New Cold War

Kim plays a blinder in Korea

The one thing that can be said with absolute certainty about the historic first meeting between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and South Korea’s Moon Jae-in is that it took place despite Donald Trump’s policies towards North Korea, not because of them. It was not sanctions or Trump’s threats that drove Kim to seek rapprochement with South Korea; it was the fact that the North’s nuclear programme was complete and with a deterrent in place, the DPRK[i] could negotiate from a position of strength. Despite Trump’s own inflated claims and those of his international supporters, the only sense in which Trump can be held to have contributed to the current détente is that the population of South Korea became so horrified by his apparent push to war on the peninsula that Moon – elected anyway on a platform of rapprochement with the DPRK – felt strong enough to drive ahead with the opening to the North despite Trump’s belligerent stance.

At no point has the US even particularly encouraged the rapidly unfolding peace process; it has been dragged behind developments on the peninsula, not driven them. At the opening ceremony for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, US Vice President Pence both demonstratively remained seated for the joint North and South Korea teams entry into the stadium, and studiously avoided even acknowledging Kim’s sister who was sitting close by him as guest of honour from the DPRK. This behaviour from the US was met with near universal vilification. Outside a war-mongering coterie within the Beltway, across the globe this initial thawing of relations on the peninsula was greeted with delight and genuine emotion, not least because it alleviated real fears that the world was teetering on the brink of nuclear war. By the closing ceremony Trump had learned the lesson, and Ivanka, his representative stood for the Korean teams – though still avoided interaction with the DPRK delegation.

From the Winter Olympics the momentum towards substantive talks snowballed, without any help from the US. Indeed, when in late February Moon Jae-in suggested that the US should lower its threshold for talks with the North – which was to demand a commitment from the DPRK for total denuclearisation with no preconditions – Trump’s response was to impose the largest package of sanctions to date on North Korea, despite it having carried out no new nuclear tests and already being engaged in a process heading to negotiations with the South.

Meanwhile, Kim’s March visit to China was a clear indication that the DPRK was serious about seeking a thaw on the peninsula. He would not have made the effort to go to Beijing – or been invited in the first place – if he was not offering the Chinese something they seriously wanted to hear.

China’s concerns on the Korean peninsula are twofold: to avoid an escalation in military tensions – not just because of the actual threat of war, but the cover this gives the US in undertaking a regional military build-up actually aimed at China; and also to avoid any devastating economic or political collapse in the DPRK that could allow a US-led reunification of the peninsula, giving it military access to the Chinese border. For nearly 70 years it has been the existence of the DPRK that has prevented US troops being stationed on the Yalu River overlooking China’s northeastern industrial heartland and only 1000km from Beijing.

Thus Xi would have wanted to hear Kim’s proposed steps to reduce the nuclear tensions, but he almost certainly also received some commitments to engage with China to further ‘market socialist’ reforms in the DPRK, which China sees as crucial to deliver the kind of growth in living standards that can ensure stability in the North.

Over the last five years Kim has already carried through significant steps in this direction, which have included infrastructure investment and ‘privatisation’ of some kinds of small business. This has underpinned a healthy rise in DPRK GDP growth rates – 3.9% in 2016, its highest growth rate for 17 years, and after 7 years when its growth has averaged little over zero. 2016 also registered 4.6% export growth, despite tightening of international sanctions. But this has stalled over the last 18 months with the impact of increased international sanctions and deteriorating relations with China inhibiting mutually beneficial economic relations.

China’s drive for the further opening up of the DPRK economy to Chinese investment is not motivated by any potential, tiny, economic benefit to China, but by its political concern that any future reunification of the Korean peninsula should be the outcome of equal negotiations between North and South, explicitly limiting the US military presence, which requires a successful and dynamic DPRK.

Thus, despite Trump’s self-congratulatory tweets following the Kim-Xi meeting, more perspicacious international commentators pointed out that the meeting in fact created problems for Trump, underlining that the China-DPRK axis will drive any terms or settlement on the peninsula, not the US. For example, in an interview with The Atlantic, Yun Sun, director of the Chinese Programme at the Stimson Centre, explained: ‘Last week the assumption was that North Korea’s relationship with China was very bad, so going into the [Trump-Kim] summit we could assume that North Korea would be more desperate to have a deal.’ Following the meeting North Korea has more leverage: ‘… the less isolated North Korea is, the less able the US will be to coerce North Korea in any direction.’

The Xi-Kim meeting in Beijing led directly into the historic Moon-Kim meeting on the North-South border, again without any role for the US – beyond Trump giving his endorsement to a process that was already proceeding.

The Moon-Kim meeting was an evident success at every level. The meeting has increased the popularity of Moon Jae-in, currently polling at an astounding 75% in South Korea, and has amplified support for the peace process with the North. Prior to these recent developments support for Korean reunification in the South had been declining, particularly among younger South Koreans, with a recent survey showing that 71.2% of South Koreans in their 20’s opposed reunification. The meeting in April between Moon and Kim has reportedly had an impact on this already, not least because Kim himself made a favourable public impression; the evident rapport between him and Moon was reinforced by positive responses to his confident and relaxed manner of speaking – the first time most South Koreans had heard the North Korean leader speak in his own voice.

The success of the meeting has left Trump little choice but to agree to start serious planning for his own meeting with Kim. Driven by his notorious amour-propre, Trump would no doubt like the accolade of being the first US president to meet with a leader of the DPRK. But there have been numerous voices of caution from hardliners in the administration who believe the US is being rushed into talks with the North without any guarantees as to what it is really prepared to offer on denuclearisation. And, from their own point of view, they are right.

Kim has promised an end to tests and the destruction of North Korean test site(s), and he has pledged to discuss full denuclearisation. But he has not agreed to abandon any of the DPRK’s existing nuclear weapons or missiles, which Kim sees as a necessary deterrent to any Iraq, Libya or Syria type operation by the US against the North. This is a long way from the verifiable full denuclearisation that has been the US precondition for talks right up until the last couple of weeks. But when NBC journalist, Chuck Todd, pointed this out, it provoked Trump into a typically hyper twitter response to ‘sleepy eyes Chuck Todd of fake news NBC’ , where Trump claimed that North Korea had agreed to ‘Wow…denuclearisation’ when this was manifestly untrue.

This is all further evidence that it is not the US, but careful tactics by Kim and the North, aided by the desire for a peaceful solution in the South, that is driving the process towards talks.

The underlying problem for the US in this unfolding peace process is the threat that it poses to the US military presence in South Korea. South Korea’s strategic location has always placed it at the heart of US military policy in East Asia, both in relation to the USSR in the past, and currently primarily towards China. The US bases in South Korea are its only ones actually on the continent of Asia east of Islamabad; geographically they are the most proximate to China of all its bases, and its annual naval exercises with South Korea take place the closest to China’s shores.[ii] Only Japan is as militarily and strategically significant as South Korea.

The 28 US army and air bases in the country are critical for the US’s strategic position in northeast Asia. Comprising 23,500 US troops in 2017, this is its third largest permanent overseas deployment after Japan and Germany; and will become its second largest, as its drawdown from Germany continues. Fort Humphreys, a new US base, will become the largest single US garrison in Asia. A Senate Report found that the costs to the US of its military presence in Korea in 2012 amounted to nearly $3.1 billion, not including the South Korean contribution of $765 million.[iii]

From 1950 until 1994 the US had complete day-to-day operational control – OpCon – over the South Korean army. This was ended for peacetime operations in 1994, but OpCon would still revert to the US in the case of war. The transfer of wartime command over its own army to South Korea has been serially postponed.

Since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, opposition to the US’s military role and presence in South Korea has grown, sometimes erupting into major street demonstrations – most recently against the installation of the US’s anti-missile THAAD system.

The US’s winning card in seeing off opposition to its military role in South Korea has always been the ‘threat’ from the DPRK; its image in the West as an irrational rogue state and exaggerating the threat from its primitive nuclear weapons programme have ensured both the South Korea’s compliance and Congressional support for the huge budgets required.

Periodically the actions of the DPRK have indeed seemed to confirm allegations that it challenges regional security. But US inflexibility on the DPRK has been driven less by the actions of Pyongyang than by concern to maintain an internationally acceptable cover for the US military position in the South. It is the US that has scuppered every previous attempt to engage in a peace process.

For example, in June 1994, former president Carter, during a visit to the North, persuaded the ageing Kim Il-sung to agree points for a treaty with the US, under which the US agreed to lift some sanctions, help the North build light water reactors and supply it with domestic fuel oil in return for ending its nuclear arms programme. But the US never implemented it, with the Clinton administration believing the desperately weakened post-Cold War situation of the state would mean it collapsed before the US had to make good on its side of the deal. The North, however, did suspend its weapons programme.

Alongside these developments in the US, the impact of the end of the Cold War on South Korea was a greater sense of security due to the absence of the threat from an alliance between the USSR and DPRK. In this context the South adopted a new spirit of engagement towards the North, with successive presidents – from right and left – pursuing rapprochement with the North, culminating in the historic summit between President Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang 2000.

Unsurprisingly, parallels have been drawn between that summit in 2000, and the April meeting between Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un, with right-wing commentators arguing that nothing came of that summit in terms of denuclearisation and therefore nothing can be expected from this one either. This is to ignore the context and the role of the US in derailing the process.

Despite the DPRK having closed its nuclear programme and signed up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in his 2002 State of the Union address announcing the ‘war on terror’, Bush included North Korea as part of a global ‘axis of evil’. A year later Iraq was invaded, and fearing it was the next target the DPRK withdrew from the NPT and relaunched its nuclear weapons programme. It was the US offensive against the DPRK that scuppered the peace process unfolding from the 2000 North-South summit, not the obstructionism of the North.

The return to a nuclear programme in the North was however viewed with alarm in South Korea, as it was also in China, which was on the brink of becoming the South’s main export market (which it did in 2003). The two countries came together to try to persuade Washington back into negotiations.

Together they initiated the framework for ‘six-party talks’ involving the US, China, Russia, Japan and both Koreas, with the aim of getting the US to the table with the DPRK. The US agreed to participate and several rounds of talks were held between 2003 and 2007. But Bush constantly intervened to scupper any agreement. In 2006 the US blew up the talks by refusing to release North Korean foreign assets, and when they resumed they were blocked again by the US claiming the DPRK had failed to fully disclose nuclear facilities.

Kim Dae-jung’s successor, Roh Moo-hyun, had been elected in 2002 on a pledge to continue to seek openings to the North despite Bush’s positions on the ‘war on terror’. His government increasingly worked with China to keep the talks going despite US sabotage them, and a summit between Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang in 2007 proposed to continue this dialogue towards a peace settlement. But any progress from this meeting was ended by the election of the right-wing Grand National Party’s presidential candidate Lee Myung-bak in 2008 pledged to take a hard line on the North and reprioritise relations with the US. Relations with the North deteriorated rapidly, only beginning to stabilise after the election of Park Geun-hye in 2013. But she took no initiatives towards the North, and agreed to an increase in the US military presence in the South. An increasingly isolated North decided to accelerate its development of a nuclear deterrent, with the stepped up missile and nuclear tests leading to the recent sharpening of tensions on the peninsula.

The question is now whether the US will once again scupper the positive progress towards a peace deal in Korea? The problem for the US, for all its talk of peace and deals, is that every actual step towards a settlement in Korea undermines the case for its high level military presence in the South and the aggressive military exercises it stages in northeast Asia each year.

Although Kim has been careful not to say it – as it would give the US an excuse to walk away – any scrapping of the North’s existing nuclear weapons would clearly have to be tied to a US withdrawal from the peninsula. The US is utterly unwilling to concede an inch on this, as its military presence in South Korea is crucial to maintaining its strategic position vis-à-vis China. Hence why it has always scuppered any progress in talks.

The deeper the US is drawn into these new talks, and with growing sentiment in South Korea both for a peace process and against the US military presence, the harder it will be for it to refuse concessions without losing status, and friends in the region.

It is not Trump that has pulled off a blinder in Korea, that honour rests, somewhat surprisingly, with Kim Jong-un. Watch this space. It will be interesting.

 

[i] DPRK, Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, North Korea; ROK, Republic of Korea, South Korea

[ii] The US has a small military presence in Thailand of c.100 personnel.

[iii] ‘Inquiry into the US costs and allied contributions to support the US military presence overseas’, Report of the Committee on Armed Services, US Senate, 15 April 2013.

Japan: Abe's landslide in seats based on no increase in votes

Shinzo Abe and his right wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) swept to an outright victory in Japan’s snap General Election at the weekend.

His LDP/Komeito Party ruling coalition won over two-thirds – 313 – of the seats in the lower house of the Japanese Parliament. Taken together with the coalition’s existing two-thirds majority in the upper house, the election delivered a ‘super-majority’ for Abe which potentially allows him to take such steps as changing the Japanese constitution without consulting the opposition parties.

Abe’s election platform included a pledge to amend the ‘pacifist’ Article 9 in the Japanese constitution, which currently means it can only wage defensive war.

However although Abe won a stunning majority in seats this was not the result of a similar landslide in votes.  

Firstly the turn out in the election was very low at 53.9 per cent, only about 1 per cent up from 2014 which registered the lowest ever turnout in a Japanese General Election.

Secondly the LDP itself only saw a tiny increase in its share of the vote – from 33.1 per cent in 2014 to 33.3 per cent this time, an increase of only 0.2 per cent – while its coalition partner Komeito saw its vote fall by 1.2 per cent from 13.7 per cent to 12.5 per cent. This meant support for the coalition overall declined from 46.8 per cent in 2014 to 45.8 per cent this year.

In other words the electorate was distinctly lukewarm towards Abe. The fact that – despite crowing in the Western press about the success of ‘Abenomics’ –Japanese economic growth for the last three years has averaged less than 1 per cent has not made Abe or the LDP particularly popular.[i] His personal approval ratings have been increasingly negative in 2017, primarily due to economic issues, but also amplified by a series of corruption scandals,[ii] and concern about the impact of the proposed change to the constitution

The reason why this nonetheless translated into a landslide in seats for the LDP was primarily due to the divisions that have beset the opposition in a system where 60 per cent of the seats are elected by a first past the post system. On the eve of the election the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) dissolved, eventually producing two new rival parties, the right-wing Party of Hope and the more liberal Constitutional Democratic Party(CDP).

The Party of Hope was launched by Tokyo Mayor, Koike provoking the dissolution of the DP.  Abe announced the election later the same day! The new party aped the policies of the LDP, supporting it on changing Article 9, and only opposing it on nuclear power and a previously agreed 2 per cent hike in sales tax – from 8 per cent to 10 per cent – which is due to come in shortly. During the election Koike suggested that her party would be willing to form a ‘grand coalition’ with the LDP, although since the election result she has denied this.

Despite the fanfare on its launch – when the DP effectively dissolved itself to allow its sitting MPs to run for the new party – Koike’s junior version of the LDP eventually came third to the other party formed out of the ruins of the DP, the CDP. Before the rapid founding of the CDP, after the election had been called, it appeared that the Communist Party of Japan would effectively become the main alternative to the LDP’s policies. In the event, the CDP won 55 seats to Hope’s 50, and 19.9 per cent of the popular vote compared to 17.4 per cent, while the Communist vote was squeezed back from 11.4 per cent in 2014 to only 7.9 per cent in 2017. Although the Communists still did considerably better than the Japanese Social Democrats, whose vote fell from a disastrous 2.5 per cent to an annihilating 1.7 per cent.

Neither Hope nor the CDP put forward a clear alternative to Abe’s policy of strengthening Japan militarily against China (with North Korea as the fig leaf for this) nor to his economic policy. The CDP opposed Abe’s proposed constitutional change, but offered no fundamentally different course for Japan domestically or internationally.

The LDP has been in government continuously in Japan since the end of the US occupation in the 1950s, on a platform of subordination of foreign, trade and domestic policy to the demands and interests of the United States. Despite Abe’s nationalistic spin on Japanese politics, he has at all points stressed that maintaining and strengthening Japan’s relationship with the US is fundamental and non-negotiable, a position reinforced by hostility to China in particular.

There have only been two moments where an alternative to the LDP was able to win elections and form a government.

The first was in the mid-1990s when, in the context of a crisis in the LDP, a series of very short-lived coalitions eventually led to a Socialist Party-led government that lasted two years, on a policy of reorienting Japan towards Asia in the context of the end of the Cold War, the end of any threat from Russia, and the growing economic weight of South Korea, the island of Taiwan and increasingly China. The US’s total hostility to this orientation forced it to abandon this course and hastened its fall leading to a return of the LDP in 1996.

The second was when the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) under Hatoyama won the election in 2009 on a pledge to close the US base in Okinawa and also to reorient Japan to Asia, now China in particular, floating the idea of some community of northeast Asian states on the model of the EU. Again total hostility from the US forced Hatoyama to change course on Okinawa, and within a year he was ousted as PM and replaced by DPJ right-winger Naoto Kan, who reoriented policy back in line with the US. The LDP, under Abe, easily won the next election in 2012.

The lesson is clear. Barring a crisis in the LDP where a political current of essentially the same character replaces it under a different name, the only opposition that can hope to replace the LDP as Japan’s main party of government is one that proposes to reorient the country from the US to Asia, especially China.

Abe’s policy is to strengthen Japan’s orientation to the US, chiefly by expanding Japan’s military forces. This was begun in response to Obama’s 2010 ‘pivot to Asia’, shifting US naval and military resources to the Pacific to counter China and encouraging US regional allies to rearm. It has stepped up in response to Trump’s threats that allies cannot rely on the US military umbrella unless they ‘pay their way’.

But this is not entirely popular in Japan itself. Although the recent crisis over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes has led to some hardening of positions in the Japanese population in favour of militarily strengthening Japan, opposition to the US base in Okinawa remains strong and support for changing Article 9 of the constitution remains questionable. Not only is such a step highly controversial in Japan, but it is fiercely opposed by Japan’s neighbours, not just China and Russia but also South Korea. Japanese voters are concerned about provoking a deteriorating security situation in the region.

A number of opinion polls taken in April and May this year confirmed this.[iii] A poll by Asahi reported 63 per cent opposed to revision, with 29 per cent in favour; NHK – Japan’s public broadcaster - found 57 per cent and just 25 per cent for (down from 30 per cent in its previous 2002 poll); Kyodo’s ‘mail-in’ poll was the only one to show a majority in favour, with 47 per cent against and 49 per cent for. NHK’s poll also showed that 82 per cent thought Article 9 either ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ useful for peace and security, despite also finding that 87 per cent thought Japan was currently threatened, especially by North Korea and China.

Certainly Abe is not going to back off on his support for Japanese rearmament and support for the US’s policies towards China. He has promised a ‘hard line’ on North Korea, but as for Trump himself, short of risking an all-out war that might wreak significant damage on South Korea and Japan itself, Abe does not have many options. Whether he pushes through a change to Article 9 – which looks more likely now he has a ‘super-majority’ and de facto support from the Party of Hope – is nonetheless still an open question, given the level of popular opposition.

Whatever else happens, this election result is no cause for celebration by the peace movement internationally and will deliver no economic respite to the Japanese working class.

 

[i] World Bank data. Available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2016&locations=JP&start=2009&view=chart

[ii] Browne, R. ‘As Shinzo Abe’s approval rating declines, markets could question sustainability of “Abenomics”: Analyst’, CNBC, 14 July 2017

[iii] Mark, C. ‘Japan debates changing its pacifist constitution’, The Diplomat, 18 May 2017

The US is to blame for the crisis with North Korea, and the US could solve it

 

Once again tensions between the US and North Korea over the latter’s nuclear programme have reached a dangerous boiling point, as North Korea carried out its largest-ever nuclear test in early September.

As with previous missile and nuclear tests by the DPRK, this test was accompanied by provocative rhetoric, threats and counter-threats from both sides. But evidently this is of most concern coming from the US, as the US actually has the capacity to carry out its threats, whereas despite the blood-curdling warnings in the Western media, Kim Jong-un does not.

North Korea’s claims have included that US cities are now within the reach of its missiles, that it plans to ‘contain’ the US base in Guam and it would respond to US attack by putting ‘an end to the US’. However these threats are in reality preposterous; North Korea does not have the arsenal to inflict any damage whatsoever to the US mainland or Guam. Such threats are however very dangerous as they are used in the West to whip up public opinion against North Korea, and in support of any response made by the US.

The US, on the other hand, definitely does have the capacity to obliterate the DPRK many times over. It is therefore of great concern that, in response to the latest test, US defence secretary Mattis threatened North Korea with a ‘massive military’ reaction; and that hardline Republican senators like Lindsey Graham, told the BBC that the US should be willing to contemplate 100,000s of civilian deaths to bring North Korea to heel.

Regarding the fundamental background to these events it is US foreign policy, particularly since the 2002 launch of the so-called ‘war on terror’, that has led to this crisis. In 2003 Bush, backed by Tony Blair, faked evidence of a continuing Iraqi nuclear programme to justify by-passing the UN to pursue illegal ‘regime change’ in that country. After defeating the regime through its military policy of ‘shock and awe’, Saddam Hussein and his family were hunted down and he hanged by a kangaroo court.

In Libya, Gaddafi drew the lesson from this that he must make a deal with the US and actually close down the Libyan nuclear programme; but this did not protect Libya from NATO bombing, nor Gaddafi also being hunted down like an animal and murdered with the tacit backing of the West.

The same was intended for Assad; but with Russia backing the regime, and the populations of the US and Europe growing wary of both the costs and domestic blowback from such wars, the US was unable to simply bomb its way to overthrowing Assad.

Putin analysed the situation rather accurately, identifying the US’s repeated violations of the UN Security Council as the prime cause of the uncomfortable bed in which the US and the rest of the world is now lying: 'Foreign [US] interventions in Iraq and Libya had convinced the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, that he needed nuclear weapons to survive, Putin said. “We all remember what happened with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. His children were killed, I think his grandson was shot, the whole country was destroyed and Saddam Hussein was hanged ... We all know how this happened and people in North Korea remember well what happened in Iraq.”'

In other words, the main threat to world peace comes from the US’s record of unilateral military actions – exactly as those who opposed them warned at the time.

For small states that are in the crosshairs of the US the lessons are crystal clear. There is no persuasion, no talking, no UN that will protect you if the US decides to come for you. The only solution is to do what is possible to deter the US by building up a sufficient arsenal, including nuclear weapons, so that the threatened collateral damage acts as a brake.

And North Korea has plenty of reasons to feel threatened. Obama’s 2010 ‘pivot to Asia’ – which is one Obama policy that Trump is not reversing – was universally understood to be aimed at containing China, but within this North Korea was set up as a convenient scapegoat and cover for the US’s real intentions. For example, the stationing of the THAAD missile defence system in South Korea was proposed in response to North Korea, although its main target is really China and Russia – THAAD is a far too powerful system, with radar ranges of thousands of kilometres, to be aimed purely at North Korea.

From 2010, US bases in South Korea were expanded, with a new base, Fort Humphreys, slated to become the largest US base in Asia. Meanwhile North Korea’s other unfriendly neighbour, Japan, embarked on a sharp increase in its military spending and deepened its military collaboration with the US.

The DPRK’s August firing of an unarmed missile over Japan’s northernmost Hokkaido Island took place the day after the conclusion of US-Japan Northern-Viper-II wargames on the island that simulated invasion of North Korea and a ‘decapitation’ operation to remove the regime.

The US has also stepped up the scale of its annual Key Resolve/Foal Eagle land and sea based training exercises held jointly with South Korea, which the North Korean government had regularly objected to. The annual training exercise was already the largest held globally by the US, and from 2010 it was upgraded continuously. In 2013 B-2 and B-52 bombers were included; the exercise in 2016 was the largest to date.

The sea-borne element of these exercises often close in on the North Korean Yellow Sea coast, where the offshore border between North and South Korea is disputed. While the land border at the 38 parallel was de facto agreed by both sides in 1953, the western sea border was not. Despite North Korea’s reasonable objections, the UN, at the behest of the US, which entirely dominated it at the time, unilaterally imposed a sea border curving up the western coast of North Korea, rather than extending the line of the land border out to sea. (see link for map)

The threatening mien of this escalating US military presence, plus the evidence of the US’s practical implementation of ‘regime change’ since 2003, is the reality that has driven the North Korean nuclear programme, which was restarted in 2003 after being suspended under the ‘Agreed Framework’ with the US in the late 1990s. The DPRK knows its nuclear weapons cannot defeat the US, but they can offer sufficient threat to South Korea and Japan that they will act to stay the US’s hand on military action. And threaten some damage to US assets as well.

However, the real defence of the DPRK is that offered by China and Russia. Quite apart from the fact that China has no more intention today that it showed in 1950 of allowing the US to be able station its troops on the Yalu river that runs along its border with the DPRK, both China and Russia are determined that the US will not spread its policies of devastation and instability (as seen in the Middle East) to their backyard.

And it is in this regard that the behaviour of North Korea becomes rather less reasonable or defensible, and more straightforwardly provocative, as despite China’s role as its chief international defender – alongside Russia – and key economic and trading partner, North Korea refuses point blank to listen to its advice or take account of its concerns.

China does not make a big campaign against the DPRK’s nuclear programme, but does suggest that the DPRK should proceed quietly and calmly, refrain from provocative rhetoric and unrealistic threats, and present itself as reasonable, balanced and prepared to talk. China would have liked to see more positive signs in response to openings like the election of a South Korean president committed to easing tensions with the North, which might have positively impacted on Moon’s own wavering.

China’s – and Russia’s – proposal in relation to the current crisis has been dubbed ‘freeze-freeze’: that the US agrees to refrain from holding military exercises off the North Korean coast and that North Korea suspends its nuclear programme to allow talks to take place.

China has stood up to the West’s demands that it impose comprehensive sanctions on North Korea, which would wreck the DPRK’s economy. But China is also concerned to avoid a complete breakdown with the West, so earlier in 2017 it agreed to a figleaf of some limited sanctions on North Korea.

Rather than showing understanding of the corner that China had been placed in, North Korea’s state media denounced China for crossing a ‘red line’ and for ‘dancing to the tune of the US’.

North Korea followed this up by scheduling missile and nuclear test at times chosen to most embarrass and create difficulties for China.

Thus, in May, a missile test was launched hours before president Xi was due to open China’s key 2017 international event, the ‘Belt and Road Forum’ in Beijing, convened to take forward proposals for improved overland and sea communication links across Asia to the West. Similarly, early September’s nuclear test was timed for the eve of the 2017 BRICS summit that was convening in Beijing.

There is no doubt that these tests were deliberately timed as a snub to China.

This is completely unreasonable behaviour by North Korea and makes its defence against the US harder.

Rather than berating China, Kim Jong-un should learn from how it handles its international relations, and listen rather more to its well-judged advice on how North Korea should conduct itself internationally.

However, in the final analysis, it is the US that holds the key to the situation on the Korean peninsula. The speeded up development of North Korea’s, still very primitive, nuclear arsenal and its missile tests are not the real threat to peace in the region. Rather its is the US’s evident capacity to inflict nuclear annihilation, and a White House that is making escalating threats to actually use it, that creates fear in every thinking person’s breast.

Overall, the US will probably not make such a reckless step, primarily because China and Russia stand behind North Korea – which together could inflict great damage on the US, even if the DPRK cannot – and Trump cannot be sure what they would do in response.

But that just means ongoing crisis and tension in the region. If the US really wanted peace and to persuade North Korea to mothball its nuclear programme it would not only have to eschew ‘regime change’, but offer clear security guarantees on the ground, including ending its provocative war games off its coasts.

The US vs China: Asia’s new Cold War by Jude Woodward, Manchester University Press., 2017. Available to order in the UK and USA through bookshops and online

Is Trump losing South Korea?

A significant initial impact of the crisis that Trump has whipped up over North Korea was to push security issues up the agenda in South Korean politics, aiding the US in speeding up the deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) and boosting the poll ratings of the more pro-US candidate in the Presidential elections due on 9 May. But Trump’s more recent statements about this key US Northeast Asian ally have been so casually insulting that they have led to an upsurge in anti-US sentiment as the elections draw closer.

An exclusive Oval Office interview with Reuters on Thursday 27^th April, was widely flagged under headlines referring to Trump’s portentous warnings that ‘There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea’.

What was less widely reported in the West – but hit the headlines in South Korea – was the fact that he went on to suggest that he may ‘terminate’ the US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement (known at KORUS), which he described as a ‘horrible deal’ and as ‘a Hillary Clinton disaster… that should’ve never been made’.

So far so not new; Trump has repeatedly put a question mark over all existing US trade deals, especially those with countries with which it runs a trade deficit. But when the interviewer asked when he would decide to renegotiate the agreement, he declared: ‘I am announcing it now’, threatening to unilaterally cancel it if the US could not get a ‘fair deal’. Announcing the renegotiation of a trade deal with a critical ally, and major trading partner, via an interview with Reuters may be par for the course for a US president that announces bombings on his personal twitter account; but this did not go down well in South Korea where the issues of the US military presence and its influence over South Korea’s security policy are already not universally popular to say the least.

But this was not the end of the blunders in Trump’s interview. He went on to say that he wanted South Korea to pay $1bn for the THAAD anti-missile system. This caused outrage, particularly as South Korea only agreed to host the system at all because of unrelenting US pressure, riding out both domestic opposition and strong objections from neighbouring China to meet this US demand; and that the agreement was explicitly on the basis that the South Koreans provided the locations, while the system itself remained both the property and the economic responsibility of the US.

Both the presidential front-runner, Moon Jae-in – who opposes THAAD – and the second place candidate, Ahn Cheol-soo – who supports it – responded angrily, renewing calls that the stationing of THAAD should be slowed until after the elections to allow the new government to reconsider the matter. This undoubtedly boosted the numbers already participating in major protests and sit-downs attempting to block the US convoys installing the THAAD system.

By Saturday 29^th April, Trump’s security advisor McMaster, was on the phone to the acting president of South Korea to reassure him that the US expected no payment for THAAD, and that Trump’s comments had been made in the ‘general context’ of expectations of ‘defence cost burden-sharing with allies’.

This Trump blunder however had already compounded the fury in South Korea at the insulting level of ignorance he had shown when, in a 12 April interview with the Wall Street Journal, he claimed that ‘Korea actually used to be a part of China’!

Nor had South Korea been consulted prior to Trump’s mid-April Twitter announcement that he was sending an ‘armada’ to the Korean peninsula. In the light of this blatant disrespect, not surprisingly the South Korean media were especially excoriating when it emerged that this alleged armada – the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group – was in fact heading for the Indian Ocean at the time.

The upshot is that while Trump has continued to apply stepped up pressure to China and sent envoys on a charm offensive to win Asian allies support for a tougher line on North Korea – senior White House officials visited Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines over the last few days – in reality it is key ally, South Korea, that this policy chiefly impacts upon and whose support is decisive. But the effect is that South Korea is becoming progressively more alienated from the US.

Both front-running presidential candidates in South Korea have strengthened their calls for the resumption of talks with, rather than threats against North Korea. A Moon presidency in particular spells a potential problem for Trump’s ‘get tough’ policy on the North. Not only is Moon committed to trying to restart the six-party talks, but he has promised a new version of the 1998-2008 ‘sunshine policy’ towards the DPRK that successfully bought stability on the peninsula in return for talks, international advocacy for the North, aid, trade and other openings.

Moon currently looks unbeatable given that the climb in the polls of the more pro-US Ahn stalled in the face of the erosion of popular support for Trump’s interventions.

Trump’s military threats are genuinely dangerous in the context of North Korea’s isolation and understandable paranoia, with an unintended conflict not impossible. But his bluster, bombast and incivility is not winning friends in South Korea and therefore are not bringing together a ‘coalition of the willing’ in Northeast Asia that includes the US ally most central to the issues.

China is the real target for Trump’s menaces on North Korea

Trump’s dramatic escalation of sabre-rattling over North Korea from mid-April was not triggered by any new provocative action by North Korea nor any notable advance in its nuclear or missile programme, although in the din of overwrought rhetoric emanating from Mar-a-lago it appeared that the US and North Korea's neighbours faced an imminent threat. But this crisis was conveniently timed to influence the outcome of the South Korean presidential elections due on 9^th May.

The sudden heightening of US rhetoric on North Korea, with unnerving suggestions that the US might imminently launch a pre-emptive strike, did not relate to any specific actions by the North. The DPRK had indeed run several missile tests on 6^th March, which led to protests, especially by Japan, but there were no threats of imminent action by the US. It was not until five weeks later, on 12^th April – shortly after Xi’s visit to the US – that the crisis was kicked off by Trump's boastful claim that he had despatched a US ‘armada’ to the peninsula. The following day the tensions escalated when a White House representative was quoted as saying the US was considering retaliatory action against the North, which was given additional weight when set against the dropping of the so-called 'Mother of all bombs' in Afghanistan on the same day. It is true that two days after this, on 16^th April, the North did make a further missile test – which ignominiously failed. But this was after the crisis had broken out and anyway showed the opposite to the White House contention that the North Korean programme was now dangerously advanced.

However, what this furore did create were great fears in the region that war might be on the horizon, pushing national security issues right up the agenda in South Korea. Until this crisis began to unfold, the clear front-runner in the presidential race, was Moon Jai-in, the left-leaning Democratic Party candidate. Moon was opposed to the US stationing of the THAAD missile defence system, and is strongly oriented to China and seen as more distant from the US.[i] The sudden increase in tension with the North allowed the US to insist upon the speeding up the deployment of THAAD, so that it will be sufficiently advanced by the elections that it is hard to roll it back. Moon himself also backed off from outright opposition to THAAD as the sabre-rattling and fears of war boosted the poll ratings of the more centrist and pro-American candidate, Ahn Cheol-soo, who is now running neck-and-neck with Moon. Both of these outcomes clearly suit the US.

Not only this crisis, but the whole ongoing crisis in relations with North Korea and the very existence of its nuclear weapons programme, are problems entirely of the US’s own making. For 67 years, since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the US has refused to enter into diplomatic relations with the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK), while maintaining a continuous sanctions regime against it – the longest by any state against another. It has repeatedly sabotaged attempts by China and South Korea to facilitate international talks that could bring the North in from the cold and persuade it to close down its nuclear weapons programme in return for security guarantees, trade and normalisation of relations. Instead the US has demonised the North as an irrational rogue state, which it refuses to deal with, accompanied by frequent direct threats of military action.

This US inflexibility on the DPRK and its constant sabotage of talks for nearly 70 years have not been driven by the actions of Pyongyang, but by US concerns to maintain local support for it military presence in South Korea – which has never been universally popular – and latterly to provide an internationally acceptable cover for the extensive and growing US military deployments in North-east Asia. The original Cold War case for its huge presence in the region had ceased looking so reasonable after the fall of the USSR, especially with China increasingly on very good terms with its neighbours and beyond. Thus caricaturing North Korea as a dangerous, unpredictable, failed state, and exaggerating the threat from its still rather primitive nuclear arms programme have served to justify an on-going US presence in South Korea and Japan, the real target of which is to ensure ongoing US military dominance in the region, particularly in the context of the rise of China.

It is true that some of the actions of Kim Jong-un, who came to power in North Korea in 2011 following the death of his father Kim Jong-il, have indeed played into this US agenda, such as the provocative timing of missile launches, the use of belligerent and threatening language and overblown claims for its nuclear weapons capacity.

But this is a recent development. Although North Korea has always had a bad press in the West, in reality under its two previous leaders, Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il, its actions could be well understood by anyone who bothered to give it sufficient attention to get beyond the media caricatures. But this requires understanding Korea’s unresolved post-1945 history.

In 1945, with Germany defeated in the west, the USSR joined the Allied effort against the Japanese. To the enthusiastic welcome of the local population, it subsequently swept through the Korean peninsula liberating it from Japanese colonial occupation. However the USSR halted its advance at the 38^th parallel, as it had previously agreed with the Allies, and allowed the US time to move its own army into the remainder of the country. This temporarily divided Korea between the areas under USSR and US administration, north and south of the 38^th parallel.

In the northern part of partitioned Korea the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) then led a thoroughgoing revolution to overturn the old elites. With backing from the USSR, first the lands of Japanese collaborators were seized, then of all large landlords; their lands were redistributed to the peasants. This was immensely popular and made Kim Il-sung, already well known for his role in the resistance to Japan, into a national hero. The land reform was followed by nationalisations, the introduction of extensive social, welfare and workers’ rights and, on the model of the USSR, the attempt to embark upon building ‘socialism in one country’.

In the South, by contrast, the US occupying force was forced to rely on the landlords and ruling elites – many of whom were hated collaborators with the Japanese – in order to prevent the widespread mobilisation of the southern population linking up with developments in the North and extending the revolution to the whole peninsula. Amid riots and rising popular opposition to the US occupation force, which was widely viewed as just another colonial army replacing the Japanese, the US staged rigged elections which installed pro-US strongman Syngman Rhee at the head of a de facto military government of the ‘Republic of Korea’ (ROK) in the South. The US then withdrew from Korea (as did the USSR), having ensured it had left a puppet government in the South that would resist the extension of the revolution in the North to the rest of the country.

The North’s 1950 attempt to overcome the division of the peninsula arose directly from these developments in the South. Repression of popular movements, failure to address the post-war devastation of the economy, and the continuing role of known collaborators in his government soon made Syngman Rhee even more unpopular in the South than he had been to start with. With Rhee’s regime looking extremely shaky Kim Il-sung, almost certainly with the backing of the USSR, invaded the South, meeting little resistance and much support from the local population. But as Rhee’s army disintegrated the US gained approval from the newly established UN for an intervention (the USSR was boycotting the Security Council at the time) and soon drove Kim’s army back. Only China’s intervention in support of the North prevented the ‘reunification’ of the peninsula by the US army. Instead the status quo ante was re-established when war ended in 1953, with a demilitarised border between pro-communist North and effectively US-occupied South along the 38^th parallel.

For the next three decades the DPRK openly nursed the aim of at some point driving into the South, to reunify the country and expel the US from the peninsula. But it never again had Soviet (or Chinese) backing for such an attempt, and at the same time the relationship of forces with the South progressively deteriorated. First, the US army established permanent bases in the ROK, backed by the US Navy Seventh Fleet. Second, the North progressively fell behind South Korea economically, as the South became the premier post-colonial economic success story.

However, the South’s economic success took time to appear, and initially it was not at all clear that it wasn’t the North that would be the economic success story. When Korea was partitioned, the North was home to most of Korea’s pre-war heavy industry and mineral resources, and had been spared the Japanese sabotage that had reduced 1948 production in the South to 20% of 1940 levels. Using centralised control and Soviet aid to get the economy going again, for the two decades after the war it grew somewhat faster than the South overall. From 1950-70 the DPRK’s economy grew from $7bn to $27bn, while with slightly more than double the population South Korea grew from $16bn to $63bn.[ii] GDP per head was roughly similar, but social provision and workers’ conditions in the North were generally much better.

However from the mid-1970s the DPRK’s growth slowed sharply, reflecting underlying problems in its ultra-centralised, self-enclosed economic model. This coincided with South Korea’s take-off, with its high investment and export led growth making it the quintessential Asian ‘tiger’. By 1990 the DPRK’s GDP was only $57bn compared to the ROK’s stunning $373bn.

Thus from the mid-1970s the North understood it was neither militarily nor economically in a position to lead a reunification of the peninsula and its attempts to recruit China or the Soviet Union to that cause also ended. But Kim Il-sung did not abandon the hope of turning this relationship of forces around again. However with few resources to achieve this, the DPRK began to sponsor sabotage aimed at undermining stability in the South. This DPRK ‘terrorism’ of the 1980s included hijackings of civilian aircraft, the attempted assassination of ROK president Chun Doo-hwan in 1983 and the downing of Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987. This strategy did not work, made relations with the South exceedingly tense and handed the US a perfect excuse for its continuing campaign of isolation.

Additionally, as the North fell behind economically, becoming more internationally isolated and with Soviet support declining as a result of its own 1980s reforms, an increasingly vulnerable DPRK decided to shore up its position by speeding up its nuclear programme through investing in uranium enrichment technologies.

After 1989-91 with the end of the Cold War and fall of the USSR, the US turned its attention to the surviving ‘communist’ countries, applying carrot and stick pressure to ‘aid’ their progress towards 'reform'. But North Korea was only offered the stick. The US stepped up the campaign against its nuclear programme, particularly through deeper sanctions, and jacked up the direct military threat to the North, increasing the US forces stationed in the South and holding more aggressively framed joint military exercises on land and sea.

The impact of this international pressure combined with the end of economic support from the USSR and a series of natural disasters resulted in a devastating economic crash in the DPRK. Annual GDP growth between 1990-97 averaged -4.6%, and GDP fell by more than half to $25bn leading to widespread famine.

The US believed that North Korea was on the point of collapse and only needed a final push. In June 1994, Clinton despatched former president Carter on a ‘private’ visit to the North to try to negotiate a face-saving climb down for the DPRK. However the agreement Carter negotiated with the aging Kim Il-sung, although perfectly reasonable, was not the complete capitulation that Clinton had been looking for; in return for the DPRK’s nuclear disarmament the US would lift some sanctions, help the North build light water reactors and supply it with domestic fuel oil. Clinton’s administration had little choice but to sign up to this ‘Agreed Framework’ in December of that year. But it was never implemented: Congress openly opposed it; and the Clinton administration did not take it seriously still believing the famine-struck state would collapse before the US had to implement it. The North however did suspend its nuclear weapons programme and sign up to the NPT.

The DPRK only returned to developing a nuclear weapons programme in 2003. This was provoked first by Bush’s post 9/11 State of the Union address, which labelled the DPRK part of an ‘axis of evil’ and a legitimate target of his war on terror; and secondly by the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom which overthrew Saddam Hussein in a display of military and technological might. The next targets of the US war machine appeared to be Iran and the DPRK.

Pyongyang withdrew from the NPT and relaunched its nuclear weapons programme. Which, of course, in turn became the basis on which the US launched a new round of threats against the DPRK and persuaded South Korea to agree to an expanded US presence on the peninsula.

However, while relations between the US and the North deteriorated, the end of the Cold War had had the opposite impact on South Korea itself, which, following the end of military rule in 1988, adopted a new spirit of engagement with the DPRK. This trend dominated the politics of South Korea’s first democratically elected governments from the elections in 1988 right through until 2008, during which period – despite the DPRK’s resumption of its nuclear programme in 2003 and first nuclear test in 2006 – relations on the peninsula remained calm and the US found little leverage to whip up an international campaign against the North. In 2003 South Korea and China worked together to launch the Six-Party talks, which forced the US to grudgingly come to a multilateral table with the DPRK.[iii]

This policy changed with the election of the right-wing Grand National Party’s presidential candidate Lee Myung-bak in 2008 on a pledge to take a hard line on the North against its nuclear programme and reprioritise relations with the US. The Six Party talks were de facto suspended. As relations deteriorated under Lee the North began to more seriously step up its nuclear arms programme with missile and nuclear tests in 2009 and 2013. Other signs of rising tension included the 2010 incident when the DPRK shelled a South Korean held island during US-South Korea naval exercises in disputed waters. Also in 2010 the South Korean ship Cheonan sank during exercises, allegedly due to a North Korean torpedo – a story that is strongly disputed.[iv]

Lee’s successor in 2012, Park Geun-hye, came from the same right wing political tradition and quickly pledged to pursue reunification of the peninsula on a ‘democratic’ i.e. capitalist, basis, but her actual course was more conciliatory than Lee as she particularly sought good relations with China, which demanded stability with the North. However, Park’s generally weak presidency achieved little; she took no substantive initiatives to alleviate international pressure on the North. The Six Party talks were flagged to restart in 2012 and in 2014 but did not actually happen.

Park’s election had also coincided with a change of leadership in the North. Since Kim Jong-un’s accession to the leadership of the DPRK above all its rhetoric, but also its tactics, have become less reasonable – although still far from providing justification for the US campaign of threats and intimidation.

Despite being highly dependent upon China economically – 76% of all North Korea’s trade is with China – which has also extended substantial direct aid and investment and has defended it internationally, Kim Jong-un has tested relations with his country’s only real international friend to breaking point. The arrest and execution of his uncle, Jang Song-thaek in 2013 may have been triggered by more personal power struggles, but Jang was also particularly well connected in Beijing. He was a key advocate of the line that the DPRK should prioritise economic development, using China’s support to pursue a Chinese style development model, while playing down its ambitions in missile and nuclear weapons technology. Instead a hardline political faction that is anti-reform, pro-nuclear and somewhat antagonistic to China seems to have taken control.

Many of the actions Kim Jong-un has pursued, particularly regarding nuclear and missile tests, have been directly in the face of counter-advice from China. Kim has clearly bargained on the fact that China has little choice but to defend North Korea, whatever his provocative actions, as it is only the DPRK that stands between China and the US bases in South Korea, which could be moved to the border of China if the DPRK fell.

Kim is also directly calling the US’s bluff – a particularly dangerous course when facing an unknown quantity like Donald Trump. Kim’s hubris could run into the braggadocio of Trump to unleash a disastrous confrontation. But outside that, Kim is reckoning that the risk of nuclear war with China is enough to mean that threats from the US will remain angry words rather than missile strikes. Moreover he understands that the US’s chief target is not really the DPRK but an excuse to accelerate its regional military build-up for which the real target is China. Some of China’s anger with North Korea is precisely that Kim’s tactics aid this US agenda against China.

Nonetheless, for the moment, however ill advised, Kim’s wager appears to be correct, particularly as it has emerged that the ‘armada’ that Trump claimed was on its way to Korea was in fact heading in the opposite direction to exercises in the Indian Ocean!

But what Kim’s brinkmanship has actually achieved is to aid the US in gaining the agreement of South Korea to speed up the stationing of the THAAD missile defence system. The Pentagon has been warning for nearly a decade that China’s land to sea missile systems are now sufficiently comprehensive that China is close to being capable of repelling a putative US invasion force. Although the US claims that the THAAD system is necessary to repel the threat from the North, it is widely acknowledged that it is in fact primarily aimed at restoring the US capacity to knock out China defences. Hence why China’s objections to the stationing of THAAD are so strong, and why it is particularly furious with North Korea for having de facto facilitated the US in winning agreement to this in South Korea.

The US’s key lever in seeing off opposition within South Korea to the US’s extensive military presence has always been to play up the alleged threat emanating from the DPRK. The old film is just being rerun by Trump, this time de facto aided by belligerent language from North Korea.

Despite Kim Jong-un’s confrontational tactics, the situation could still be settled if it was clear that the US was willing to offer a reasonable peace deal with security guarantees, underwritten by China and South Korea, in return for Pyongyang ending its nuclear weapons programme. This is exactly what North Korea agreed to in 1994 when former US president Carter negotiated precisely such a deal, and which foundered on US bad faith not the DPRK’s. As Carter himself has continued to argue, an agreement with North Korea to end its nuclear weapons programme ‘could be worked out… in half a day’, if the US was prepared to lift its state of siege on this small and relatively weak country.[v]

[i] Terminal High Altitude Area Defence

[ii] A. Maddison, The world economy: a millennial perspective, Vol. 2: Historical statistics, OECD, Paris, 2006. Figures expressed in 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars.

[iii] The six parties are US, China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan and Russia

[iv] See Beal, T. 2014, Crisis in Korea: America, China and the risk of war, Pluto Press, London

[v] Beal, T. 2014, Crisis in Korea. p.71