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BOOK REVIEW
A Korean
Exit Strategy for the US
By Sreeram Chaulia
A Review of "Korean
Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and US Disengagement" by Selig
Harrison
Selig Harrison, one of America's finest
journalists and foreign-policy analysts, has written on Korean politics
for the past three decades. This book is a compendium of his thoughts on
ending the convoluted 50-year regional standoff in Northeast Asia, and a
reminder that the ball is in the US court to promote progress toward a
unified, de-nuclearized and peaceful Korea.
Too often, Western commentators have taken a myopic view of North Korea
as an irrational and belligerent "rogue state" that is the source of all
troubles. Harrison presents an eagle-eyed historical and strategic sweep
to demonstrate that the United States shares a large amount of blame for
past tensions in the region and that US postures have to change to ease
the path for North-South confederation and ultimate union.
Paralysis of US policy
US military commitments in the Korean Peninsula originated in the
context of Cold War alignments that no longer exist. Since 1958, there
have been no Chinese or Soviet troops in North Korea, and yet the United
States continues to maintain 37,000 troops backed by the latest combat
aircraft and a "nuclear umbrella" over South Korea. The ostensible
justification for US force deployment in South Korea is the bellicosity
of the North, while in private, US officials admit frankly that their
presence is needed to make sure that the South does not drag the United
States into a new Korean war, as South Korean president Syngman Rhee
attempted from the late 1950s.
What Washington ignores is that as long as it retains an adversarial
role on one side of the unfinished Korean civil war, reunification will
be impeded. Pyongyang's security concerns, especially its fear of US
fighter jets, have been completely overlooked by Washington, which fails
to see that its nuclear and conventional positioning in the South are
considered by the fragile and weak North as the primary threats to its
survival. US thinking is also a prisoner of a time warp, based on the
assumption that South Koreans still see the United States as a defender
against communist aggression. Even such a respected peacemaker as former
senator George Mitchell, whom I met last year, defended the status quo
by telling me that US forces are "welcomed as friends" in Korea. The
potent rise of anti-US nationalist sentiment in both South and North
Korea is apparently invisible in Washington.
Another reason for paralytic US policy is misplaced belief that North
Korea will collapse as a state and be absorbed by the South. Harrison
opposes temporizing on redeployment of US troops because "North Korea
would survive as a separate state for the indefinite future" (p 4).
North Korean self-image is founded on pride in having survived an
unequal encounter with the most technically advanced power in the world
from 1950-53. Kim Il-sung's nationalist credentials as an inveterate
anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter coupled with five decades of statist
education emphasizing total loyalty to the nation have laid a strong
ideological foundation for North Korea's survival. "It would be a
mistake to underrate the underlying strength of nationalist feeling in
North Korea" (p 20). Kim Jong-il has also begun a series of "economic
reforms by stealth", ensconcing technocrats in charge of liberalization,
allowing private farming and opening up trade and investment links with
the South. In Harrison's estimation, the North Korean regime will
"muddle through" for many years to come by playing off pragmatists
against conservatives. The United States cannot keep banking
indefinitely on naive hopes of Pyongyang's collapse.
Reformulating the US role
The future role of the United States will have a critical impact on
North-South normalization and transition to unification. North Korea is
wary of Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy", inter alia due to the outgoing
South Korean president's advocacy of a continued US military presence in
Korea after reunification. The "gap between atmospherics and reality"
over the Sunshine Policy can be explained by America's failure to relax
economic sanctions or accord normal trade status to the North, as was
promised in the 1994 nuclear-freeze agreement. Kim Jong-il expected the
June 2000 summit to produce improved North Korean relations with
Washington, but the George W Bush administration's hardline approach has
now pushed Pyongyang to lock up significant North-South contacts.
Beyond minor issues such as economic aid, diplomatic recognition and
regret for the US role in dividing Korea, what North Korea wishes is for
Washington gradually to downsize its open-ended military presence, which
sustains a "climate of indefinite confrontation". Coming down one step
from its previous demand for absolute and immediate US military
disengagement from the South, Pyongyang has indicated that it would "not
object to the continuation of a modified US-force presence for a
transition period when arms-control tradeoffs are explored" (p 115).
A revision of "Op Plan 5027", the US war contingency scenario in Korea,
visualizes a massive attack using US air superiority to "abolish North
Korea as a functioning state and reorganize the country under South
Korean control". US refusal to shelve its right to first-use of nuclear
weapons for deterring conventional North Korean advances, together with
warnings by US generals of launching preemptive nuclear attacks with
B-52 bombers if the North conducts war exercises near the Demilitarized
Zone, have raised Pyongyang's determination to negotiate a change in US
postures and "tripwire" deployments, in return for guarantees of ending
the North's nuclear and missile programs.
On the issue of formally ending the Korean War too, unless the United
States ceases to be technically at war with the North, no headway can be
made. Harrison recommends that the US sign a direct bilateral agreement
with North Korea for ending the armistice and then inviting the South to
join in the new peace structure as a full partner. This accords with the
historical fact that South Korea never signed the 1953 armistice.
Obstacles to US disengagement
Harrison points with acuity to a number of hurdles blocking a
transformation of the US role from a combatant to a neutral "honest
broker" between North and South. The psychological legacy of the Korean
War has resulted in an exaggerated imagery of North Korea as a demonic
new "yellow peril" in American eyes. South Korea has also lobbied
intensely against the North by roping in sympathizers in the Pentagon,
Congress and US defense industries that have a stake in continued
militarization of Korea. Another irritant is the "semi-imperial
trappings of US military life in Korea", where four-star generals
command a country's army and enjoy unparalleled personal privileges. For
Korea to have peace, war-economy interests will have to be smashed by a
bold and visionary US president.
North Korean nuclear and missile proliferation have helped hawks in
Seoul and Washington to argue against any compromise or negotiation with
a member of the "axis of evil". But Harrison shows that this puts the
cart before the horse, since North Korea's nuclear ambitions were
"propelled from the start by the US nuclear posture towards the
peninsula" (p 197). North Korea has repeatedly asked "formal US
assurances to the DPRK [Democratic Republic of Korea] against the threat
or use of nuclear weapons by the United States". Pyongyang promised US
envoy Robert Galucci its suspension of withdrawal from the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty in early 1994 only after he publicly declared
"assurance against the threat or use of force against the DPRK,
including nuclear weapons". Former US president Jimmy Carter's landmark
deal later that year for temporarily freezing the North's nuclear
program also succeeded "precisely because he was not associated with the
counterproductive threat of sanctions and preemptive nuclear strikes" (p
215).
The 1998 moratorium on Pyongyang's missile testing was similarly
premised on reciprocal US gestures of normalization, although both
Koreas have to consider a US-independent fear of Japanese missile
development and plutonium reprocessing. "A unified Korea would be
defenseless if Japan should convert its civilian nuclear and space
programs to military purposes" (p 246). It is in Northeast Asian and US
interests to persuade Japan not to start a "trilateral nuclear race"
with North and South Korea (the South's atomic and missile capabilities
far exceed the North's).
Preserving a neutral and secure Korea
In the concluding section, Harrison takes issue with the oft-cited
statement that if the United States disengages and militarily quits the
Korean Peninsula, regional great powers such as Japan, China and Russia
will overrun unified Korea to fill the "power vacuum". Struggle among
neighboring powers for dominance over Korea is indeed a sad fact of
history, somewhat like Poland's, but Harrison avers that the objective
conditions inside Korea have changed a lot in the last hundred years,
making it impossible for a repeat of the 1894-1905 experience. The rise
of powerful nationalist sentiment in both North and South will render a
unified regime "less vulnerable to foreign manipulation than the
politically quiescent and economically underdeveloped Korea of a century
ago" (p 347). It will be extremely difficult for giant neighbors to
manipulate internal factional divisions in a resurgent, vigilant and
unified Korea, which will claim its own place as a major Asian power,
alongside China, India and Japan.
Nonetheless, deep mutual distrust and animosity between Korea and Japan
persist. South and North alike share a conviction that Japan does not
want Korea to be united. Though Koreans are more reverential to Chinese
cultural influence, they are also worried about the Manchurian land and
petroleum seabed disputes with Beijing that could spill over into past
forms of Chinese dominance in the peninsula. Russia is also dismayed by
its marginalization from Korean affairs since 1991 and is eyeing
"re-entering" Korea economically to safeguard Moscow's geopolitical
interests in Northeast Asia.
To offset any danger to Korean independence, Harrison wants the United
States to initiate a broader security dialogue with the three big
neighbors, involving agreements not to deploy military forces, missiles
or weapons of mass destruction in unified Korea. But for this offer to
be a serious one, Washington has to begin reforming its own policy and
implement the disengagement steps outlined earlier in this review. An
egotistic, biased and one-sided approach in Washington cannot yield
lasting peace.
Written at a moment when US military presence is increasingly seen as
anomalous and insulting to national sovereignty in both North and South
Korea, Korean Endgame has a clear-cut message: It is time for the
United States to get out of Korea and act as a regional stabilizer
rather than a destabilizing force.
[Korean Endgame: A
Strategy for Reunification and US Disengagement, by Selig Harrison, 2002
Princeton University Press, ISBN: 0-691-09604-X, Price US$29.95, 409
pages.]
[Sreeram
Sundar Chaulia
works for the International Rescue Committee, New York.]
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