Conflicting priorities on North Korea
By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - Professor Wang Jisi of Beijing University may not speak for his
government, the Communist Party or his country, but his view of efforts to get
North Korea to give up its nuclear program provides a startling note of realism
that seems to have escaped non-Chinese negotiators.
"The DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea - North Korea] will keep going
nuclear, period," he told a small audience here this week. "There is no other
endgame, at least from Pyongyang's point of view." That's the kind of blunt
declaration that United States and South Korean nuclear envoys do not seem
capable of making or even thinking, to judge from their public utterances.
United States envoy Stephen Bosworth while on a swing through the region
repeated the mantra of urging North Korea to return to
the six-party talks and promised that all topics would be open for discussion.
And South Korea's negotiator Wi Sun Lac, meeting Bosworth after both of them
had conferred with China's negotiator, Wu Dawei, in Beijing, talked about "the
need for the parties to resume six-party talks".
Both the Americans and the South Koreans acknowledge, however, that the whole
process remains stuck on North Korea's insistence on conditions that have no
immediate chance of acceptance. These include the demand for a Korean War peace
treaty - a deal the North couples with the withdrawal of the remaining 28,500
US troops from the South - and an end to United Nations sanctions imposed after
its long-range missile test and then its nuclear tests last April and May.
Just in case anyone doubted the North's position, the North Korean military
came out with an appropriately tough statement warning of the consequences of
joint US-South Korea war games scheduled for next month. It was one thing to
vow to "mercilessly destroy the bulwark of aggression", as the Korean People's
Army warned, but another to promise "all offensive and defensive means,
including nuclear deterrent".
Nobody expects North Korea to drop any atomic bombs from its decrepit fleet of
MiG fighters or attach a nuclear device to one of its vaunted missiles. In
fact, it's quite uncertain whether North Korean engineers and scientists have
actually figured out how to deliver a warhead. Nonetheless, the statement would
seem to leave one clear point: North Korea intends to remain a nuclear power.
Wang Jisi, delivering a paper at a forum in Seoul on North Korea's nuclear
problem, expanded on his realistic outlook - one that is difficult to dispute
unless you're either a US or South Korean negotiator or an academic equally
prone to wishful thinking.
Wang did not have to refer specifically to Bosworth's mission to Pyongyang in
December to get across the futility of it all. From all that has gone before,
he said, "It is hard to imagine any genuine progress on denuclearization - even
if North Korea-US contacts were upgraded or the six-party talks were to be
resumed soon."
Wang did not claim any real inside knowledge of what North Korean leader Kim
Jong-il talks about in meetings with the generals he commands from his pinnacle
as chairman of the National Defense Commission, the center of power in
Pyongyang. For that matter, he did not let us know if Kim talks to his generals
at all. For all anyone knows, maybe he just tells them what to do and think,
they bow in assent, and that's it.
"It is almost impossible for outsiders to know whether there were any debates
within the North Korean leadership about the pros and cons of going nuclear,"
he said. Why bother, was the rhetorical implication. "Even if there had been
any doubts and hesitations," he said, clearly "the perseverance to attain
nuclear weapons is serving the leaders' interests very well".
The logic was simple, from Wang's perspective. "Achievement of nuclear arms
should help consolidate their position at home and increase diplomatic
leverage," he said. "They feel little increased military pressure while they
know how to take one step forward in nuclearization and then pause to show an
ostensible readiness to negotiate over denuclearization."
All the while, as Wang noted, humanitarian aid and economic assistance continue
to flow into the North.
The degree to which Wang reflects the outlook of Wu Dawei and others in Beijing
is not exactly clear, but it seems more than likely that he gets to lecture at
home and abroad as both analyst and a messenger of high-level thinking. Looked
at that way, Wang's pessimism about North Korea giving up its nukes comes
across as a sign of what Beijing sees as a higher priority, that is, propping
up the North Korean regime against the danger of collapse and chaos. Wang got
that point across too with a candor that's not readily apparent in narrow
official pronouncements from Beijing.
"Unlike other partners," he said, in a jibe at the Americans and possibly the
South Koreans, "Beijing would look at a possible political implosion in North
Korea in most negative terms." For that reason his government "would never try
to destabilize that country or join others" in attempting "to do so".
Indeed, he added for good measure, it was "a consensus among many observers in
China that the Pyongyang government, with the social order it maintains, may
survive for a long time to come" in view of "traditional friendship" between
Beijing and Pyongyang, a not-too-subtle allusion to Beijing's rescue of North
Korea in the Korean War, as well as "shared interests".
Not that China is supporting whatever North Korea does. Reports persist that
China is anxious somehow to tamp down North Korea's nuclear ambitions, to
discourage the North from another nuclear test that many observers here are
predicting will happen this year - and to engage in serious, effective economic
reform.
Japan's influential national daily, Asahi Shimbun, for instance, this week
cited diplomatic sources in Beijing as saying that China had responded with "an
unexpectedly harsh reaction" to the North's nuclear test of May 25.
"The Communist Party of China told North Korea to reform and open up its
economy, end its hereditary succession of political power and abandon its
nuclear development programs," said Asahi, attributing those sweeping demands
to party sources. It was against this background, said the article, that Kim
Jong-il's third son, Kim Jong-un, visited Beijing while his father eased up on
disastrous economic reforms.
Wang's remarks, however, may not have convinced influential North
Korea-watchers in Japan and the US. The differences were apparent at the same
forum, held at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a think-tank financed in
large measure by Hyundai money and led by Han Sung-joo, a former foreign
minister noted for his moderately conservative views.
Evans Revere, president of the Korea Society in New York and a former diplomat
with a long background in Korea, Japan and China, warned that "China could be
forced to make hard choices between traditional support for its ally/partner
and a new approach".
Nor did Revere seem all that happy about the outlook of South Korea's
government. He did not seem impressed by President Lee Myung-bak's repeated
declarations that North Korea must give up its nuclear program as a
precondition for the aid the North was accustomed to receiving in the decade of
the "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation initiated by the late president Kim
Dae-jung in 1998.
The South "will need to decide whether it must now get tougher", said Revere,
while the North "must ask itself whether intransigence risks sowing the seeds
of even further isolation".
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