South Korea’s new president has ditched the soft approach of his predecessors on North Korea. The direction of Lee Myung Bak’s policies, says Selig Harrison, could have an incalculable impact on the region – politically and economically – as the Korean peninsula lurches back towards aggression
When North Korea’s president, Kim Il Sung, died in July 1994, after ruling with an iron hand for five decades, South Korea’s business, military and political elite was sharply divided over how to respond.
Hawks argued that the North Korean system would collapse after half a century of one-man rule and economic mismanagement. Pointing to the example of West Germany’s unification, they called for efforts to destabilize the Communist regime as a prelude to the absorption of the North by the South.
Moderates countered successfully that a German-style absorption would be too expensive. In the ensuing four years, a consensus developed that the more prudent course for the South would be to come to terms with Kim Il Sung’s son and heir, Kim Jong Il, help him to sustain his regime economically and promote North-South economic cooperation that would gradually make the economic systems of the North and South more congruent – setting the stage for eventual reunification on terms acceptable to both sides.
This consensus became the basis for the Sunshine Policy of president Kim Dae Jung, who took office in 1998, and of his successor, Roh Moo Hyun, who stepped down last year. Now South Korea’s new conservative president, Lee Myung Bak, who campaigned against what he called the unconditional appeasement of the North by his predecessors, is seeking to forge a new consensus in support of a hard-line posture toward Pyongyang.
Lee line
During the past decade, South Korea has provided large-scale food assistance, fertilizer and other economic aid to Pyongyang despite strong pressures from the Bush administration to withhold such aid until North Korea meets US terms for phasing out its nuclear weapons programme. Lee made clear immediately upon taking office that he would toe the US line in his dealings with the Kim Jong Il regime and suspended all assistance to the North, except for limited humanitarian aid pending North Korean steps toward denuclearization acceptable to Washington.
In marked contrast to the cool treatment of Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun on their Washington visits, Bush rewarded Lee by holding their recent summit meeting at Camp David, the first such visit to the presidential Maryland retreat accorded to a South Korean leader. The summit focused not only on the denuclearization negotiations but also on key military and economic aspects of South Korea-US relations. Lee pressed successfully for keeping US troop levels in the South at 28,500, with a planned US drawdown of 3,500 US troops suspended, and Bush obtained a commitment that Seoul would open up South Korea to imports of US beef, a key issue in the still-unresolved US congressional debate over the Free Trade Agreement negotiated last June. Lee also agreed to liberalize the terms for access to South Korean banks, brokerages and other financial institutions by foreign investors.
Lee was called the Bulldozer when he was a Hyundai executive and later mayor of Seoul. Since his election, he has lived up to this nickname with “in your face” criticisms of the North and radical changes in the South’s policies toward Pyongyang, which have produced a predictably truculent and bellicose reply.
Responses
The most important of these reversals was conditioning a resumption of aid on the complete implementation of all phases of the February 14, 2007, six-party agreement on North Korean denuclearization.
Realistically, the most that is likely in the remaining months of the Bush administration is an interim agreement carrying out only the initial phase of the February 14 denuclearization scenario in the agreement. Thus, Lee’s policy puts off a resumption of aid for the indefinite future. The aid cutoff could well become increasingly controversial in the South in the months ahead. The World Food Program has warned that North Korea faces a food production shortfall of 1.7 million tons this year and will face a food crisis within the next three months.
If Lee had adopted a tougher bargaining posture on aid and investment relations without linking it to denuclearization, and without hostile rhetoric toward the North, the reaction from Pyongyang might have been relatively restrained. But his approach during the first weeks of his tenure was provocative. South Korea voted with the US to condemn North Korea’s human rights record in a UN resolution. Next Lee said that the Unification Ministry, a symbol of the South’s commitment to reconciliation and reunification, would be abolished. Then Lee’s newly-appointed chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Kim Tae Young, made a carelessly-phrased statement during a parliamentary hearing on March 26 that seemed to threaten a preemptive strike against North Korea’s nuclear facilities.
A questioner asked General Kim, “If we assume that North Korea has nuclear weapons, what countermeasures would we have?” “The most important thing,” General Kim replied, “is to strike a site that the enemy could be using to stock nuclear bombs, after confirming the location of the site, before the enemy uses them. The next thing would be to not let them be used against us.” North Korea’s official news agency promptly responded that “our military will not sit idle until warmongers launch a preemptive strike. Everything will be in ashes if our advanced preemptive strike once again begins.”
General Kim responded that “my remark wasn’t about a preemptive strike. I was talking about it in the context of the worst case of war.” But the damage was already done, and North Korea soon began to threaten a renewal of the tensions between naval forces of the two sides in the Yellow Sea, which have been quiescent since the Kim Dae Jung years.
Apart from rhetoric, North Korea’s most significant concrete retaliatory step in the face of Lee’s new posture has been to expel the South Korean government representatives who oversee the participation of South Korean companies in the joint industrial zone near the North Korean city of Kaesong.
No showdown
Significantly, however, the North did not shut down the operation of factories in the zone, and there are signs that Lee, too, might stop short of bringing matters to a showdown. He did not abolish the Unification Ministry, and he observed in Washington that “during presidential elections, you really are given no choice but to take up positions that will benefit your prospects for getting elected.”
More important, he announced that he will offer to establish permanent high-level diplomatic channels between North and South, including liaison offices in the two capitals. This is not likely to impress Kim Jong Il unless it is accompanied by a resumption of aid, but it suggests that Lee recognizes the need to modify his posture toward Pyongyang. One way to defuse tensions with Pyongyang would be to lower the bar by making a resumption of aid conditional not on the completion of all phases of the February 14 agreement but only on an interim accord satisfactory to Washington.
The future direction of Lee’s policies will have an important impact on the geopolitical and military environment in north-east Asia as well as on the denuclearization negotiations.
Filling the gap
China and Russia would almost certainly move into the vacuum created by a cutoff of South Korean economic aid and investment. Chinese companies have already become increasingly entrenched in the North in recent years, especially in the extraction of coking coal, magnesite, iron ore and other North Korean mineral resources. Russia is close to closing an agreement with North Korea to construct railroad links, and combined Sino-Russian cooperation with North Korea is underway to develop a tripartite economic zone at Sinuiju.
China has made no secret of its concern over Lee’s frequent references to trilateral US-Japanese-South Korean military cooperation to police north-east Asia. General Pan Zhengqiang, chairman of one of China’s leading military think-tanks, warned that such cooperation would be dangerous and urged Lee to preserve the gains in North-South cooperation made during the past decade.
“It is almost incredible,” he wrote in a South Korean journal, “how the new president could interrupt the process of communication and interaction between the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea until Pyongyang acts on Seoul’s terms. The new president certainly has a legitimate right to demonstrate that he is different from his predecessors. But he should guard against throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
Chinese strategists like General Pan believe that the North Korean nuclear programme was a defensive response to the perceived threat of a US preemptive strike. They do not believe that it poses a threat to north-east Asian security, but they do worry about fears of a North Korean nuclear threat in Japan, where rightists in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party point to the danger of a nuclear-armed North Korea to build support for a Japanese nuclear weapons programme. As the convenor of the six-party denuclearization negotiations and the driving force behind the February 14 agreement, China has a special stake in seeing it carried out and has pressed Washington to settle for step-by-step progress rather than to insist on complete denuclearization all at once.
Interim agreement
The interim agreement now being negotiated would ratify a declaration marking completion of the first phase of denuclearization envisaged in the February 14 accord. North Korea would declare how much fissile material it possesses and accept inspections to confirm the size of its plutonium stockpile. Concurrently, it would complete disablement of its plutonium-producing reactor at Yongbyon. What will not be in the declaration is any reference to US allegations that Pyongyang has a secret uranium enrichment programme. This is expected to be “acknowledged” in a secret protocol. It was the uranium allegations that the Bush White House put forward in December 2002, to justify abrogation of the Clinton administration’s 1994 agreement with the North freezing its plutonium production.
In a Foreign affairs article (February 2005), I likened the uranium accusation to the now-discredited administration charges in the prelude to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. In the case of North Korea, I showed that intelligence reports relating to imports of equipment relevant for enrichment were greatly exaggerated to support charges of a weapons-grade enrichment programme. This was done to get rid of a Clinton-era agreement that the Bush administration considered too soft and to move to a confrontational policy.
The uranium issue is now being used by hard-line US critics of the February 14 agreement, led by former UN ambassador John Bolton, to discredit the interim agreement and is likely to be unresolved when the next US administration takes office. My own surmise, arising from hints by North Korean officials during recent visits, is that Pyongyang had an experimental uranium enrichment research and development programme that is now inoperative. In any case, North Korea, like Iran, is permitted under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to make low-enriched uranium fuel for civilian nuclear reactors if it accepts International Atomic Energy Agency inspection safeguards to prevent weapons-grade enrichment.
The bottom line is that Pyongyang will not, in my view, surrender its plutonium stockpile and move to full denuclearization unless its right to enrich uranium for civilian use is accepted – and unless it is promised light water plutonium reactors for electricity, like those promised but not completed in the 1994 Clinton agreement, when and if its nuclear weapons programme is ever fully dismantled.
Selig Harrison is director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy and a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars