South Korea is now reporting two civilian deaths from North Korea’s shelling of Yeonpyeong Island yesterday, raising the death toll to four. Given that the North fired 80 shells onto the island and destroyed 60 homes, it seems miraculous that more people didn’t die. Korean language reports (hat tip to my wife) are saying that kimchee may have saved lives. It’s kimchee-making season, which means that most of the civilians were down in the markets buying cabbage, garlic, and pepper paste, or else they were at the pier to meet a ferry that had just arrived from Incheon. Meanwhile, Yeonpyeong Island’s one and only fire truck found itself racing around the island, doing the best it could to put the many fires out.
For a second day, South Koreans were banned from traveling to North Korea, including Kaesong, where about 700 hostages workers remain behind. I hope Lee Myung Bak will finally close the place down once and for all. Also, just how stupid do you really have to be to work at Kaesong these days?
Charles Krauthammer, who correctly identifies China as the ultimate origin of our problems with North Korea, calls for the United States to help Japan and South Korea acquire nuclear weapons. Good. But he forgot to mention Taiwan. I had predicted before that this year would be a repeat of 1968 in which we would enter “a dangerous new phase,” with the difference being that the Soviets were willing to restrain North Korea, while China isn’t. Fairly or not, Barack Obama just doesn’t project the Mad Man image that deterrence sometimes requires. The Nobel Committee and the Workers’ Party of Korea both formed their impressions of President Obama based on empty rhetoric, but that rhetoric (to my great relief) hasn’t really matched his performance in office. I worry that perceptions like that can lead to miscalculations.
It happens every time North Korea does something dangerously brutal or provocative — some idiot pundit or reporter infantilizes North Korea, suggesting that they’re somehow childlike, not responsible for their actions, or that they just want to be loved. It’s sickening, an insult to the growing list of this regime’s innocent victims.
Proliferation expert Henry Sokolsi sounds a warning on North Korea’s uranium program. You know, I’ve always seen the question of military action as a balance between the risks of acting and the risks of not acting. I’m not privy to enough information about our intelligence and our capabilities to say whether we should launch a lightning strike against North Korea’s artillery and nuclear facilities, though I’d say my own balance has shifted in that direction. We’re now just one step away from North Korea shelling Uijongbu, Seokcho, or Camp Casey.
It defies the imagination that Kaesong remains open with ROK support after the Cheonon sunk. Remember the old “kick me” signs from 7th grade?
Is it just me or do the images of Lee Myung Bak I saw yesterday in a bomber jacket look like that of a man that is done talking? What is our time frame now for these hostilities to “go away”? Three days? 2011? New President? I have to agree that it is hard to really sit here and say what should be done, considering we have a vague idea of the military intelligence it would take to ensure you get your point across and not get thousands…or millions of South Koreans killed, much less the collateral damage that could be caused in the North. Is this a time you may try to strike a deal with someone else in the North Korean government and assisted in a coup or a filtering out of the higher officials? One thing I think is that 6 party talks are probably not going to work (surprise). The thing I find the most peculiar is that it seems the Japanese are more upset than the Koreans. My girlfriend (who is from Seoul) really has no qualms about what has happened. She thinks the world media has exaggerated the problem. I compare to a child growing up in a violent/verbally abusive home, they don’t know it’s not normal so they don’t find anything wrong with the norm.
Thanks as always for your insight on the situation Joshua.
That is where I put my vote.
It is as dangerous as a limited military strike. There is just as much chance the regime would lash out if it began to collapse as it might if the US and/or South Korea used a limited military strike. But, the regime is going to collapse one day anyway. There is no way to avoid the possibility of massive casualties in South Korea.
All we have been doing for the past two decades is prop the North up ineffectively hoping to put the moment of truth off until tomorrow. So far, it has prevented large scale bloodshed that MIGHT happen — but that only hold up if you don’t count the millions of North Koreans who have died in the meantime.
There is no way the US and others can build the North up into a state not teetering on the brink of collapse without a change in regimes. We’re just throwing away money to avoid something that is going to happen (or not) no matter what we do.
So let’s do it now…
Eat the regime out from the inside and hope the collapse remains an internal affair. Then do all we can, along with the international community, to stabilize and get the rebuilding process underway as fast as we can. (I’d think we’d stand a heck of a lot better chance seeing that happen with North Korea than we do in Afghanistan even after 9 years over there.)
I just have received an e-mail from my Suzhou correspondent. In between discussing baozi recipes, she asked me if I’ve heard of the attack.
Does anyone know how the Chinese State media is reporting this?
Both the Cheonan and Yeonpyong Island incidents occurred in areas in the West Sea which have been co-opted by South Korea, where North Korea does not agree that UN jurisdiction extends. The actions themselves were murderous — but from a North Korean perspective, they are simply assertions of their own interest. They do not amount to any incursion into South Korean territory and so, while morally and personally atrocious, they are legally quite ambiguous since a state of war still exists. This is particularly the case since last year, the North denounced the truce.
Unlike the uranium centrifuge issue, which is really important and is destabilizing on a local and worldwide basis, these actions of North Korea are simply the actions of a badly-controlled guard dog which thinks its territory extends into the street past its surrounding fence.
I’m sorry to say I agree with david woolley. I don’t think the North Koreans intended to raise tensions to a new level. They thought they were responding to a provocation. They thought they were shelling a militarized island. Of course I think their action was wrong. But if we’re trying to figure out why they did it, we have to see the incident from their point of view. Meanwhile, we should continue to honor our alliance with South Korea. Let’s see how China reacts to the George Washington in the Yellow Sea.
Glans,
What would your reaction be if it was the North Korean military holding one of its military exercises (military exercises which all militaries in the world routinely do) on one of the islands it holds in that area and the US military attacked it?
I’m with usinkorea.
I appreciate why North Korea lobs shells into the sea whenever South Korea and/or the U.S. hold an exercise, and I even think it possible to put forward an argument for North Korean missile tests etc on a similar basis. By the same token, it is possible to fully appreciate why China sometimes chooses to get a bit leery and sensitive when U.S. aircraft carriers venture close to its shores or whatever.
However;
North Korea knows very well what is on the islands less than 20km from its shores; they have spies all over South Korea and quite a few places abroad as well. They knew what they were liable to hit. As one Russian newspaper editorial put it;
Let’s not help them to try.
I’m not saying the North Koreans were right. They’re wrong! I’m saying I don’t think their artillery fire was an attempt to get attention, to restart negotiations, or to extract aid. So what was their motive? I suggest it was a distorted sense of self-defense. The result of their action will be more South Korean exercises, with US participation, and even with the George Washington going to the Yellow Sea. Unwanted attention, no negotiations, and no aid.
“South Korean Defense Minister Kim Tae-young resigned Thursday, according to the South Korean presidency.”
“The Yeonpyeong attack was the first direct artillery assault on South Korea since the Korean War ended in 1953.”
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/11/25/koreas.crisis/index.html?hpt=T1
North Korea has a proven track record, and the global community for that matter, of doing provocative things that stirs the global waters then negotiating a “settlement” a few months later in which it promises to do little or much and then receives an increase in aid in advance and then backs out of the deal only to start more provocations some months later.
The artillery fire certainly fit within the norm of previous North Korean actions.
In fact, I did predict something like it would happen this year after it tested another nuke and ICBM. I said if those actions did not lead to a significant increase in material aid, we should expect NK to take it up to the next level — which was killing people (or blood letting, as I put it).
I didn’t mention artillery firing. I mentioned firefights along the DMZ or shooting down an American spyplane in international airspace or clashes in the West Sea. I said that I thought things would go beyond sea battles, because the North had done those in recent memory and they were not likely to generate the kind of activity in South Korean society the North would hope to see.
A land attack is something new and a step up, in South Korea’s eyes, even though more people died in the recent sinking of the ship.
South Korea is not going crazy after this – which means North Korea’s new tactic in its usual strategy is not going to pay off. Which means North Korea will likely come up with something else in the next few months that it thinks will rattle the global community enough to cave into it.
My bet is an attack on a Japanese ship. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see them go after an American ship or airplane. A bolder —- or more repetitive — land attacks against South Korean targets would fit. Even a suicide or non-suicide bomber attack inside South Korea – possibly targeting GIs near a US base is not far fetched given what North Korea, often under the direction of pre-president Kim Jong-Il, did in the past.
The artillery attack certainly does fit into a previous pattern of behavior.
That last comment is mine, not Glans’.
This is from early in 2008
That as almost 3 years ago – which can be seen as a long time – but I think the analysis fit and still fits. The nuke and ICBM tests, and the closings or promotions of nuke plants, and a variety of minor provocations, have been used since the late 1990s after the Great Famine almost caused the nation to collapse.
In the police force, they teach you a Use of Force Continuum explaining what level of force is justified under what conditions – with the level of force rising along the continuum.
North Korea has a provocations continuum. It is likely used in part to shore up internal stability among the North Korean people and the regime supporters, but I think it is primarily designed to wring concessions from the international community, because the less the North gets out of the community, the higher up the continuum the next provocation often turns out to be.
Killing people is near the top.
Given the nature of South Korea’s reaction to the sinking of the warship and now this artillery shelling, things do not look good at all for what North Korea will do next time – within the next 6 to 12 months.
If I were high up in the Japanese or USFK, I’d start a serious review of safeguards and other elements concerning force protection, reactions to a terrorist incident, all kinds of things that are involved in a variety of scenarios in which North Korea does something big and deadly. I’d look back at the big events from the 1980s through 1960s. I’d pay particular attention to the 1960s. If I were Japanese, I’d scrutinize my Navy and shipping activities around Korean waters. The US should review its military aircraft within reach of North Korea – like the spyplane that was harassed a few years ago.
And the longer things go before the North kills some people again, the more I’ll fear it’s going to be a shocking event.
Killing over 50 South Korean sailors in a surprise torpedo attack that sunk the ship without warning is pretty big to me. It didn’t get the North what it wanted in terms of reaction. I shudder to think what comes next….
I think usinkorea has a good point, to which I ask, where does this end then?
Let’s assume for a minute that Jong-il either continues living, or power passes smoothly (not likely, but lets assume this for the sake of argument). Have we backed ourselves into a corner here? From your comment alone, it would seem that the regime wins no matter how the South responds.
Refusing to negotiate would force the regime to move to the next step in the continuum, and the next, and the next, to the point where the South responds militarily. When that happens it will be a great propaganda victory for the DPRK, and they will be fighting to defeat the colonialist capitalist puppet pig-dogs.
I’ve only been watching the North for four years now, so I don’t have the wealth of knowledge you guys do, but I can’t help but think there is little hope for peace on the peninsula unless the regime can be disabled internally. How do you pressure a nation who’s only response is more reckless action and saber rattling? I was born in ’91, so I missed the transition from Il-Sung to Jong-il. Was that period marked by increasing provocation, or is this a whole new beast?
The comment “North Korea has a proven track record…” is definitely not mine. usinkorea claims it, and I concede it. This looks like a strange bug in the blogging software.
And now back to the subject at hand: I think it would be wrong to reward the DPRK regime in any way, and I don’t think Obama, Clinton, and Gates will. Let’s see what China and Russia do, espectially during and after the exercises in the Yellow Sea. Meanwhile, speculations about the DPRK’s motives should stay close to the facts or should be dispensed with altogether.
The North general has won something through its strategy of brinkmanship: For example, President Bush really rattled the North when it got China and the rest of the world to agree to tough banking sanctions that froze a vital lifeline for Pyongyang. It was the first time that China has been brought on board with measures that were a direct threat to the survival of the regime, and the immediate response from the regime seemed to indicate the pain was being felt.
This naturally led some months later to the (first?) nuclear test followed very quickly by the first ICBM test since 1998.
Those major provocations were an indication that the attempt to put great pressure on the North (without using a military option) was working. But, within a few months of the tests, the Bush administration reversed itself, went into negotiations, and came out with the same crap deal that the North had wrung out of us in the past…
So, North Korea’s testing of a nuke and ICBM caused it to win – in the North’s eyes.
But, this example also shows us that North Korea is vulnerable to coercion. If Bush had done some minor or major things to increase pressure, along with maintaining the banking sanctions at full strength, it stood a chance of forcing the North to move beyond provocations into a position of real concessions.
The North might have gone the other direction – it might have increased provocations. Increased desperation might have led to bloody attacks. Or to concessions.
We’ll never know, because Bush did cave in instead of trying to force Pyongyang to do so.
But, bloody attacks were going to happen as long as the US did not lead the rest of the global community in greatly increasing the material aid to the North to the point Pyongyang was happy.
There is no sure way to win against North Korea. There is no sure way to stop it from increasing its nuclear arms or using provocations as a diplomatic tool.
There is no sure way to pressure the North while avoiding the possibility of causing it to collapse (with the potential of a violent outburst as it goes down).
But, threatening to cause the regime to collapse by cutting off funding and aid it needs to survive is the most likely way to get any real, lasting concessions from the North.
Military strikes MIGHT do the same as significant, persistent sanctions against vital life-support systems.
Basically, the US, SK, Japan, and others need to make Pyongyang believe that its very existence will be thrown into serious doubt if it continues to act as it has for a long time.
We have never given it the reason to think like that since the early 1990s.
In the early 1990s, the US made North Korea believe that we were about to attack it, and the result was the first nuclear agreement. I still don’t believe the US was really going to go through with an attack, but it did go through all the motions like it was about to pull the trigger, and North Korea blinked.
A roughly similar event happened in reaction to the infamous Ax Murder of 1976.
I don’t know if that is the exact article I read a few years ago, but it gives the general background of the event and the US thinking in its response. The idea in the article I remember was —- the US government at the time put forward a huge show of force, without pulling the trigger, just to protect the small group that went back into the DMZ to finish cutting down the tree.
The huge show of force was designed to make the regime in Pyongyang think that the US government had gone crazy and was on the warpath.
That is one way to deal with a regime like the one in the North — which most people rightly consider a mafia-like government. Threatening the regime’s survival is something it understands. It runs the risk of causing it to increase provocations in the short term. More difficult to handle – it could also cause a collapse in such a weak country.
But, negotiations leading to new “agreements” in exchange for resumption or an increase in material aid has not worked.
Why doesn’t China give North Korea enough aid?
China can’t give NK enough aid. Neither can the US, Japan, and South Korea.
North Korea is a black hole. The Soviet Union (and China) threw tons of aid to it during the Cold War trying to maintain it as a model of communism vs the capitalist South Korea. Russia’s attempt to keep the North afloat was one of the reasons it collapsed. And when the Russians and Chinese started making NK at least barter for its goods, the North collapsed into a horrible famine that killed a sizable percentage of its citizens.
That is another reason why the current situation is hopeless: The world community cannot give NK enough to prevent it from collapsing. The North refuses to reform. It refuses to open up to the outside world. It lives on international handouts, and the regime sees no reason to alter that situation – it just periodically tries to wring more aid out of the world.
NK is a terminally ill patient kept on life support by the international community – but death is certain. It’s infrastructure deteriorates more each year. It’s revolution era, cold war era leadership gets closer to the grave each day.
China (and maybe South Korea) is the only nation that can pump lots of aid into the North without concern for its horrific human rights record or its frequent provocations.
But even if the US could politically survive pouring aid into the North, it would be a doomed effort.
That is one reason why I’m not worried about China taking over the North when it collapses. Even if China tries, it will fail in short order and invite the world community in within 5 to 10 years. China doesn’t have the resources to rebuild the North largely on its own.