We should expect serious trouble in Korea if the impending war with Iraq goes quickly and Saddam Hussein is overthrown. For the past two months North Korea has sought to get Washington's attention with a series of provocative moves, but the Bush administration has succeeded thus far in dragging its feet and delaying a serious response. The stage is thus set for the U.S. to deal with the "axis of evil" serially: first Iraq, then North Korea, then Iran.
The current crisis is a virtual rerun of events that transpired a decade ago-played on fast-forward by the North since early December. In 1991 the administration of George H.W. Bush became concerned about North Korea's graphite nuclear reactor complex at Yongbyon, but could do nothing about it until the U.S. cleared its own nuclear weapons out of South Korea. Bush pulled the nukes out in the fall of 1991 and inaugurated the first-ever high level talks with Pyongyang. In came Bill Clinton, however, who was focused on the economy and paid no attention to North Korea. To grab Clinton's attention, accordingly, six weeks after his inauguration the North declared that International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors were doing the bidding of U.S. intelligence, announced its withdrawal from the NPT, and stated that any sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council would be "an act of war."
This crisis lasted 18 months, reaching fever pitch in June 1994 when Clinton nearly mounted a preemptive strike on Yongbyon. Fortunately Jimmy Carter jumped into the fray, gaining a commitment to a total freeze on the graphite reactor. Soon the IAEA came back in, sealed off the reactor, encased the fuel rods in concrete casks, and sat there watching the facility for the past eight years.
The North began the current rapidly-unfolding repeat in December. It again kicked the inspectors out, castigated the IAEA for being a tool of Washington, announced its withdrawal from the NPT, began loading new fuel rods, and said that any Security Council sanctions would be interpreted as "a declaration of war."1 But it has stopped short of opening the plutonium casks, the clearest "red line" that might again provoke a preemptive American strike at the facility.
It was also in December that the South Korean people decisively broke with the existing political system and the elites within it that date back to the Korean War, by electing Roh Moo Hyun, a lawyer with a courageous record of defense of labor leaders and human rights activists during the darkest days of the military dictatorship in the 1980s. His election was boosted by a burgeoning movement among younger Koreans against the seemingly endless American military presence in the South, conducted in successive, truly massive, and dignified candlelight processions along the grand boulevard in front of the U.S. Embassy in Seoul.
Roh has since made clear his dissatisfaction with Bush's policies toward the North and his desire to solve the problem through dialogue, and perhaps as a consequence the initial meetings between his advance team and Bush officials in early February did not go well: indeed, according to Howard W. French of The New York Times, some insiders described the visit as "a near disaster." As one American participant put it, "I sense major trouble ahead in the relationship. The impression I got is that for Roh and his generation, the ultimate goal is to reunite their country and get us off the peninsula." Thus Bush finds himself having to manage two very difficult relationships on the Korean peninsula, amid the rapidly-building momentum toward war with Iraq.
The acute danger today, however, derives primarily from a combination of typical and predictable North Korean cheating and provocation, longstanding U.S. war plans to use nuclear weapons in the earliest stages of a new Korean War, Bush's new preventive war doctrine, and his loathing of Kim Jong Il and his regime. Bush's new doctrine conflates existing plans for the early use of nuclear weapons in a crisis started by North Korea, which have been standard operating procedure for the U.S. military in Korea for decades, with the apparent determination to attack states like North Korea simply because they would like to have nuclear weapons such as those that the U.S. still amasses by the thousands. Moreover, Bush seems bent on "regime change" in North Korea. Last August Bush declared to veteran Washington insider Bob Woodward his preference for "toppling" the North Korean regime.3 According to New Yorker investigative journalist Seymour Hersh (the most well-informed reporter in Washington since September 11th), a participant in White House strategy meetings said of Kim Jong Il, "Bush and Cheney want that guy's head on a platter. Don't be distracted by all this talk about negotiations. There will be negotiations, but they have a plan, and they are going to get this guy after Iraq. He's their version of Hitler." The North Koreans follow these stories, of course, and in a highly unusual commentary published in early February, the North Korean party newspaper stated that "It is foolish for the U.S. to think that we will sit idle with folded arms to wait until it gives orders for a preemptive strike."
So, expect trouble in the near term because of these grave threats of preemption and counter-preemption, and because of the big gap between the incoming administration of Roh Moo Hyun and George W. Bush over how to deal with North Korea. In the long run the only way to solve this nuclear problem is for the U.S. to return to direct and meaningful talks with Pyongyang. In other words Roh Moo Hyun's conciliatory position is correct, and he is supported in this position by all the relevant parties: Japan, China, Russia, and the European Union. It is only the Bush administration that is isolated on how to deal with the North Korean nuclear problem. But it has been isolated on war with Iraq, too. Those seeking to prevent that war should redouble their efforts, because Iraq appears to presage a series of preventive wars.
Bruce Cumings teaches at the University of Chicago. His book, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations, has recently appeared in paperback, and contains an extended analysis of the first crisis with North Korea. (March 7, 2003)
<http://www.asahi.com/english/asianet/column/eng_030307.html> *****
Bruce Cumings: <http://history.uchicago.edu/new/faculty/cumings.html> & <http://history.uchicago.edu/faculty/cumings.html>.
Bruce Cumings, _Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations_, Duke University Press (Cloth, 1999/Paperback, 2002), <http://www.dukeupress.edu/books/C_bk_authors.shtml>.