Avoiding the Next Korean War
Of course, it is premature for any government to assign blame for the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan before reviewing the detailed findings of a completed investigation. But for many South Koreans, the conclusion is already inescapable that North Korea did it. That’s my hunch, too. If I had to pick a favorite theory, it would involve North Korea’s semi-submersibles — they operate well in shallow waters, are hard to see on radar, can move quickly on the surface, and can carry mines or torpedoes — although the use of frogmen and submarines are also possibilities. Let me start by explaining the basis for my own speculation (please see these posts for additional citations):
– The extensive history of North Korean provocations that are as bad as this, or worse.
– The extensive history of North Korean provocations in these very waters, the most recent of which was a defeat for the North Korean Navy that would have created a motive for revenge.
– The recent rise in North-South tensions as President Lee refused to give in to Kim Jong Il’s increasingly extortionate demands to bail out his politically and financially bankrupt regime.
– North Korea’s recent unilateral renunciation of the 1953 Armistice that did not end, but did scale down, the surge of hostilities we call the Korean War.
– The elimination of other plausible theories. First, we can eliminate early theories that the Cheonan struck a rock or sank due to an internal explosion. Both the surviving crew members of the Cheonan and an investigator who has presumably seen the severed hull (and thus the direction in which its metal was bent by explosion) has told reporters that the blast came from the outside. Could this have been friendly fire? I’ve seen nothing to rule that out, but nothing to suggest as much, either. It has been suggested that a sea mine left over from the Korean War could have been the cause. Sea mines can certainly remain destructive for many decades, but this area is a heavily trafficked sea lane and fishing ground. No other sea mines have been found in the area since 1986 1984. It seems unlikely that the next one would be struck by a ROK naval vessel at a time of increased tensions.
– A radar blip was seen heading North cross the Northern Limit Line at about 30-40 knots shortly after the explosion, and ROK Navy commanders on shore ordered the frigate Seokcho to open fire on it (or them). I continue to have some difficulty believing the early reports that this blip was a flock of birds moving with deliberate haste from where a South Korean warship had just sunk, through disputed waters, in the middle of the night, and at approximately the same speed that a North Korean semi-submersible moves (or perhaps two, thus explaining why the “blip” divided into two at one point). Maybe some ornithologist our there knows something on this subject that can enlighten us. I also find it significant that the radar on smaller ROK Navy vessels apparently couldn’t determine the blip’s altitude. I don’t completely rule out that hypervigilant sailors could have shot at almost anything in those tense hours; I just doubt that a flock of birds would have been moving with such deliberate speed in that time, place, and manner. I’ll be interested in seeing the investigation’s findings about this.
– Some less probative evidence: the idea that North Korea sank the Cheonan certainly doesn’t seem implausible to those who’ve spent their lives under North Korean indoctrination.
For what it’s worth (probably not much) hearsay reports echoing widespread rumors claim that many North Koreans think their own “government” was behind the sinking. The manner of the Cheonan‘s sinking may or may not bear some resemblance to a popular North Korean movie. Also for what it’s worth North Korea has finally gotten around to denying that it sank the Cheonan, but significantly, it didn’t initially broadcast that denial. Now, North Korea is saying that it’s being framed.
For now, I think President Lee is doing the right thing. He has restored enough message discipline in his own government to staunch the flow of ever-changing speculation about the cause. Nothing is concluded, and nothing is ruled out. He has reached out to his allies for investigative assistance, probably to inoculate the investigation’s findings against charges that President Lee fabricated the evidence (the allegations and theories will still circulate, only with a more anti-American tint). Despite some early misgivings, I’m glad to see the U.S. Navy is already helping with the investigation. Fox publishes these photos of the U.S. Navy on scene.
I recently said that it might take a North Korean attack to finally break the spell of many South Koreans’ inexplicable sympathy for Kim Jong Il’s regime. It may be that that moment is on us now. Editorials in major South Korean newspapers have begun to call for the unspeakable. Says one, “[N]o developed country tolerates provocation without punishing the offender. If Korea is a proper nation, it should, in principle, destroy the North Korean submarine base.” This may not be so surprising coming from the staunchly conservative and nationalist Joongang Ilbo, but look what the editors of the center-left Korea Herald are saying. The Herald is the most liberal of the mainstream Korean papers and at least used to republish an English supplement from The Guardian. The Herald also calls for war:
It will take weeks or even months until a joint civilian-military inquiry panel comes to a final conclusion on the cause of the incident based on technical findings by top-rated international experts. Yet, outside the official process, the South Korean public, who listened to the statements of the surviving sailors at a press conference last week, has become more than 90 percent sure about “who did it.
When President Lee Myung-bak spoke of “resolute actions” to take against whoever is responsible for the tragedy, he was sharing the belief of the people. The government and military leaders may have some more information that has not been made available to the public, but they need concrete proof to move over to the phase of making a response.
Still, even before we get hold of conclusive evidence, the relevant authorities need to study what to do about this apparent grave act of provocation. They should provide the president with diplomatic and military options to help him make an appropriate decision and to ensure that no time will be wasted after a decision has been made. [Korea Herald]
The Herald then points to a long series of North Korean attacks and provocations that have gone unanswered, thus inviting more attacks, even escalation, and concludes:
A military retaliation is a justified response to an unprovoked attack. It can be reserved when the adversary admits guilt and makes an apology, promises no recurrence and punishes the directly responsible individuals in cases where it acknowledges their involvement but denies the state’s role. Whether or not North Korea will take any of these steps is anybody’s guess.
Among possible reactions, the government could bring the Cheonan case to the U.N. Security Council with proof that North Korea violated Article 2 Paragraph 4 of the U.N. Charter which asks all members to refrain “from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The attack on a ship engaged in a routine mission inside Southern territorial waters calls for punishment in the form of a U.N. sanction. The problem is that North Korea has already proved its resilience against U.N. sanctions over the past years of international pressures for its denuclearization.
Here we are seeing a shortage of options to punish North Korea in the event its involvement has been confirmed. Still, we have to do something to manifest the territorial integrity and political independence of the Republic of Korea. That something should be resolute and effective to guarantee that there is no recurrence of the wanton attack. [Korea Herald]
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As gratifying as it is to see a lucid confrontation of reality at the Korea Herald, no less, I would say in response that not everything that is justified is necessarily wise. I do not read either of these editorials as calling for all-out war but a limited one. They assume that the war would start as a limited war and would end as a limited war. On balance, they’re probably right. Kim Jong Il isn’t about to risk an OPLAN 5027 scenario.
On the other hand, there are a few risk factors that these editorial writers may not have thought through, but which President Lee and his advisors probably have. The major premise of this still-hypothetical discussion is that Kim Jong Il and/or Kim Jong-Eun ordered the attack on the Cheonan, facially a grave miscalculation of the likely South Korean reaction. Consistent with the characteristics of a sociopathic personality is a high tolerance for risk and a tendency to misjudge risk. What would Kim’s next miscalculation be? A “limited” artillery barrage of Camp Casey, Uijongbu, or Seoul? Ordering terrorist attacks by commandos or sleeper agents? Delivering some dreadful weapon via North Korean’s suspected tunnels under the DMZ, believing that his responsibility would be (as with the sinking of the Cheonan) plausibly deniable?
It is important for us to remember the cheapness of life between the Imjin and the Yalu. That is one reason why the question of human rights matters in our diplomatic and military thinking, and why the horrors of Camp 12 and Camp 22 (to name just two) can’t be isolated from our calculation of the North Korean threat. The loss of life on either or both sides of the DMZ would not be punishment for Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Eun. A military humiliation might be, assuming that word of that humiliation spread widely within the North Korean armed forces, but despite the advanced erosion of North Korea’s information blockade, the regime probably still has substantial control over what its armed forces hear and know. And in any event, there are plenty of other demoralizing things a determined South Korean government could tell the North Korean armed forces without risking war.
In contrast to the risk that a limited war would demoralize North Korea’s armed forces and population, we must balance the risk that a limited war is actually the very outcome that Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Eun want most. Imagine yourself as Kim Jong Il today — your nation’s long-moribund economy may have starved a million or so of your most expendable subjects, but by keeping the secret police well-fed, blaming the troubles on American sanctions, and characterizing the arrival of international food aid as the payoff for your masterful act of nuclear extortion, you muddled through. Despite widespread discontent, the loss of much control over the food supply, and even a rumored mutiny by a corps-level army unit, the system defied the predictions of foreign experts and held. Now you’re under unprecedented pressure from international financial sanctions and have lost the no-questioned-asked, unmonitored humanitarian aid that helped you keep the army and your party minions fed. The “wavering” and “hostile” portions of your civilian population no longer depend on the state’s rations and rely on capitalists markets to earn an independent living. Your recent desperate effort to confiscate the wealth of a nascent middle class and regain control over the food supply was a fiasco that caused more open public anger — and even some rioting — than at any time in North Korean history (there is even some empirical evidence to support this). Your subjects appear unwilling to blame the Americans this time; they’re holding your government responsible, and shooting a few scapegoats won’t restore their confidence in you. All of the crises you’d slogged through for the duration of your misrule have reached a critical phase. The world is closing in on you.
Worse, you’re dying, and in the only way that really matters, you’re dying intestate. Your eldest, the natural successor under traditional Korean concepts of primogeniture, is too corrupted by foreign influences, and besides which, starving people aren’t going to give unquestioned devotion to Jabba the Kim. Your second son has all the manly command presence of Richard Simmons and performed poorly when tested in a leadership position. Your third son has the necessary DSM-IV diagnosis to be a proper successor, but he’s just 27 years old, and lacks the experience or the cred to survive (much less rule) in that octagenarian vipers’ nest known as the National Defense Commission. If you want your legacy to outlast you, you need to find a way for him to “make his bones,” and fast. In a society where every citizen is inculcated with the ideology of war, fearlessness, and sacrifice, a “limited” war is precisely the thing to legitimize your successor and to change the topic of national conversation to anything but the hardship that your misrule has caused.
Which is to say, South Korean military “retaliation” would be anything but: because Kim Jong Il knows that South Korea will want to avoid all-out war as much as he does, he would be able to cast almost any outcome to a limited war in terms that would consolidate and legitimize a transfer of power from the father to the son. Without such a war, and given the current mood among North Koreans, it seems doubtful that such a transition would have the Mandate of Heaven.
Perhaps for some of the same reasons, my friend Andrei Lankov says that even if North Korea is found to have sunk the Cheonan, that President Lee can’t do anything about it. I would agree with him that the balance of risks and rewards does not favor a military response, but this does not mean that there is nothing that President Lee can do.
What Kim Jong Il fears is the weakening of his political control, not the loss of a few old boats, and certainly not the loss of a few dozen, hundred, or thousand lives. For the aforementioned reasons, a limited war would only strengthen his political control. What Kim Jong Il wants is to consolidate his power, restore the credibility of his propaganda, and to extort more money from South Korea, but without starting a total war. If what President Lee wants is to deter future North Korean aggression, throwing Kim Jong Il the political lifeline of a limited war is no way to do it. Instead, Lee should intensify what is already working: the economic constriction and political subversion of Kim Jong Il’s regime, both of which have significantly eroded the regime’s influence over its domestic economy, food supply, public opinion, and capacity to suppress dissent. That’s why President Lee still has options.
First, he can stop feeding the beast — he can cut off South Korean economic aid to the North. For cosmetic purposes, he can offer to resume aid if Kim Jong Il cooperates fully with the investigation and personally apologizes (don’t worry; he won’t). Lee can stop importing goods from North Korea and cut this flow of hard currency. The other main conduits of South Korean hard currency for Kim Jong Il include the Kumgang Tourist Project, whose property the North has just begun to confiscate anyway, and the Kaesong Industrial Park, which has fallen victim to North Korean political meddling and clearly won’t ever become a profitable export manufacturing center now. Lee can also order his banks to take a more aggressive approach to enforcing the financial provisions of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874. Politically, he should increase his government’s support for a community of 17,000-plus North Korean defectors who are leading efforts to broadcast independent news back into their homeland, news that seems to have attracted a significant following in North Korea. He can increase the number of defectors his government admits, and do more diplomatically to force China to let would-be defectors in China travel to South Korea safely. He might even permit defectors to establish a North Korean transitional government-in-exile on his country’s soil; after all, with proper education and training, those defectors could be a key part of President Lee’s strategy to stabilize North Korea if, as seems increasingly likely, the Kim Dynasty ceases to exist within the next five years.
Certainly these options carry with them some risk that North Korea will engage in further provocations, but the risk will probably still be less than the risks of paying extortion, doing nothing, or launching military retaliation. In any event, it seems unlikely that as long as Kim Jong Il inhabits a series of palaces whose location is known to the American and ROK air forces, that he would launch a full-scale attack or use nuclear weapons. And as is clear even to the editors of the Washington Post now, the end of the Kim Dynasty is the only realistic end of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, and all of the proliferation it threatens. They might also have said that it’s the only way life for the vast majority of North Korea’s people will ever become something other than a living hell.