Archive for Sunshine

North Korea’s cash-for-summit demands put 2010 attacks in a new light

March 15, 2013 Appeasement, Cheonan Incident, North-South, Sunshine, Terrorism (NK), Yeonpyeong Attack No comments

WERE THE 2010 ATTACKS North Korea’s way of making good on extortion?  Stephan Haggard, not widely know for his hard-line views, cites an article in the Chosun Ilbo revealing that Kim Jong Il wanted a summit with Lee Myung Bak, but at a price.

The sticking point was money. How much? According to the Chosun Ilbo, $500-600 million in rice and fertilizer aid, which had effectively been cut from the first of the year, and perhaps some cash too; that was about the price that Kim Dae Jung paid for the first summit. Negotiations continued through November at Kaesong, when the North Korean delegation even presented a draft summit declaration including a resumption of aid.  [Stephan Haggard, Witness to Transformation]

The Chosun Ilbo story adds this important piece of evidence:

In January 2010, after the secret contacts ended and North Korea realized that it was impossible to extract any aid from Seoul, it vowed to launch a “holy retaliatory war” against the South and fired multiple artillery rounds at the Northern Limit Line, a de facto maritime border on the West Sea.  [Chosun Ilbo]

Haggard makes a compelling (if circumstantial) argument that the attacks were meant to demonstrate that North Korea’s extortion should be taken seriously. We now know that two months after Lee refused to pay up, North Korea sank the Cheonan.

Wondering if I could make this case a bit less circumstantial, I decided to consult my archives and see what else North Korea said and did in the months between Lee’s refusal to pay and the Cheonan attack. I didn’t find what I expected.  Although there were certainly some menacing acts and words by North Korea, the threats were nowhere near as extravagant or as frequent as those issued in early 2009, after President Lee cut off aid, and as President Obama warmed up his chair.  What’s interesting, however, is that in early 2010, North Korea was facing a severe popular backlash against The Great Confiscation.

In November, of course, North Korea followed up with the Yeonpyeong attack.

Let me take Haggard’s point a step further:  if he’s correct in his inference, this course of conduct would be a good fit for the legal definition of “international terrorism.”  Some commenters have suggested that the 2010 attacks — particularly the Cheonan attack — are not a basis (not that another is needed) to re-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, but fresh evidence of a motive to extort merits reconsideration. The key element is that the violent act must have been intended to influence South Korean government policy, and some of North Korea’s statements from 2009 provide additional evidence of North Korea’s intent.  The evidence is circumstantial, but somewhere in North Korea are people with direct evidence, and one of them is probably thinking about defecting.

The Stillbirth of Sunshine Lite

January 31, 2013 North-South, Sunshine No comments

SO PARK GEUN-HYE HASN’T EVEN BEEN INAUGURATED YET, and her plans to engage North Korea – she called them “trustpolitik” – are turning out just as I’d predicted they would, and just how Sung Yoon Lee predicted in the opening paragraphs of this piece — they’re being overcome by North Korea’s own plans:

Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has ordered his top military and party officials to take “substantial and high-profile important state measures” to retaliate against American-led United Nations sanctions on the country, the North’s official media reported Sunday.

North Korea did not clarify what those measures might be, but it referred to a series of earlier statements in which Mr. Kim’s government has threatened to launch more long-range rockets and conduct a third nuclear test to build an ability to “target” the United States.

Mr. Kim threw his weight …

Excuse me, did the New York Times correspondent just make a fat joke?

… behind his government’s escalating standoff with Washington when he called a meeting of top security and foreign affairs officials and gave an instruction in his name. He inherited the posts of supreme party and military leaders from his father, Kim Jong-il, who died in December 2011.  [N.Y. Times]

When North Korea blusters against the Security Council, remember that South Korea just began a term as a non-permanent member.  According to the Times, the North specifically said that its subjects “demand” a nuclear test.  It also explicitly threatened the United States, whose Presidents have kept it off the list of state sponsors of terrorism since October 11, 2008, to reward it for its progress toward nuclear disarmament.  Discuss among yourselves.

For what it’s worth, KCNA’s rhetoric is especially high-proof these days.  I’ll give you a Whitman’s sampler:

“A sledgehammer should be dealt to … [t]he U.S. imperialists.”

“Show of military force, not words, is needed to settle accounts with the U.S.“

“[T]he rhetoric of traitor Lee Myung Bak that ‘unification comes like an alley cat’, daring insult the supreme desire of the Korean nation. The Lee regime is a group of such human scum.”

“[T]he Lee Myung Bak group is kicking up anti-DPRK human rights racket. This is an act reminding one of a thief crying “Stop the Thief!“

“The DPRK already stated to the world that it will react to the confrontation elements’ provocation with immediate retaliatory blows and their war of aggression with a grand and just war for national reunification.  The group of traitors should heed this warning and not go indiscreet.  The provokers will meet only merciless retaliatory blows.”

My personal favorite, referring to annual U.S.-ROK joint exercises, “Those who dare provoke the just cause of the DPRK will meet death only.”  In related news, The Onion reports that all North Korea is in celebration at learning that Kim Jong Un is the first man to walk on the moon. This a serious North Korea-watching site.  One of the important public services we provide is to mark the increasingly treacherous boundary between reality and parody.

To be fair, North Korea’s rhetoric (as quoted here) explicitly refers to the Lee Administration, not Park, but does so in reference to policy decisions that Park presumably supports and probably intends to continue.

 

Many tea-leaf-readers who are skilled at parsing North Korean New Year’s messages for vague and cryptic hints of reform or cross-border thaws that the rest of us can’t quite see have a corresponding talent for overlooking or discounting the most direct, patent, and brazen threats from Pyongyang.  Don’t expect to see any deep analysis of these things at 38 North, although I do look forward to Joel Wit’s post explaining why the coming provocations and Park’s curtailment of cash flow to the North in response are somehow Park Geun Hye’s fault, or perhaps even Barack Obama’s.  My advice to Mr. Wit would be to wait about two years.  By then, memories will have faded, and some people will still want to believe it as much as ever.

My problem is that I remember too much.  I’ve watched these cycles repeat themselves enough to see patterns.  The pattern I see here is of a North Korea that ramps up its provocations when new U.S. and ROK administrations come into office. The long-received conventional wisdom held that North wanted better relations with the U.S. and South Korea, and was (however cautiously) open to engagement, the expansion of trade, and economic integration.  Years of evidence do not support that view, which is why its remaining advocates are now probably a minority among North Korea watchers.*

In fact, the evidence really suggests that North Korea intentionally frames its relationships with newly elected administrations around provocations.  You can debate whether that’s to extort or to create the safety of distance.  I don’t think it has to be one or the other.  Richardson once called this “strategic disengagement,” meaning that North Korea uses provocations to limit foreign interaction.  I’ve always seen considerable merit in that, and I would add that the North calibrates international tension just enough to maintain that level of trade needed to keep a modest amount of regime-sustaining hard currency flowing in.  This makes sense to me, because I’ve never believed North Korea was interested in engagement for any purpose other than to fund a few high-priority projects and lifestyles.  Its tolerance for any particular interaction is proportional to a series of factors, including the economic benefit to be gained, its own need for hard currency, and the degree to which the “cultural pollution” associated with those interactions can be controlled.

Yet although some have (perversely, in my view) constructed arguments blaming Lee Myung Bak for the deterioration of North-South relations, the odd thing about this is that North-South trade actually increased during Lee’s term, although some kinds of higher-profile engagement were curtailed.  North Korea felt the need, and also the ability, to attack the South militarily without losing this key source of revenue.  The scary thing about this?  North Korea can only calibrate these tensions as carefully as it does by maintaining a great deal of insider knowledge of how the South Korean government thinks and reacts.  North Korea seems to have sunk the Cheonan and shelled Yeongpyeong secure in the knowledge that South Korea wouldn’t close down Kaesong.  Ilshimhue must have been just the tip of the iceberg.

——————–

* The majority, which includes many who have lost hope in Sunshine, is harder to characterize.  Mostly, I see a few gloating hard-liners mixing uneasily with disillusioned ex-Sunshiners who still hope, against their better judgment, for something they don’t really believe in.  They’re mostly waiting for the next shoe to drop.  Most of them are frank enough to admit that they don’t know what to say anymore.

Update, 5 Feb 2013:  The Daily NK reports that the state has begun its anti-Park demonization campaign:

The source added, “He stated that the new Park Geun Hye administration wants to start a war with us, so people from every organ, enterprise and Worker and Peasant Red Guard unit must prepare to meet the threat. He emphasized that the people must be on guard at all times and stay prepared to respond to any provocation.”

I often suspect that the content of the regime’s external propaganda is different from what the regime tells its people domestically.

 

Happy New Year, Now Pay Up

January 3, 2013 North-South, Sunshine No comments

Those who read only headlines will believe that Kim Jong Un has declared peace with South Korea. Those who read on, and who know anything of the background to the story, will see that Kim Jong Un’s New Year’s Speech is a demand for Park Geun-Hye to resume massive financial aid and make territorial concessions to the North, in line with what Roh Moo-Hyun agreed in his 2007 going-out-of-business summit.

It’s debatable whether the message was really all that conciliatory.  Kim, whose country has launched two major military attacks and multiple terrorist attacks against South Korea since 2010, called on “anti-reunification forces” in South Korea to cease their hostility toward the North.  Good to know.  As Reuters’s Jack Kim notes, any mention of North Korea’s nuclear programs was “conspicuously absent” from the speech.  In fact, the speech is more demand than offer:

Kim on Tuesday asked for a détente — but with prerequisites that the conservative Park will be reluctant to agree to. To promote inter-Korean relations and hasten unification, Kim said, both sides must implement joint agreements signed off years ago by liberal, pro-engagement presidents in Seoul. Those agreements call for, among other things, economic cooperation between the countries, high-level government dialogue, and the creation of a special “cooperation” zone in the Yellow Sea, where the North and South spar over a maritime border.

Park, who takes office next month, has said she’ll resume humanitarian exchanges and small-scale economic projects with the North — efforts that were shuttered under outgoing hard-liner Lee Myung-bak. But Park promises to hold off on major economic cooperation unless the North disassembles its nuclear weapons program, something Pyongyang says it will never do.  [WaPo, Chico Harlan]

The terms ostensibly agreed in 2007 are worth rereading, if only to remind yourself just how dangerously naive Roh was, and to take stock of how many of the terms the North has since violated.  But what did Roh actually give up?  During South Korea’s most recent presidential election, there were persistent reports that Roh (perhaps with opposition candidate and former Roh aid Moon Jae-In’s knowledge) compromised the integrity of the Northern Limit Line, the de facto maritime extension of the DMZ in the Yellow Sea.  The fact that the conservative press pushed the story is suspect, but part of the reason it became a major issue is that it rings true.  Roh’s associates deny that they agreed to give up the NLL, but concede that they discussed creating a “a peace zone in the West (Yellow) Sea,” under which North Korea would have gained access to most of the disputed waters south of the NLL and west of Incheon, plus the Han Estuary.

Oddly enough, Roh’s people say there are no records of exactly what they discussed with the North Koreans in that regard, and Roh himself wasn’t immediately available for comment, so the precise meaning of “peace zone” will now be open to different interpretations.  Even if Park knew what this North Korean demand meant, she could never accede to it.  It would mean giving up South Korea’s control over some of its most important fishing waters, and one of its more important sea lanes. As a general matter, Park supports aid and expanding trade with the North, but not without certain preconditions.  The North will not compromise its demand or accept preconditions.  So far, in other words, events are unfolding just about the way I’d expected.

And of course, as Sung Yoon Lee points out, none of this means the North isn’t about to do something nasty.  Some analysts continue to speculate that North Korea is about to test a nuke.  Their evidence looks a little flimsy to me, but with the U.N. still failing to agree on any reaction whatsoever to North Korea’s missile test — defenders of Susan Rice, take note — the North may see this as the perfect moment to continue perfecting better and smaller nukes.

Park, Lee, and Obama all had big plans to “engage” North Korea. North Korea had other plans.

December 20, 2012 Appeasement, North-South, Sunshine 5 comments

Robert links to some polling data suggesting the pleasantly surprising fact that not only did North Korea’s missile test fail to swing votes toward Moon Jae-in, the ideological successor and former Chief of Staff to arch-appeaser Roh Moo-Hyun, it may have caused more conservative voters to flock to the polls to vote for Park (or against Moon).  If those voters expected Park to govern as a hard-liner, however, they’re projecting. Park didn’t run as a hard-liner in this election; in fact, she avoided creating much daylight between herself and Moon on North Korea policy.  Park has advocated Sunshine Lite for years, and even if (like me) you don’t agree with Park’s positions, at least acknowledge her consistency.

People have a tendency to project policies they want on candidates they prefer to other candidates — just look at how disappointed the left is at Barack Obama, the guy who won a Nobel Peace Prize at around 4 p.m. on Inauguration Day for promising to close Gitmo. It’s possible, of course, that Park comes to office with a secret hidden agenda, or with an enduring grudge for the fact that Kim Il Sung sent the assassin who killed her mother on live television.  It would be nice to think that the evil that men do eventually returns to them.  But that’s not how I assess Park.  Park is all about expediency and pragmatism.  She’s competent, tough, and honest, an will be an effective and cool-headed executive, but isn’t ideological (another adjective we could substitute, given the awful realities of life for most North Koreans, is “principled”).

If you forecast Park’s policies based solely on the evidence she’s offered us, at this moment she intends to give North Korea aid, but not without some return on her investment, not at the expense of South Korea’s own economy, and not at the expense of its relations with the United States.  Sound familiar?

In his inaugural speech, Lee reiterated his willingness to engage North Korea economically as long as it gave up its nuclear program. Unlike Roh, who always emphasized that North Korea was a small country that felt threatened by the outside world, Lee placed the onus on North Korea.

“Once North Korea abandons its nuclear program and chooses the path to openness, we can expect to see a new horizon in inter-Korean cooperation,” Lee said, adding that he was willing to help North Korea raise its per capita income to $3,000 within 10 years.

Considered a moderate in his party, Lee, unlike some South Korean conservatives, does not call for regime change in Pyongyang and is not expected to emphasize human rights violations in the North. During the presidential transition, he signaled that he might take a harder line on the North by eliminating South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, which critics consider soft on the North. But he eventually decided to keep it.

Like his left-leaning predecessors, Lee said that policy toward the North should “prepare the foundation for unification.”

“Unification of the two Koreas is the long-cherished desire of the 70 million Korean people,” he said.  [NYT]

Like Lee, Park doesn’t want to expend political capital on a pissing match with North Korea, and she might even have convinced herself that she can avoid one.  She’ll soon learn that she can’t. North Korea isn’t interested in what Park is offering.  It demands aid, and it refuses conditions.  North Korea will provoke her because that’s what North Korea does when it doesn’t get what it demands.  And when it does — key point — Park Geun-Hye will not just take it. Consequently, her North Korea policy will turn out to be something completely different than what she promised and still expects.

Today, the left is painting a revisionist image of Lee Myung Bak as a “hard-liner” for falling victim to the very same cycle.  On North Korea, however, Lee advocated a more generous brand of Sunshine Lite than either Park or the ultra-conservative offshoot Liberty Forward Party.  Lee was never an ideologue on North Korea. All he really cared about was bulldozing out big ditches and helping the chaebol make lots of money.  He was ready to give North Korea its own piece of the action by employing cheap (read: forced) North Korean labor in the service of the chaebol.  Here it is, all spelled out in detail, in a form that hardly seems less aggressive than Roh’s model.  Unlike Roh and like Park Geun-Hye, however, Lee demanded disarmament and reform in return.  He wanted a North-South relationship without the co-dependency and abuse, he wasn’t interested in spending his term wearing a ball gag, and he assumed that Kim Jong Il would accede to that.  When Lee entered office, the head of his transition team made this telling comment:

“In evaluating the past five years, the ministry admitted there had been no visible reforms in the North and that their policies had lacked effectiveness,” said Lee Dong-gwan, the transition team’s spokesman.

At about that time, an American president was also entering office hoping that he could reduce tensions with North Korea where his predecessors failed. Like Lee, he also favored economic outreach. Both presidents’ plans were almost immediately overcome by events:

Jan. 2008:  Incoming Lee Administration reviews aid programs for North, including massive last-minute aid commitments by outgoing President Roh Moo-Hyun.  Lee indicates he will link further aid to nuclear disarmament and return of South Korean abductees and POWs.

July 2008:  North Korean soldier shoots and kills South Korean tourist Park Wang-Ja at Kumgang.  South Korea demands that North Korea cooperate with an investigation into Park’s death; North Korea refuses.  South Korea halts tours out of concern for its citizens’ safety.

Jan. 2009:  Barack Obama takes office and asks North Korea to unclench its fist. North Korea says it will no longer recognize the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de facto sea boundary between the Koreas, and unilaterally withdraws from a 1991 inter-Korean non-aggression agreement.

Mar. 2009:  North Korea detains U.S. journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee along its border with China, an incident that Ling later suggests was a trap.

Apr. 2009:  North Korea tests an Unha-2 long-range rocket, in violation of UNSCR 1695 and 1718. The following week, it orders U.N. inspectors to leave Yongbyon, signaling the final collapse of George W. Bush’s Agreed Framework II.

May 2009:  North Korea tests several short-range missiles, restarts the reactor at Yongbyon, conducts an underground nuclear test, then unilaterally withdraws from the 1953 Korean War cease fire.

June 2009:  U.N. Security Council responds to the nuclear test with Resolution 1874.

Aug. 2009:  North Korea frees a South Korean Kaesong manager after 137 days in custody, and  bills her employer $20,000 for the cost of his room and board.

Sept. 2009:  South Korea accuses the North of intentionally releasing water from a dam and killing six South Koreans.

Nov 2009: North Korean ship crosses the NLL and gets the worst of it.  North Korea vows to take revenge.

Jan. 2010:  North and South Korea exchange artillery fire near their maritime boundary.

Mar. 2010:  North Korea torpedoes the ROKS Cheonan south of the NLL and kills 46 South Korean sailors.

Apr. 2010:  North Korea announces that it will confiscate South Korean property at Kumgang.

Oct. 2010:  Two shots are fired from a North Korean DMZ guard post.

Nov. 2010:  North Korea shells a civilian village on Yeongpyeong Island, South Korea, killing four and causing the evacuation of the island’s entire population.  The attack causes a significant shift in South Korean public opinion, away from giving unconditional aid to the North.

What’s amazing in retrospect is that Lee still kept the aid flowing until North Korea attacked South Korea on its own territory, and even then, he never shut down the Kaesong Industrial Park, a massive indirect subsidy for North Korea.  (Meanwhile, North Korea regularly blocked or restricted South Korean access to Kaesong, and levied confiscatory taxes against companies located there.)

So what hints do we have about where things are headed now?  First, KCNA has already been antagonizing Park and equating her with “traitor” Lee Myung-Bak (and Park’s own father, of course).  Remember how KCNA called for tearing out the throat of “rat-like” Lee?  North Korea will provoke — if only to test Park — and I’m betting that Park won’t take their shit.

Then, consider that second terms are policy tipping points for American presidents. Second terms are characterized by centrist, “stewardship” policies as weakened presidents try to keep the focus on a few second-term agenda items.  Obama’s team would have tipped toward engagement but for the missile.  Now, they feel they have to sanction.  I predict they’ll swing and miss at the U.N., which will give people like Ed Royce and John McCain a chance to voice a more conservative alternative policy for dealing with the North.  Obama may not want to argue the point.

Right now, everyone is predicting a softer line toward North Korea.  I don’t think it matters much what plans Obama and Park have right now.  Events will overcome those plans, too.

Really? DJ Horked the Whole Sunshine Thing from the Moonies?

September 7, 2012 Sunshine, WTF? 3 comments

Depending on your perspective, this revelation may soften your image of Reverend Moon, or you might be saying to yourself, “yeah, that figures.” Having lived in South Korea during the height of the Sunshine craze and observed it with more pity than anger ever since, the whole thing certainly looked like a cult to me.

Moon was an early practitioner of the kind of conciliatory politics that the South Korean government would eventually embrace in its now-abandoned “Sunshine Policy,” which it introduced in the late ’90s in an effort to build friendlier ties with the North. In 1991, the self-made mogul visited North Korea’s founding leader, Kim Il Sung, in Pyongyang, nine years before South Korean president Kim dea-Jung’s groundbreaking visit to the North Korean capital. “Moon began his efforts to engage with the North Koreans at a time when the South Korean government still formally opposed that kind of interaction,” says Scott Snyder, a Korea expert with the Council on Foreign Relations.

But Moon had hardly been coopted by his hosts. The Washington Times published a conspicuously defiant opening paragraph about the meeting: “President Kim Il-sung of North Korea, one of the last of the Stalinist states, yesterday discussed reconciliation of the two Koreas with a man he once imprisoned, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the fiercely anticommunist Unification Church.” Moon’s flagship American media property published original reporting about the “horror” of the country’s “communist gulag,” even at a time when the Unification Church was engaged in precedent-setting investment in that same country. This approach was not without its drawbacks for Moon and his business empire. [Armin Rosen, The Atlantic]

In related news, Moon’s funeral is widely expected to be “all weird.”

The Two Minutes’ Hate

May 9, 2012 North-South, Sunshine, WTF? 2 comments

North Korean state TV shows us how to treat an effigy of a neighboring country’s elected president.

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism October 11, 2008.

Discuss among yourselves.

Told you so: Now that the FTA is in effect, South Korea wants to use it to put North Korean-made products on your store shelves

March 24, 2012 NK Economics, Sunshine One comment

So now that the Free-Trade Agreement between the U.S. and South Korea is officially in effect, the supposedly conservative South Korean government is pulling a bait-and-switch, reviving the demand of its leftist predecessor to include products made by the virtual slave laborers in Kaesong, North Korea in the deal:

South Korea is pushing to include the Gaeseong industrial zone in North Korea in its free-trade deals with the U.S. and Europe, a step that would deepen cross- border ties after the North’s leadership transition.

“Unification is already taking place in Gaeseong, with daily encounters and shared interests,” said Yoo Dong Ok, the chairman of Daewha Fuel Pump Industries and a spokesman for South Korean companies operating in the manufacturing enclave. Shipments from the factories, mostly textiles and car parts, would quickly surge 15 percent if they win free-trade status, Yoo estimated in a March 20 interview.

Yoo and the government in Seoul want the fruits of North Korean workers’ labors on the shelves of stores in Chicago and Berlin, even as they condemn the regime of new leader Kim Jong Un for a planned rocket launch. [Bloomberg]

Yeah, you say, but who exactly in the South Korean government is actually saying this?

Trade Minister Bark Tae Ho said on March 14 that he will try to persuade the U.S. and European Union to recognize products made in Gaeseong as South Korean.

Oh.

The perverse result of this would be that North Korea has an FTA with the United States and Japan does not. What a splendid way to celebrate the one-year anniversary of North Korea sinking a South Korean warship, even as the North prepares to test a missile satellite. Some very smart people told us that this would never happen. I don’t doubt that the Korea Lobby’s many foot soldiers in this town encouraged them in believing that. From the beginning of Lee Myung Bak’s presidency until now, every South Korean diplomat you saw, heard from, had lunch with, or who introduced so-and-so at this-or-that think tank was an FTA monomaniac. They were like annoying insurance salesmen or subway evangelists who always found ways to steer every conversation (however clumsily) toward trying to pitch their product — in this case, the FTA. Which, without its North Korean entanglements, would be a good thing for both countries.

And if a conservative South Korean government is pushing the expansion of the FTA into Kaesong now, what do you suppose a leftist South Korean government would do? It’s not the first time I’ve seen the Korea Lobby (and its State Department enablers) pull something this unprincipled and cynical, and it’s why I’ve learned that you just can’t trust them.

South Korea’s Credibility Problem

January 20, 2011 North-South, Sunshine 2 comments

China’s plans for the economic colonization of Rason in North Korea have set off a great deal of fretting in South Korea about China grabbing up North Korean resources. In my experience, those who fret about this are usually setting up an argument for South Korean investment in the North. But we know how that’s always ended. Instead of pouring more money into this bottomless pit, South Korea ought to let it be known that after reunification, Korea will invoke the doctrine of odious debt and nullify those contracts.

There are multiple reason for South Korea to be concerned about Chinese investment in North Korea, including the stripping of resources, the danger of creeping colonization setting the stage for future boundary disputes, and most immediately, China’s tendency to perpetuate and reward North Korean aggression against the South. Those issues are fundamental to Korea’s nationhood.

And yet it’s hard to take South Korean concerns about China’s plans for Rason seriously when South Korea’s trade at Kaesong continues, inexplicably, to grow. South Korea is trying to mask this colossus of a contradiction by closing down massage parlors there — as Robert would say, “The humanity!” — and investigating firms that trade with North Korea without going through Kaesong.

But this is mostly cosmetic. I have stronger views about the right of North Korean workers to organize unions than I do about access to hand jobs there, but since when does anyone really believe that Kaesong is going to be a harbinger of political change in North Korea? And if the original justifications for Kaesong are now nullities, can any honest person reconcile this unconditional and unaccountable subsidy to Kim Jong Il’s regime with the financial accountability provisions of UNSCR 1874? South Korea can hardly criticize China for bailing out Kim Jong Il while it’s paying for the shells that land on its towns and the torpedoes that sink its ships. And why should the United States spend its diplomatic and financial capital to protect South Korea as long as that’s the case?

Rumors Hint at Policy Shifts in U.S. and South Korea

December 28, 2010 Korean War II, North-South, Sunshine, Washington Views 5 comments

From Engagement to Reunification?

So says the Chosun Ilbo, in describing what would be a major policy shift for South Korea. From 2008 until now, the policy would best be described as reluctant engagement, which brought out North Korea’s violent and extortionate streak. Now, according to unnamed sources in the Unification Ministry, the administration seems to be looking for ways to prepare for and even accelerate reunification:

The government is shifting the emphasis of North Korea policy from exchanges and cooperation to fully fledged preparations for reunification beginning in 2011. “Next year, we intend to concentrate our efforts on strengthening our reunification capabilities rather than on dialogue with the North,” a Unification Ministry official said. It is apparently looking to influence ordinary North Koreans to bring about changes in the Stalinist country. “We must free ourselves from the perception that reunification by absorption is unfeasible,” he added.

More on that here. The problem with stories like this, of course, is that they name only anonymous officials, and therefore, we really don’t know whether we’re hearing the views of a junior official with rogue views, someone who represents a faction within the Ministry, or someone who is intentionally disinforming the Chosun Ilbo to scare the North Koreans. I maintain that the Lee Administration isn’t serious about holding North Korea accountable for anything, catalyzing change, or even about cutting off the money used to terrorize its own population until it shuts down Kaesong. When Kaesong closes, it will be time for a serious discussion of a policy shift. Everything else, especially this, is empty talk.

The Force Has Great Power Over the Weak-Minded

One of our perpetual questions about North Korea has to be whether they’re just too smart for us to comprehend, or whether it’s just the rest of us that are too stupid and weak-minded to deal with them properly. I still vote for the latter:

Senior Grand National Party lawmakers who gathered yesterday to deliberate the government’s policy toward North Korea after its attack on Yeonpyeong Island quarrelled intensely and broke into two camps.

One group argued the government should ease its tough stance against the communist regime to abate the highly strained relations between the two Koreas. This met fierce opposition from another group that maintained it was too early to “appease” North Korea.

I’d wonder where the constituency is for appeasing North Korea now, except that public opinion in South Korea is almost impossibly unpredictable. One person who obviously thinks there’s a constituency for appeasement is our old friend Comrade Chung. Although I can certainly see why the administration denied him permission to visit Kaesong, there’s a part of me that thinks he’d have been an ideal hostage — just think of what a win-win that would be for all of those involved.

Kim Jong Bill for Secretary of State?

Meanwhile, there are also rumors foreshadowing a policy shift on this side of the Pacific. I find those rumors hard to believe, beginning with the explanation that Hillary Clinton would step down … so spend more time with Bill. Yeah, right! If Hillary Clinton steps down, she’ll do it to distance herself from the administration or to mount a primary challenge, which I think is also unlikely.

Still, I can’t quite dismiss this. The obvious argument for Richardson’s appointment is that it would help the President with Latino voters, and I’ve always suspected that this President cares very much about domestic politics and so little about the actual substance of foreign policy that he’s delegated it to a group of sensible advisors, including James Steinberg, Kurt Campbell, Robert Einhorn, and Philip Goldberg. Putting Richardson in charge of them would be like putting a cat in a basket of pigeons. At a bare minimum, it would cost us a year of policy reviews, internecine struggles, and purges — a repeat of what happened after 2004. It might even mean that someone gets to follow in Mike Chinoy’s footsteps and write a book chronicling this administration’s paralysis-by-analysis on North Korea.

Ultimately, I don’t think it will happen because the adverse political consequences would outweigh the benefits, and the Administration seems smart enough to get this. Kim Jong Il’s behavior has been bad enough that any hint of Agreed Framework 3.0 would go over badly with the American people. Until now, President Obama has successfully neutralized foreign policy as a campaign issue, but a Bill Richardson foreign policy would give the Republicans an opportunity to cast off their discrediting by Bush, Rice, and Hill, find their voice, and make this an issue they can run on.

The greatest barrier, however, may be South Korea’s certain opposition to such a shift in Washington. Lee Myung Bak will still be President for a little more than two years, and with him facing a likely challenge from Park Geun-Hye on the right, you can expect his Administration to strongly oppose a new American diplomatic initiative to the North now. Say what you will about Lee not having a vote in our elections, but South Korea exerts a powerful influence over U.S. policy toward North Korea.

Is South Korea Finally Ready to Cut North Korea Off?

November 28, 2010 North-South, Sunshine, Yeonpyeong Attack 17 comments

kji-step.jpgThe New York Times, in a report bylined in Incheon, says that the Yeonpyeong attack has caused a significant shift in South Korean views about the North.

After years of backing food aid and other help for the North despite a series of provocations that included two nuclear tests, many South Koreans now say they feel betrayed and angry. “I think we should respond strongly toward North Korea for once instead of being dragged by them,” said Cho Jong-gu, 44, a salesman in Seoul. “This time, it wasn’t just the soldiers. The North mercilessly hurt the civilians.

That is not to say that he or other South Koreans will really push for a South Korean strike; people south of the border are well aware that the North could devastate Seoul with its weapons. But the sentiments reflect a change of mood in a country where people have willed themselves to believe that their brotherly ties to the North would override the ideological chasm between the impoverished Communist North and the thriving capitalist South.

The attack seemed to challenge one of the underlying assumptions of a decade of inter-Korean rapprochement, which had slowed but not stopped under President Lee Myung-bak: that two nations’ shared Koreanness trumped political differences, making a return to cold war-era hostilities not only undesirable but also impossible. “I never thought they would attack us people of the same race,” said Hong Jae-soon, 55, a homemaker who fled Yeonpyeong with most of the island’s other 1,350 residents after the attack.

If this report is accurate, it suggests that sympathy for North Korea may shift from being a relatively insignificant factor in a politician’s electability to a political liability. It may mean that Lee Myung Bak will have political cover to do what he should have done years ago and close Kaesong for good (Kaesong’s business model always depended on attracting foreign investment, and North Korea pretty much foreclosed any chance of that with some belligerent meddling starting in late 2008). It could also mean the end of inter-Korean food and fertilizer aid, which was never sufficiently monitored to prevent it from being diverted to the military and those inhabiting the top tier of the North’s political caste system. The end of South Korea’s remaining aid to the North would represent a very significant policy shift. It would also be, in my view, a more appropriate response than military action, something that feels better to call for in the abstract than after the next shells start falling. Until now, South Korean voters weren’t ready to cut up Kim Jong Il’s credit card. Has that changed?

I’m not so sure. First, and provided the North Koreans don’t do something else stupid first, it’s probably too early to tell how much of this anger will dissipate in the coming weeks (the Chosun Ilbo reports that the North may test fire one of its new medium range missiles next). Second, I still don’t see much polling data to back up an anecdotal report from a place that’s uncomfortably close to where the shells landed. This is where I need your help.

There are certainly a lot of interesting things I learn by living and listening in Washington, but one thing I really can’t assess from here is how much truth there is to reports like this. One of my big regrets is that my job and my family have made it difficult to spent much time in Korea since my DEROS date, which means that everything I read and hear about political attitudes in South Korea is based on my increasingly outdated view of an unusually fluid electorate. Just from reading the papers and watching the polls, I’d have thought that attitudes in the South had moderated and stabilized substantially, but then came Mad Cow, which caused me to question all of my conclusions and realize that many of the sentiments of 2002 still lay latent. I have the general sense that gradually, and notwithstanding the conspiracy theories, the reality of the Cheonan Incident has taken hold, and that the North’s pretty-much-undeniable atrocity at Yeonpyeong will buttress that conclusion and shift the consensus on North Korea away from “they wouldn’t” and toward “how could they?” But how much, and for how long?

Another general sense I have is that many South Koreans probably leaned toward viewing USFK as an unnecessary evil in 2002, but that most probably see us as a necessary evil now. Beyond this, there are still two political extremes that remain mostly static. And all of what I’ve just described is subject to dramatic shifts based on things whose significance might completely escape most Americans. But this is the guesswork of someone who doesn’t live in Korea anymore. Maybe you know better. If you do live in Korea, and especially if you’re a Korean speaker, I’d like to hear your assessment of the mood on the street right now.

« Older Entries