North Korea is more of a menace than Iran
Stephen Schwartz says that we should be more frightened of Pyongyang than of Tehran, and that Kim Jong-Il’s nuclear ambitions could awaken the Japanese giant
Washington
North Korea’s proud announcement on 9 October that it had exploded a nuclear bomb represents a serious danger to the world, and it is dismaying to see confusion about it in many Western capitals. Although North Korean nukes and missiles are unlikely to land on Western soil, they can be sold to Iran and directed against Israel, as many commentators have pointed out. What is more important, however, is that they are explicitly aimed at Japan which, as one of the G8 countries, must be considered part of the West.
I visited the Korean peninsula twice in the 1990s, and was one of few neocon American journalists to have gone there without sponsorship by Revd Sun Myung Moon and his system of religious, media, and political enterprises. As a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, I developed close relations with CalifornianKorean entrepreneurs, a prominent element in US West Coast society for more than a century. In my travels I journeyed through the demilitarised zone and learned about many absurdities of the North Korean dictatorship.
But one need not go all the way to Korea to understand the perverse dynamics of the Pyongyang regime. Tyranny is tyranny — but the Confucian-Communist monarchy of Kim Jong-Il differs significantly from the Islamist clerical regime in Iran. Kim is all powerful in his rump Hermit Kingdom, whereas the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, though he engages in objectionable rhetoric, has no real executive power. For that reason North Korea is more of a menace than Iran (for all Iran’s encouragement of Hezbollah). Further, in its nuclear chessgame, Iran acts on the basis of its perceived national interest; it has no big patron and is nobody’s puppet. North Korea, when it engages in military braggadocio, acts not on its own but as an overeager instrument of Beijing in China’s bitter rivalry with Japan. Tokyo has indicated that it wishes to surpass Pyongyang’s provocation with extremely harsh sanctions, and that serves to increase the incentives for adventurism in North Korea.
Kim Jong-Il speculates that playing fast and loose with international security in the eastern Pacific will encourage continued patronage by China, allowing Pyongyang’s decrepit socialist system to survive. It is true that China has declared its opposition to North Korea’s bomb test, and previously served as a member of the ‘Group of Six’ that administers talks on nuclear proliferation, but it is unlikely that Beijing will take serious action to limit Pyongyang’s pattern of regional ructions.
Nor is Russia likely to. Vladimir Putin, who cannot be excluded from the list of sub rosa accomplices of the North Korean nuclear gambit, responded to news of the bomb test with his typical (if not deliberate) incoherence, calling for ‘international law’ to prevail in place of ‘ultimatums and sanctions’ — as if international law consisted of anything but such actions.
Meanwhile South Korea will do nothing that would deviate sharply from its policy of ‘reconciliation’ with the North. That line was set out a decade ago by reforming South Korean president Kim Dae-Jong, the Nobel Peace Prize winner for 2000, and continued by his successor Roh MooHyun. Mr Roh expressed ‘deep frustration’ about North Korea’s nuclear test, but he also said that while the South Korean policy of engagement appeared fatally undermined by the news, he was reluctant to pronounce the effort dead.
Foreigners must remain clear-eyed about the subtleties of East Asian politics. So long as Kim’s presumed target is Japan, many citizens of Tokyo’s former imperial victim are little troubled, as they are survivors from and descendants of Koreans and Chinese who were massacred, raped, and tortured in a series of Japanese invasions over the past 100 years. I have repeatedly heard South Koreans profess that if the northern dictatorship and Japan went to war, the southerners would back Pyongyang. (At the same time, though, and in spite of ‘reconciliation’, South Koreans, with their advanced economy, are wary of reunification with the north, which stands among the world’s least developed states, notwithstanding its rocketry and nuclear sideshow.) Hatred of Japan provides the Japanese with a pretext to increase the heat of their resurgent nationalism. The new Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has declared that he will co-ordinate with Seoul and Washington in responding to the North Korean bomb test. Mr Abe has also proposed much heavier sanctions on Pyongyang than any of the other powers have suggested, and had earlier placed unilateral restrictions on North Korea after Pyongyang fired seven military rockets, including a Taepodong-2 long-range missile, into waters near the archipelago in July. After the nuclear declaration this week, Shinzo Abe’s response was blunt: ‘Japan needs to take severe, unilateral measures as soon as possible.’ The US, along with Japan, has expressed alarm that the North Korean missiles could land as far away as Alaska and the American island possessions in the southwest Pacific. Further, it has been reported for years that North Korea sells missile technology to Iran. In August this year North Korea took the extraordinary and impudent step of declaring ‘null and void’ the armistice that ended the Korean war in 1953. Given Kim Jong-Il’s arrogance, sanctions by powers other than Japan are unlikely to produce a positive outcome, while heavy punishment by Japan will almost certainly aggravate the situation dramatically.
The fact that North Korea was included with Saddam’s Iraq and Iran in President George W Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ seems to indicate that a unilateral American strike against Pyongyang is possible. But it is certain that neither China nor South Korea would support such an action. At the same time, it is absurd to imagine that the world should ‘learn to live’ with a nuclear North Korea, as some soundbite experts are already arguing. Letting Kim do as he wishes with nukes would encourage other dictators — who will inevitably come — to make a habit of recklessness. The US can and should find ways to distance Pyongyang from China, to reinforce South Korean vigilance, and to compel Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear pretensions. At the same time, the US must restrain a power equally likely to exacerbate tensions in the region — a bornagain, supremacist Japan.
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