The Great Korean Peninsula Chess Match

In the great bargaining game for the relaxation of tensions on the Korean Peninsula, for freedom from the fear of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, the decibel level of the rhetoric grows louder by the day. Three factors form separate but related elements in a great drama with far-reaching repercussions for the region. Not necessarily in order of importance, these range from succession in North Korea, U.S. policy on Korea and the North Korean intimidation of South Korea’s conservative government. None of these are evolving in ways likely to relieve tensions.

Kim Jong-il

North Korea is elevating the nuclear threat level to new extremes, while American policy appears uncertain to Korean observers. That’s the impression one gets from the North’s demand that the United Nations Security Council issue “an apology” for having condemned its test-firing of a long-range Taepodong-2 missile on April 5 and its subsequent nuclear test on May 25. If the Security Council fails to do its bidding, North Korea threatens to “defend its supreme interests” with “measures that will include nuclear tests and test-firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

The question is, how long is the North prepared to wait to see if the United States shows signs of yielding to direct dialogue outside the format of six-party talks. Paik Sung-joo, director of the Center for Strategy and Security at the Korean Institute for Defense Analyses, dismisses the view that North Korea’s response to the UN condemnation “constitutes a rhetorical threat only.” North Korea now “wants to demonstrate that it’s completing its nuclear system,” he told me. “They must improve the device and the delivery system” – that is, the nuclear warhead and the means to fire it to distant targets.

North Korean scientists and engineers by most estimates have fabricated at least six nuclear warheads, but probably not a small enough device to affix to the tip of a long-range missile, such as the one that flew 2,000 miles in the early April test. North Korea has so far conducted two underground nuclear tests, but both tests were far smaller than those of the eight full-fledged nuclear powers – an elite group among which the North would like recognition as a member. The timing of North Korea’s test is directly related to the North’s succession crisis and evolving U.S. policy. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, “is not in the greatest of health and the succession issue is unresolved,” observed Dean Ouellette, a research fellow at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. With the missilefiring and subsequent nuclear test, he believes, North Korea is keeping the world on edge while working through problems at home.

The process of selecting a successor to Kim Jong-il became a top priority last August after he suffered a stroke that weakened his left side. Kim, who also suffers from diabetes, looked frail and appeared to have lost weight when he chaired a session of the Supreme People’s Assembly several days after the firing of the Taepodong- 2. The session unanimously roared its approval of another term for Kim as chairman of the national defense commission, the center of power in North Korea, and named his brother-in-law, Jang Song-taek, a commission member. Jang is Kim’s right-hand man – and likely regent behind Kim’s successor. The youngest of Kim’s three sons, Kim Jong-un, given a defense post as “inspector,” is believed to be in line as the first thirdgeneration family member to inherit the top post of any communist country.

In the midst of the backstage maneuvering for succession, North Korea also is weighing the U.S. response to the drama of rhetoric and testing. North Korea is clearly not interested in going on with six-party talks, last held in December, while the State Department routinely calls for returning to the table. First, in the view of Choi Jin-wook, senior research fellow at the Korea Institute of National Unification, North Korea wants the UN Security Council to cancel sanctions imposed by a resolution adopted after the 2006 nuclear test. The resolution appeared ineffective as long as sanctions were not enforced, but China, Russia and others now appear more inclined to observe them. Meanwhile, said Choi, “No international bank will make transactions” with North Korea while the sanctions are in place. “The U.S. wants to pressure North Korea,” he believes. “They are playing a game of bluffing each other.”

Seoul

It is a dangerous game, however, in which North Korea is expected to continue to make good on its threats. “It’s easy to predict they will do what they’ve said,” said Yoon Dae-kyu, vice president of Kyungnam University, but first North Korea wants to see the drift of U.S. policy under President Barack Obama. The U.S. special envoy on North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, is believed to advocate dialogue between the U.S. and North Korea, long sought by the North in what is viewed in Seoul as an attempt to sideline and isolate the South.

One consideration will be the degree to which the U.S. chooses to fight the spread of nuclear weapons and technology under the Proliferation Security Initiative, a program for banding scores of nations together to cooperate on blocking shipments of nuclear materiel. South Korean officials have said the South has made a “firm and clear” decision to join the PSI as a core member after having participated under an observer status in exercises, but North Korea has said such a move by the South would be “a declaration of war.” If nothing else, North Korea could respond to the South’s joining the PSI by staging attacks on South Korean patrol boats in the West or Yellow Sea similar to those in June 1999 and June 2002. Six South Korean sailors were killed in the second attack while scores of North Koreans were believed to have died on each occasion.

At the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, Kim Tae-woo, the vice president, believes North Korea is looking for any pretext to conduct more tests and would rather do so sooner than later. By demanding an “apology” from the UN Security Council, Kim told me, “they are asking something not acceptable” while “trying to accumulate legitimacy for the next nuclear test.” Preparations for testing a warhead, Kim Tae-woo believes, “will not take much time” since North Korea has started reprocessing spent fuel rods at its nuclear complex at Yongbyon. “They could do it in two months,” he said. “They are waiting for the U.S. position as well as dialogue. The U.S. has not yet set its North Korean policy.” At the same time, North Korea in the next month or two may stage an armed confrontation in the West or Yellow Sea, as happened in the bloody shootouts in 1999 and 2002. Or North Korea could go one better and stage an incident along the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas.

The ultimate challenge, though, is against the United States. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Seoul in February on the way to Beijing, host of the six-party talks, she spoke of the need to consider the future of North Korea when Kim Jongil was no longer around. Diplomatic analysts chastised her for speaking so frankly about the fitness of the leader of a regime the U.S. hoped would return to negotiations. More recently, Clinton has said the North Koreans can forget about economic aid unless they return to the six-party talks that they have vowed “never” again to attend. She estimated the chances of the North Koreans biting on that bait as “implausible if not impossible,” as were the odds they would “begin to disable their nuclear capacity.” Such tough talk was more reminiscent of the early years of the presidency of George W. Bush than of that of her husband Bill Clinton, whose secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, schmoozed with Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang in October 2000, three months before Bush took over from Bill.

At the crux of the North Korean strategy is the desire to soften U.S. policy, as happened during Bush’s second term when North Korea agreed at the six-party talks to an elaborate scheme to disable its nuclear complex in return for a massive aid package. Now Kim Jong-il, prodded by his generals, is betting the U.S. will assent to two-way talks in which the North will press for all the billions promised in the 1994 Geneva agreement and then in the six-party deals of 2007. The generals will be vying for control behind the cover of the close relatives at the apex of the structure.

The certainty of military assumption of real power rests on the military-first policy that Kim Jong Il has promoted ever since he inherited national leadership after the death of his long-reigning father, Kim Il-sung, in July 1994. Although elevated to the National Defense Commission after the latest missile test, brother-inlaw Jang will have to contend with military people whose command of the country’s 1.1 million troops gives them an automatic power base. Third son Kim Jong-un, moreover, may be a weak leader – even if his father adjudged him better qualified than his two older brothers. Educated in Switzerland, he has never had to endure the hardships of the military people around him. Moreover, like his ailing father, he’s somewhat overweight and may be suffering from diabetes – a condition that does not augur well for his long-term future as the first third-generation leader of any socialist country.

In the rivalry to show who’s toughest, North Korean strategists view South Korea as an irritant to be intimidated by threats and warnings. They are “investigating” the Hyundai engineer arrested on March 30 for bad-mouthing North Korea in a drunken conversation with a North Korean waitress at the Kaesong Industrial Complex just above the Demilitarized Zone about 60 kilometers north of Seoul. In response to South Korean demands to see him, they are telling South Korean officials to stop making a fuss or face reprisals. In effect, they are holding the engineer for ransom, demanding more money from the 100 South Korean companies whose managers and technicians supervise about 40,000 North Korean workers producing light industrial products inside the zone. Simultaneously, the North Koreans are warning South Korea to stop investigating activist groups, an implicit call for southern compatriots to stage protests and incidents designed to weaken the government of President Lee Myung Bak.

It was in that spirit that North Korea called on the UN Security Council to apologize. What would it take for the Security Council to decide that retraction of its condemnation of North Korea’s test-firing of the missile and its subsequent nuclear test would not be a bad idea? Could those countries within range of North Korea’s missiles be certain of their immunity? The answer to such questions is sadly no. The demand for an “apology” was noise in a chorus of rhetoric likely to end in more explosions.