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SPEAKING
FREELY
North Korea: Bluster and broadsides in
Beijing
By Sung-Yoon Lee
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have their
say. Please click here if you are interested in
contributing.
US
President George W Bush was right. North Korea is back
to playing its old game of nuclear blackmail, and much
of the world lies at risk of being hypnotized by the
same old fanciful refrain, "Our nuclear program in
exchange for money and security."
During the
Beijing talks recently, North Korea apparently "offered"
to scrap its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles in
return for oil, economic exchanges (a Korean euphemism
for money), and normalization of diplomatic relations.
By coming out swinging, declaiming on the very first day
even before sitting down to talk that it had nuclear
weapons and had begun reprocessing plutonium, the feisty
Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) set the
tone and raised the stakes.
The North Korean
strategy is to raise the bar to an extreme level, to
test the limits of US tolerance of its nuclear program,
and then to come back down to its original set of
demands and thereby create the illusion that it is
making a major concession. But nothing has changed, save
for the fact that the DPRK is now the only nation in the
world to have withdrawn from the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty and to have admitted to
blatantly violating it. This is an unassailable fact, as
are the deplorable human-rights violations in North
Korea, where tens of thousands of political prisoners
languish under nightmarish conditions. By its own
audacious admission, the DPRK now faces the danger of
self-containment - pushing too far and unwittingly
finding itself trapped in a corner.
The positive
outcome of the talks in Beijing is that North Korea's
admission further legitimates and internationalizes US
concerns, not to mention forcing a frown on China's
face. Not that the North Korean nuclear threat was not a
legitimate international issue before, but the latest
bluster can only lend greater legitimacy to the US
position, and might even push China off the fence to
exert more pressure on its problematic neighbor. This
nuclear game is international politics played at the
highest level, and the North Koreans choose to play it
not because they enjoy it or because they are inherently
evil, and most decidedly not because Bush pushed them
to. To presume so ignores the crux of the issue, not to
mention denying South Korea its due respect.
The
world knows that North Korea has persistently snubbed
the South while unabashedly reaching across the 38th
parallel for food and money. But, ultimately, it's the
North's fear of absorption by the South that makes
nuclear weapons its absolute priority, the one panacea
that can offset the impoverished regime's weakness in
all other conventional indices of state power. Over the
long term, DPRK leader Kim Jong-il knows he cannot
compete with the incomparably richer South, neither in
manufacturing, ideology, nor a conventional arms race.
He cannot liberalize his nation's moribund economy, as
that would lead to the unwelcome development of a
foreign and cosmopolitan entrepreneurial class that
might pose a threat to his secretive regime. For a
nation like the DPRK, resource-poor and isolated - hence
no revenue-generating foreign investment, tourism or
information-technology industry to speak of - giving up
nuclear weapons and entrusting its long-term survival to
the goodwill of the United States and South Korea would
be, well, poor national strategy.
It's something
of a historical irony that in the spring of 1950 the
Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, was busying himself traveling
to Moscow and Beijing, pleading his case before Joseph
Stalin and Mao Zedong to invade the South based on the
presumption that the United States would not intervene,
while today, it's the Russians and Chinese who are busy
traveling to Pyongyang to pacify the Dear Leader, Kim
Il-sung's son Kim Jong-il, and persuade him to behave,
based on the presumption that the United States, flush
with victory in Iraq and consumed with war fever, is
likely to take military action. The moral, clearly, is
that the credible threat of the use of force is the only
way to avert North Korean adventurism and a potential
catastrophe.
The US strategy henceforth should
be further to engage the moribund regime, suing for a
peaceful unification on the Korean Peninsula, while
garnering the support of world public opinion. It's a
shame that many around the world, almost completely
ignorant of the DPRK and put off by the unfortunate
image of a bellicose United States, feel naturally
inclined to side with the underdog and blame George W
Bush for this current standoff. The US can counter with
a human-rights propaganda campaign of its own.
We know that human rights as a component of US
foreign policy are a new phenomenon, and that it has
been sporadically and selectively practiced at best. But
the case against North Korea is so compelling that it
would be morally incumbent on the United States and,
especially, South Korea, to err on the side of
principles and human dignity. At the very least, it
would be educational. "Human rights in the name of
peaceful unification" - the North will go on denying it.
The world won't.
Sung-Yoon Lee is a
professor international politics and Korean history at
the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts
University, Massachusetts.
Speaking
Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows
guest writers to have their say. Please
click here if you are interested in
contributing.
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