Defiant Kim Jong-IL’s Peninsula Game

June 9, 2010

“…is Kim Jong-il trying to undermine the Six-Party Talks in order to force Washington to deal with Pyongyang directly, as some experts claim? Or, as others maintain with equal certainty, is he sending a signal that the North is not interested in talks at all, given current domestic political uncertainties surrounding the Dear Leader’s poor health and succession plans? Or is Pyongyang merely laying the groundwork for eventual talks, but only on its terms, which include acceptance of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state (which will not happen)? The real answer is probably a combination of all of the above but the truthful answer is we really don’t know; when it comes to understanding North Korean motives. we’re all guessing.”–Ralph Cossa at the 24th Asia-Pacific Roundtable, Kuala Lumpur (June 9, 2010)

“Over the last months the news from Korea was dominated by “Cheonan” incident, bringing the tension to a new high. This incident and especially its aftermath seems to have taken down with it all progress in North-South reconciliation in the area of new security arrangements over the past decade and a half…I believe the rapid deterioration of relations cannot be blamed solely on the North Koreans. North Korean guilt is not proved 100 per cent.

Russian experts who visited Seoul are not convinced and China refuses to seriously consider such a possibility (hence we cannot expect her support of any UN action). However the ensuing campaign of heightening military-political confrontation to an unprecedented level has been mostly engineered by  South Korea with reluctant US support. But as long as there is still a reasonable doubt as to the North’s involvement, from a legal standpoint it is premature to reach any conclusions on North Korea’s guilt and punishment (let alone sanctions) in an international forum”. –Prof. Dr. Georgy Toloraya, Director of Korean Programs, Institute of Economy of Russian Academy of Science at the 24th Asia-Pacific Roundtable, Kuala Lumpur (June 9, 2010)

www.nst.com.my

Defiant Kim Jong-Il may torpedo himself in final opera act

by Scott Thompson*

RIGHT now, the world is riveted on Israel shooting itself in one foot while trying to jam the other into its mouth. It shows that there is nothing new under the sun.

But I’m thinking of an immense irony. The formidable chair of US President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Larry Summers, told a group of us in Washington last week that one of the most important things to happen in the past year was the success of the G-20. “Now, essentially, the biggest economies of the world are successfully really working together.”

Last weekend, the finance ministers of the 20 met to prepare for the heads of state meeting in Canada. Where? In Pusan, Korea. With 20 times the economic weight of its North Korean tormenter (and only twice the population), there couldn’t have been a greater underline to the disparities of the two, yet with military disproportion almost in reverse.

It shows what provocation accomplishes. And it’s an old game. On Jan 23, 1968, North Korea claimed that the Pueblo, an American intelligence-gathering ship, was in its waters. They captured it. They held the 58 soldiers to ransom for about a year and finally, with the captain’s “apology” as the price of freedom, they let them go.

Subsequently, the North just proved more and more aggressive. Since then, whenever they are caught with their fingers in the cookie jar — as with the South Korean corvette, the Cheonan, which sank with 46 lives lost — they just put both hands in the jar and then with sticky fingers in our face ask what we are going to do about it.

Many strategists, for example, are today expecting Kim Jong-Il to test a third nuclear weapon to defy the world even more.The only question is, what China will do? There isn’t much Seoul can do other than add to its sanctions, cutting off sea lanes, which will cause North Korea to retaliate in ways that escalate tension. But Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao met South Korean President Lee Myung-bak prior to the summit with the Japanese and promised to support the results of independent investigations.

For as long as anyone can remember, North Korea has always used foreign policy to compensate for the utter failure of its internal policies. For the past 20 years famine has been an intermittent reality. How to keep the people in line?

Not even the harshest regime can ignore popular feeling. As long as the Kim dynasty can pull rabbits out of the foreign policy hat — particularly with China willing to bail them out — then they don’t have to worry about domestic revolt.

I see three possibilities ensuing. There is a 70 per cent chance that he continues to get away with it. Nobody wants war. He tests the third time, and there are harsh words but no really cutting sanctions, even if China tells Kim not to do it again, that it won’t bail him out the next time.

He may be so chastened, in a 20 per cent scenario, that he escalates and retaliates for a United Nations resolution and additional sanctions imposed by the South, with further military action becoming more likely. Remember that his father Kim Il-Sung miscalculated in June 1950, thinking the US wouldn’t retaliate for an invasion of the south, and there was a three-year war.

We could parse this 20 per cent in half: 10 per cent for the destruction of the regime, and 10 per cent for enough success by the North’s forces that the South and its allies come to a truce, not unfavourable to the North.

But I see another 10-per-cent scenario. Kim knows his Western music and film. He might know the last of the quartet of operas in Wagner’s Ring cycle (it lasts over 20 hours, but then communist dictators have long attention spans), in which at the end, Wotan the God, trapped in his own machinations, makes Valhalla, the mountain where the gods live, implode.

Even if the Dear Leader isn’t an opera fan, the idea of an old man at the centre of the show for 16 years, infirm and probably soon to die, deciding to have one final act, isn’t difficult to envisage. It’s one that he writes, orchestrates, then directs. Why should he be concerned if millions die in the process? He has let it happen through famine for most of his years in power.

And like all spoiled brats, why shouldn’t he end his show the way he carried it on for 16 years solo, and most of the rest of his adult life as heir apparent? He looks frail, and if he sees China willing to pull the plug the next time, then he knows his time is up. He’s the type who’ll want to end things his own way.

We can only hope that his own lieutenants, not to mention his own young son and heir apparent, can move in and constrain his opportunities. Valhalla needn’t be the entire region.

*The writer is professor emeritus at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Tufts University

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