This weekend summary from the NYT shows just how dangerous, and how complex, this North Korean situation is.
December 29, 2002
Asia's Splits Deepen Korea Crisis
By DAVID E. SANGER
CRAWFORD, Tex., If centuries of brutal power struggles over the Korean Peninsula could be ignored, if Seoul could be protected, if Asia had a NATO, the crisis that has re-ignited in Korea would lend itself to a swift, if temporary, solution.
Yongbyon, the nuclear plant that North Korea began reactivating last week, might be the perfect place to execute the pre-emptive strike that the Bush administration has talked of as a last resort in protecting the world against weapons of mass destruction.
"All we would have to do is take out one building," a senior national security official said this month, referring to the nuclear reprocessing center where North Korea said it would begin converting a long-dormant stockpile of 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into bomb-grade plutonium.
Yongbyon is remote, and the international inspectors who have lived there for eight years were just asked to pack their bags. So the perfect moment for a precision attack would be right now, before blowing the building to bits could spread nuclear material across the countryside.
But then the official added, "If it was only that easy." It isn't, and not just because of the 11,000 North Korean artillery tubes north of the demilitarized zone that could set all of Seoul afire.
The truly complicating factor is how Asia has worked for decades ? or, more precisely, how it hasn't worked.
In the decade since the cold war ended, Asia has largely failed at the task Europe has fairly well mastered ? defusing many of its geopolitical land mines. Even as China and Russia have embraced their own forms of Western-style capitalism, any talk of creating a common security structure has remained just talk. The major capitals ? Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul ? have never overcome the centuries of distrust, competition for dominance and open conflict that sucked the United States into three Asian wars in the 20th century.
Now, President Bush's doctrine that America can no longer tolerate rogue states with weapons of mass destruction has run into that reality. He cannot pick up the phone and call the Asian NATO; it does not exist. Many Asians question whether the United States should remain keeper of the peace, while admitting there is no current alternative.
So this weekend, as he settles into his ranch here to rally the world against Iraq, Mr. Bush must now simultaneously rally Asia's disputatious players in a cause in which each has a very different set of interests. It has fallen to him because none of the countries within easy reach of the North's missiles has taken the lead. His national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, delicately calls the process "alliance management." A more accurate term might be "rivals management."
"The way to understand Northeast Asia today is as a Pandora's box," said Moon Chung In, a political science professor who moves among Korea, Japan and the United States. "North Korea can go bad easily, but the North Koreans know they have the capability to create huge divisions between the United States and South Korea, and with Russia and China and Japan. And in some ways, that is their greatest weapon."
Kim Jong Il, the North's reclusive and odd leader, understands this reality and is playing it skillfully.
So China, which provided much of the early technology that got North Korea into the nuclear business to begin with, now plays a double game: It condemns the North's brinkmanship, but there is no evidence it is cutting off trade. China's main interest, it seems, is in keeping desperate North Koreans from flooding across its long border.
Japan, weakened economically and diplomatically, desperately seeks guarantees that the American military will protect it from Korean missiles. Japanese politicians know that if the American shield is in doubt, the country's right wing will call for a stronger military, and the rest of Asia will fear that Japan is preparing its own nuclear deterrent.
The Russians, once the North's arms and technology dealer, now want to pretend they never heard of the place, even as they tweak the United States for, in their eyes, failing to live up to agreements to provide North Korea with energy aid and for acting antagonistically toward the North.
From the perspective of American hawks, South Korea has all but encouraged the North to flout disarmament demands by continuing to build rail and trade links to North Korea, as protesters demand the removal of the 37,000 American troops who remain in South Korea.
In short, each of North Korea's neighbors sees the crisis through its own prism. "It is, in one sense, a great opportunity for the U.S., Japan, China, with the tacit consent of the Russians, to put concerted pressure on a state that is in the last stages of desperation," Lee Hong Koo, a former South Korean prime minister, said recently in Seoul. "But will we take advantage of it? I don't know if we are ready."
Han S. Park, a professor at the University of Georgia who left South Korea nearly four decades ago, also wonders if the Bush administration is ready. "Nothing in the first two years of Mr. Bush's presidency has forced him to confront just how divided Asia remains to this day," he said. "But now that we have let North Korea go too far, now that they have their weapons and no one has much leverage over the North Koreans anymore, it's about to become obvious."
In public, all the players insist they are on the same page, calling for a peaceful settlement and stability on the peninsula. But that is not a strategy for disarming a regime that probably already has two nuclear weapons, and might, if unchecked, produce five or six more in the next six to 12 months.
Just as every country's interests differ, so do their strategies.
In South Korea, the fear is not so much of a nuclear North as of a collapsing one. The essence of President Kim Dae Jung's "sunshine policy" was to delay that day by investing in the North and reducing suspicions. Now the incoming president, Roh Moo Hyun, has vowed to let even more sunshine in ? at the very moment that President Bush seeks to punish the North.
The Chinese and the Russians don't want a nuclear North Korea. But they also don't want to run the risk that America will end up even more powerful in the region. So they resist following its lead.
The Japanese, as always, want Washington to solve the problem, but not too forcefully.
Like many members of the South Korean elite, Professor Moon admits to conflicted feelings.
"I'm a supporter of the sunshine policy, of engagement," he says. "But I can't tolerate weapons of mass destruction, because if North Korea has the bomb, Japan will have it, and South Korea has to have it."
And as the United States knows from the cold war, as soon as any state has a nuclear arsenal, pre-emption is not an option.
nytimes.com |
