his
Republican critics--and that demands lifting U.S.
sanctions--and it means resisting the hardline elements, now
increasingly in the ascendancy in South Korea, who seek
nothing less than the total collapse of the northern
regime.
Boldly ploughing the furrow forward, whilst keeping up
the defenses in the rear, is the way most likely to succeed.
The present policy of inching forward, as if expecting a
booby trap at every turn, could all too easily end up
missing the opportunity that beckons. And then the U.S. will
have no choices. It may even end up being forced to go to
war.
April 30, 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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