11 May 2017

Congratulations, new President M.  Now stop World War III.

President Moon, that is, not President Macron.

by Neil Tidmarsh

The shadow of apocalyptic confrontation falls across the Korean peninsula.

The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un refuses to abandon his nuclear weapons programme, in defiance of the UN.  He boasts that his intercontinental ballistic missiles could now nuke US cities on the far side of the globe, while his more conventional artillery – already deployed en masse along the frontier – could obliterate South Korea in seconds.  His half-brother – a critic and possible rival – is murdered under mysterious circumstances in an airport in Malaysia.  Two American academics are arrested on vague charges in Pyongyang.  South Korean and US intelligence agents are accused of arming a North Korean lumberjack with a radioactive, biochemical ‘nano poison’ for an assassination attempt on Kim Jong-un.

President Trump declares that the previous administration’s ‘strategic patience’ towards North Korea is over, and that the US is now prepared to use military force if Pyongyang continues to develop its nuclear arsenal.  He sends a US naval armada to the Korean peninsula, and intensifies joint military exercises with South Korea and Japan in the region.  US forces in South Korea hurriedly begin to install the anti-missile defence system THAAD much earlier than planned.

Even China, North Korea’s sole ally, appears to be hardening its attitude towards its protégé.  Following the meeting between President Xi and President Trump at Mar-A-Largo, there are signs that China is enforcing anti-nuclear sanctions – embargoing the export of oil to North Korea, cutting imports of North Korean coal and tightening border controls.  This week Pyongyang criticised China as “a big power chauvinist” undermining the “dignity, interests and sovereignty” of North Korea.

But what of South Korea itself, the country under immediate threat from Kim Jong-un’s rogue state?

South Korea has been paralysed politically for the last six months, while this crisis has been developing.  It’s been suffering from its own internal crisis; a corruption scandal that began with accusations against the president’s friend and spiritual guru, then spread to the country’s elite corporations and engulfed the president herself.  Two months ago she was impeached and removed from office, and she is now in prison awaiting trial.

But presidential elections, due in seven months time, were brought forward and this week the people of South Korea elected a new president, the left-leaning centrist Moon Jae-in.  The incarceration of his predecessor means that he will be sworn in immediately rather than waiting for the usual two-month transition period, so he will have to hit the ground running to play his part in the unfolding drama. He will have other crises on his hands – domestically, there’s widespread populist disgust with the country’s political and business elites which have been rocked by one corruption scandal after another (President Park was the first president to be impeached, but more or less every past president has been prosecuted once out of office) and huge disillusionment with the massive industrial conglomerates (known as chaebols) such as Samsung which dominate the economy.  Being his country’s first left-leaning president for eight years, his solutions for this include creating hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs, subsidising small companies and entrepreneurs, and loosening the chaebols’ stranglehold on the economy.  But now that the country at last has a president to speak for it on the international stage, it is his opinions on foreign policy which are attracting the most attention.  Washington might not find them very reassuring.

President Moon Jae-in is eager to re-engage with North Korea, to return to Seoul’s “sunshine policy” of conciliation with Pyongyang which was dropped ten years ago; he wants to re-open the Kaesong Industrial Zone, a joint North/South project in North Korea which was one of the fruits of that policy but which South Korea cancelled last year in protest against Pyongyang’s growing aggression.  He has said in the past that he would be willing to say ‘no’ to the USA: he would oppose any US unilateral action against North Korea; he would seek to take command of his armed-forces in time of war back from US; and he wants a review of the hastily-deployed anti-missile defence system, THAAD, which he has never supported.

Does this suggest that a US/South Korean breach is imminent, further destabilising an already dangerously unstable situation?

Not necessarily, if some of President Trump’s recent apparently casual and light-hearted comments are to be taken seriously.  This week he surprised the world by talking sympathetically and almost admiringly about Kim Jong-un’s troubled rise to power, describing him as “a pretty smart cookie” whom he’d “be honoured to meet”.  Such comments suggest that the White House recognises that Kim Jong-un’s stubbornness and aggression are rooted in the fear that the world is planning to overthrow him, that he will cling to his nuclear weapons and seek to develop them as long as he feels threatened.  Trump’s previous rhetoric has suggested that overthrowing Kim Jong-un might be the best way to halt North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme; but perhaps he is now exploring the possibility that the best way to persuade him to abandon that programme is to reassure him that no one is seeking to overthrow him, and that the world might be willing to treat him with respect.

That would certainly meet with China’s approval.  China might find its protégé exasperating, but it opposes regime-change in North Korea.  The last thing it wants is a united Korea – democratic, westernised and garrisoned by US forces – right on its border.  China opposes the THAAD anti-missile defence system even more strongly than does South Korea’s new president, suspecting that the system’s radars will be able to reach well inside its own territory, giving the USA a powerful spying tool.  But even the USA may not be that keen on THAAD – there are questions about its effectiveness, and about its cost.  Last week saw an undignified spat about who will pay for it: President Trump suggested that Seoul should pay for it, which infuriated Seoul; then the national security adviser General McMaster reassured his South Korean counterpart that Seoul wouldn’t have to pay for it, which infuriated President Trump.

It seems that South Korea may well have found its voice at just the right time in this developing crisis, and might just have found the right things to say.

 

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