Armed and Dangerous
'Crisis on the Korean Peninsula: How to Deal With a Nuclear North Korea' by Michael O'Hanlon and Mike Mochizuki
Reviewed by Bruce Cumings
Sunday, September 7, 2003; Page BW08
CRISIS ON THE KOREAN PENINSULA
How to Deal With a Nuclear North Korea
By Michael O'Hanlon and Mike Mochizuki
McGraw-Hill. 230 pp. $19.95.
For the past year the Bush administration has consistently denied that any "crisis" exists in Korea, but this book argues otherwise: The crisis is about North Korea's nuclear program, and President Bush has made it worse rather than better. Indeed, this administration has been so divided over what to do about the North (a split likened by Sen. Joseph Biden to "the San Andreas fault") that it has really had no Korea policy. Those willing to engage in diplomacy with Pyongyang are stymied by hard-liners who prefer to isolate, quarantine or even overthrow the regime. Chief executives are paid to resolve such internecine squabbles, but George W. Bush has yet to do so; indeed, the authors imply that his personal loathing for Kim Jong Il and suspicions that he may be the top hard-liner make the president part of the problem. This deeply informed and closely argued book could well be part of the solution.
Michael O'Hanlon holds a chair at the Brookings Institution, as does Mike Mochizuki at George Washington University. O'Hanlon's expertise on arms control and military technology merges nicely with Mochizuki's knowledge of East Asian security affairs, and as a result their book is smart, dispassionate and full of new information. They balance their criticism of Bush with a retrospective critique of Bill Clinton's diplomacy toward Pyongyang, and try to split the difference between "liberals and realists" with a "grand bargain" that rests equally on toughness and inducements. Elaborating this package solution takes up most of the book, but the various proposals rest on a conviction much closer to Clinton's strategy than to Bush's: "that North Korea can be talked out of its current growing momentum toward developing a substantial nuclear arsenal." With six-power talks having commenced in late August to do just that, readers may get a quick verdict on whether the authors are right. In any case, this book could hardly be more timely.
The "grand diplomatic bargain" is ambitious and complex, and worth a careful perusal by anyone concerned with the issues: In return for a verifiable end to the North's nuclear programs, a ban on selling and testing its missiles, a steep cut in its conventional forces, outward-opening economic reforms and the beginnings of a dialogue about human rights (or the lack thereof), Washington should be willing to respond with a nonaggression pledge, a peace treaty that would finally end the Korean War, the establishment of full diplomatic relations, and the creation of an aid program of "perhaps $2 billion a year for a decade" (that burden to be shared with our allies). If this deal sounds like a naïve and foolish response to "nuclear blackmail," the authors muster a host of nuanced, clever and convincing arguments on behalf of their strategy, with the ultimate goal being "a gradual, soft, 'velvet' form of regime change -- even if Kim Jong Il holds onto power throughout the process." O'Hanlon and Mochizuki are particularly well informed in assessing the conventional military dangers in Korea, and how to reduce them.
Crisis on the Korean Peninsula is an inside-the-Beltway book, in every sense. Akin to a very good State Department paper stretched to modest book-length, it is of the policy wonks, by the wonks and for the wonks. Partisan fault lines limit the range of debate on North Korea for the authors, who migrate between a grudging admiration for Clinton's diplomacy (the 1994 agreement that froze the North's reactors was "a smart one") and an involved but ultimately tepid critique of Bush's policies that could only have been written in the foreseeable present -- after all, it is at least conceivable that the American people may choose someone else to lead them in little more than a year. O'Hanlon and Mochizuki also appear unaware of recent extra-Beltway scholarship on North Korea by Haruki Wada, Charles Armstrong and Hong-koo Han, among others, which offers a definitive account of where the North Korean leadership came from and the nature of the regime they founded, which in turn is helpful in figuring out why this regime persists so long into the post-Cold War era -- and why it is not likely to collapse anytime soon. Instead, O'Hanlon and Mochizuki practice a kind of "collapsed" history in which something that happened in the 1950s (collectivization of agriculture) gets blamed for the famine in the North four decades later, thus ignoring judgments by various experts that North Korean agricultural productivity increased steadily into the mid-1980s.
But does history make a difference? Most Americans seem unaware that our combat forces first landed in Seoul in 1945, and set up a military government that lasted three years and deeply shaped postwar Korea. If our contemporary occupation of Iraq were to follow the same course that affairs did in U.S.-occupied Korea, the country would be divided, five years later a civil war would erupt, and millions would die but nothing would be solved. By the 2060s, nearly 40,000 American troops would still be tied down there, holding the line against the evil enemy (whoever he might be), with a new war possible at any time. From a strategic standpoint, one can only conclude that the U.S. effort in Korea has been a long-running failure: Our troubles with the North began 58 Septembers ago, and we have never found a way to end them. But O'Hanlon and Mochizuki provide many reasons to hope that an enlightened American diplomacy might finally resolve this state of perpetual crisis. •
Bruce Cumings, who teaches in the history department at the University of Chicago, is the author of the forthcoming "North Korea: Another Country."
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