Cheonan Incident Updates

Andrei Lankov talks about China’s motives for supporting Kim Jong Il and predicts that in due course, it will be business as usual all over again:

At all probability, this time we will see another repetition of the old game. Chinese will insist that North Korea should come back to the six-party talks (Beijing’s pet project), and also should restrain itself. Kim Jong-il will claim his sovereign rights to run his state as he pleases while inquiring how much aid he is going to get for some minor concessions. The Cheonan affair is unlikely to be discussed at all “• even if Chinese bring up the question, the North will deny responsibility, claiming that all accusations are results of the “smear campaign waged by the South Korean warmongers.”

And what will be the net result? Perhaps, we can see the contours of a likely deal: North Korea will promise to go back to the six-party talks while China will reward Pyongyang for this by aid and subsidized trade. So, China will be satisfied with maintaining both its international prestige and stability in its neighborhood while the long-delayed six-party talks will finally restart, to continue for a while, until the next crisis. Will the talks ever produce their intended result “• the “complete and verifiable elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs?” Of course, not. But has that not been clear for years?

Andrei’s cynicism is well supported by recent history, but I’m not sure I agree with this. The Cheonan incident might, for once, be too big a deal for any South Korean government to sweep under a rug. If anything, it seems to have turned South Korean voters hostile to the North and served as the ultimate repudiation of the Sunshine Policy. Similarly, an American President, particularly a Democratic one, will find this and other recent North Korean provocations (not to mention the next ones) difficult to overlook. President Obama, whose North Korean policy has been ostensibly rudderless but clearly less bad than second-term G.W. Bush, is vulnerable to charges of appeasement and coddling dictators, largely because of the hippie drum circle rhetoric of his campaign, rhetoric that drew the adoration of some of the world’s shallowest foreign policy thinkers. If we’re now at the stage where the U.S. and South Korean governments have to agree on next year’s approach to North Korea, I’d predict that the consensus will be more economic pressure and military containment. The mood I’d sensed in Washington was already that the Obama Administration was feeling hawkish about Kim Jong Il’s nuclear test and bullish about the effect of sanctions. I don’t expect this incident to change that mood in North Korea’s favor.

Don Kirk writes that for most in the South Korean political leadership, the mood has changed from malign neglect to outright hostility:

“The sinking of the Cheonan was unprecedented in human history, other than in wartime,” said a South Korean general, perhaps engaging in hyperbole but nonetheless expressing the sentiments of the country’s top leadership. “It was the equivalent of a declaration of war.” Almost daily, the South is building up its case – if not for war, then for a measure of international sympathy and support that will finally bring Kim Jong-il to heel.

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It is said here, in an article surveying the evidence of North Korean guilt in the Cheonan incident, that this would be “the most serious attack on the South Korean” since the “end” of the Korean War. Similarly, this piece says the incident would be “the deadliest military engagement between the two countries since the 1953 truce in the Korean War.” To be sure, the Cheonan incident — assuming North Korea’s responsibility is proven beyond a reasonable doubt — will be a very grave provocation and a clear causus belli. But in fact, the 1968 Blue House raid killed 68 South Koreans and wounded 66. I suppose you can say that an attempt to assassinate the President of South Korea didn’t ultimately target the South Korean military, but surely the North Koreans knew they’d have to kill plenty of South Korean soldiers to accomplish their mission. This doesn’t take away from the gravity of the Cheonan incident, it just calls for a more accurate historical perspective.

The Joongang Ilbo rightly concludes that the message sent by Beijing’s warm welcome for Kim Jong Il is to preemptively undermine any sanctions imposed on North Korea as a response. But if China forecloses any peaceful means for holding North Korea accountable for an unprovoked attack, it effectively sanctions it and enables a destabilizing attack against South Korea. Denied peaceful means to deter North Korea, not-so-peaceful options deserve careful reconsideration. With a direct military response being unduly risky, a better alternative is to sow chaos and instability in North Korea and force China to confront the possibility of an insurgency breaking out along its own border with North Korea.

Because all dissent is patriotic: A Hankyoreh editorialist characterizes leaked evidence of North Korean guilt as a conspiracy for conservatives to win seats in the next election, and compares the Cheonan incident — without any supporting evidence but his own uneducated conjecture — to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The logical parallels to 9/11 conspiracy theories are striking, and disturbing.