[The following is an English translation of remarks I made at a conference held at Korea University yesterday, with former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in attendance. As seems to be the custom here, most journalists returned to their offices right after the ceremonial opening bits, there to infer the content of the ensuing presentations from their titles. I was said to have advised South Korea to do more to get Washington interested in its security. As you can see, my actual points were of a different sort. Afterwards I was thanked by a former diplomat and a few audience members for making points a South Korean might be called anti-American for making: “You can say these things, because you’re an American.” Note: I’ve left out the opening part in which I summed up recent reports on the state of North Korea’s nuclear program.]
The situation having become very serious, it’s time for us to discuss it frankly. I agree with the Secretary-General that the alliance should be strengthened, but blindly trusting in America is not the way to go about it. For three decades, the US and South Korea have been careful not to offend each other, with each side pretending not to notice the elephants in the other’s room. This excessive politeness has fostered a complacency on both sides that has worked in North Korea’s favor. To make matters worse, the South Korean media seem to have decided to go all in on Kamala Harris [audience laughter], so no one these days is doing a sober analysis of the US-North Korea relationship. But if we want to understand Kim Jong Un’s strategic intentions, we need to be able to discuss those uncomfortable aspects of the alliance of which he cannot possibly be unaware.
To point out the first elephant: America’s reluctance to push North Korea too far goes back a long way. One wouldn’t be far off in describing the modern history of the peninsula as a series of North Korean provocations that the US turned a blind eye to. When I lived with my father on the army base in Yongsan in the 1980s, the half-joke at the Officers’ Club was that US troops were in South Korea not to protect it, but to keep it from starting something. America’s passivity is not the result of North Korea’s nuclear success; rather, that success is the result of America’s passivity. As Joshua Stanton has pointed out, the US never enforced sanctions against North Korea as consistently and firmly as it enforced sanctions against Iran, Belarus, and Zimbabwe. The first and last time it got tough was when it moved to cut Banco Delta Asia off from the financial system, a measure which the State Department strongly objected to.
Keep in mind how afraid of provoking North Korea the Americans were even in the 1990s, when the regime was so much weaker and more isolated, and you can well imagine how afraid they are now. For years US experts have been saying that if hostilities should break out on the peninsula again, the most important thing is to keep them from escalating or spreading. Kim Jong Un is well aware of all this.
Normally we Americans don’t see things from other countries’ perspective. We would never tolerate Russian troops in Mexico, yet we have no qualms about expanding NATO right up to Russia’s doorstep. Nor does China’s historical trauma at the hands of imperialist powers give us any pause about encircling that country. Some in Washington now talk calmly about how it’s only a matter of time before we go to war with Russia or China. It’s appalling. But when it comes to North Korea, we become a very understanding superpower, and blame its insecurities primarily on ourselves. We acknowledge and problematize the possibility of war, but we consider it more likely to come about accidentally, as a result of some misjudgment or overreaction on the North Koreans’ part. Kim knows this too.
Another elephant is the fact that since the US military occupation our State Department has consistently favored South Korea’s left over its right. Not only its mouthpiece media, the New York Times and so on, but also most think tanks under the influence of the Council on Foreign Relations applauded President Moon’s appeasement policy. They refrained from criticism even in September 2018, when Moon signed a military agreement with North Korea detrimental to the alliance, and gave a bizarre speech in Pyongyang praising Kim Jong Un for not yielding to outside pressure.
That’s not all. When the Hankyoreh newspaper and various [ROK] politicians described the opening of the inter-Korean liaison office as the first step on the road to North-South confederation, US media refrained from covering this important news, and our government pretended not to have noticed. The reason was obvious: they feared that the American people would balk at supporting the continued presence of US troops in a country that had joined hands with North Korea. It wasn’t until 2019, in an exchange at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that the topic of North-South confederation finally slipped out, with Victor Cha [of the CSIS] casually describing the plan as entailing an “economic marriage,” and a Republican senator saying in effect, “Ah, I see,” before moving on. Say what? You hear your ally is pursuing an economic marriage with the country you’ve imposed sanctions on…. and you move on to the next topic?
The only explanation, in my judgement, is that for “the Blob,” as the US foreign policy elite is now popularly known, the so-called peace system envisaged by the South Korean left looks like the most viable way to get North Korea to open up so it can be brought down from within. This has to be a very risky strategy from South Korea’s perspective, because the North could exploit a decisive military advantage even in the very early stages of such a system.
Obsessed as they are with the issue of US troop costs, South Korean conservatives and the Cho-Jung-Dong newspapers are wrong in thinking that Trump poses the only real problem for South Korea’s security. In the run-up to the Hanoi summit, Special Envoy Stephen Beguin did what he could to pressure Trump into making concessions to Kim Jong Un, as John Bolton writes in detail in his book. The State Department was as disappointed by the failure of that summit as the Blue House was. It’s true that its influence [on North Korea policy] has been limited to some extent by the Treasury Department, but State has always been more powerful, and Biden’s health problems have made it even more so in the past two years. It has no intention of handing back that power. It’s therefore wrong to assume that Kim is now desperate for a Trump victory. Haven’t both parties removed from their platforms the long-term goal of denuclearizing North Korea? Kim knows that regardless of who wins, he doesn’t need to worry too much about the United States in the near future.
He also knows that whatever the Yoon administration may do to strengthen this country is likely to be undone by the next administration. Most Americans, including many Korea watchers, still mistake South Korea’s left for pro-American, “woke” liberals, which is one reason for their naïve optimism about US-ROK-Japan cooperation. They think that if trilateral exercises take place often enough now, the South Korean people will get used to them, and they’ll continue even under Minjoo Party rule. Kim Jong Un has a much better grasp of South Korean politics.
The bigger delusion in the US — and a more dangerous one for this country — is that the North has long since given up any serious hope of conquering or dominating the South. There are a few hawks in Washington, but to the same extent that they overestimate the risk of all-out war, they underestimate the possibility of the North using the tactics Russia employed when taking Crimea. Kim is well aware of this too.
It’s no secret that the State Department wants to pull North Korea out of the arms of Russia and China and pursue a two Korea policy. Perhaps this is why even Kim’s military co-operation with Russia hasn’t upset the US all that much. It’s odd, really: the Americans compare Putin to Hitler, and rage at people like Orban who don’t side squarely with Ukraine, yet they seem full of understanding for North Korea. The propaganda line on China is that it could attack Taiwan at any moment, but when it comes to North Korea, which has already attacked South Korea several times, the Beltway consensus is that it really just wants to survive.
One reason for this lenient view has been the assumption that nationalist Kim Jong Un wouldn’t go so far as to launch a nuclear attack on [his ethnic brethren in] Seoul. But if North Korea is to be fully safe, the US must be made to worry that it’s capable of anything. This is why Kim made those remarks last January about regarding South Koreans as foreigners. I still doubt that he was sincere. The political scientist Hannah Arendt said that totalitarian systems are more like movements than states: if they don’t keep moving toward a clear goal, they collapse. Is Kim too stupid to see the problem? I don’t think so. Yet the outside world has generally taken that speech at face value.
It was a brilliant move. On the one hand, it conveyed the impression that North Korea is ready to wipe Seoul off the face of the earth if the US attacks. At the same time, the renunciation of pan-Korean nationalism has inspired hope that although North Korea has violated many agreements in the past, it will abide by the next one. It also gives the US the face with which to back down from its denuclearization demands: “Thanks to our resolve, Kim had no choice but to abandon his goal of ‘final victory’.”
I’ve been asked to make a few short-term predictions, so: Neither the US nor North Korea will show interest in negotiating before the November elections. In the meantime, Kim will continue carrying out his five-year plan [for strengthening his military]. The US media will spin each missile launch as a provocation aimed at helping Trump’s chances, but don’t fall for that. Regardless of who becomes president, or how negotiations go, it’s highly unlikely that Kim will agree to anything more than an action for action deal. A more important variable than the outcome of the November election is the progress of the war in Ukraine; as long as it continues, the two countries will find it difficult to enter into negotiations.
In any case, North Korea has no intention of respecting an agreement for the long term, especially now that America has broken all the promises it made to Russia in the 1990s. Recently Professor John Mearsheimer said, “No country should trust the US,” and we can be sure Kim feels the same way. After all, no one in Washington is preaching peaceful coexistence with North Korea. Our doves and hawks may disagree over tactics, but both groups support the ultimate goal of subjugating North Korea to the US-led neoliberal system.
We should therefore discard the optimistic notion that Kim is developing weapons only in order to negotiate from a position of strength. He may want to make a few small deals with the US, and see sanctions temporarily eased as a result, but he has no intention of stopping the development and optimization of his nuclear arsenal, nor will any agreement result in meaningful cooperation between the two countries.
As for South Korea: Six years ago, President Moon’s advisor Paik Nak-chung said that this country’s very existence poses a threat to North Korea, and I agree with him. Unlike Paik, however, I don’t believe that Kim would ever see a solution to this threat in a North-South confederation, which the US would be all too likely to use as a Trojan horse.
For this reason, I believe that the main function of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal remains that of preventing America from intervening in a future effort to take over the South. How South Korea should respond to this difficult situation is a question that South Koreans must answer, but I think that what President Park Chung-hee said after the attack on the Blue House [in 1968] remains valid: “This territory belongs to our citizens, and we are the main agents of its defense.”
