.The Wall Street Journal, International Commentary
Korean Security - The Millennial Moment
By Nicholas Eberstadt
The Asian Wall Street Journal
January 15, 2001Mr. Eberstadt, author of "The End of North Korea" (AEI Press, 1999), holds the Henry Wendt chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute
As a new millennium dawns over the Korean peninsula, hopes and expectations are high among many students of Korean affairs. Half a century after the Korean War, there is suddenly widespread anticipation that this tormented and divided nation may be on the threshold of a new era -- an era of genuine peace, in which one of the last surviving structures of the Cold War is at last dismantled and a reconciliation between North Korea and South Korea commences in earnest.
Some influential voices in both Korea and the West, in fact, have insisted 2000 was Korea's anno mirabilis. By this telling, the year was marked by a series of events that once would have been judged impossible.
First was the unprecedented and extraordinary Pyongyang summit in June. Then North Korea's proposal to shelve its program of ballistic missile tests if other countries would launch Pyongyang's satellites. The spectacle of North and South Korean soldiers working conjointly to re-establish the long-severed rail link between Seoul and Pyongyang would have been unthinkable even months earlier.
Moreover, with the Norwegian Nobel Committee's award of the Nobel Peace Prize to South Korean President Kim Dae Jung for his work for "peace and reconciliation with North Korea in particular," the international community registered its own judgment that something tremendously important and promising was happening on the Korean peninsula.
To an important contingent of scholars, diplomats and policymakers, the notion Korea should be heading toward an epoch of peace is the natural and perhaps even inevitable consequence of the security policies they have advocated. These are the proponents of what has been called the "sunshine" or "engagement" approach to relations with the North -- which maintains that it is possible to alter Pyongyang's menacing international behavior, and even the regime's inner character, through a mix of positive incentives and rewards.
Since 1998, when the Kim Dae Jung government was inaugurated, Seoul's policy has incarnated this theory. By 1999, with the coalescence of the "Perry Process," the governments of both Japan and the United States became de facto subscribers to the theory and joined in the experiment.
"Engagement" theorists, in both academia and government, hold that North Korea's international behavior has changed, that the change is attributable to the approach they champion, and that further salutary changes can be expected the longer and more vigorously their preferred policies are pursued.
What fuels these theorists is easily grasped When hazard is close by, one should always hope for the best. Future historians may be better placed to judge the fruits of their theories. But from our present-day vantage point it may be well to emphasize that the "engagement" interpretation is by no means the only one that can account for Korean current events -- nor are they even necessarily the most compelling among competing explanations.
For all the excitement the turn in inter-Korean relations has engendered, this fact remains The North Korean government, up to this writing, has taken no concrete steps to reduce its conventional force, or nuclear and ballistic missile threats to the South or the South's allies abroad. And despite the high hopes invested in it by serious people in many countries, the fact remains that the "engagement" theory is at heart curiously, indeed strikingly, ahistorical. Indeed one would be hard pressed to offer a single historical example of a situation in which a lasting peace framework has been constructed with a closed, repressive state in the manner that "engagement" theory currently proposes to build one with Pyongyang.
There is, of course, a first time for everything. Millennialists steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition have always professed that near the end of history the day will come when the lion shall lie down with the lamb.
Modern-day Korea wouldn't be the first conflict spot on the globe about which such notions have influenced foreign policy. Throughout the ages, statesmen have often been tempted by romantic, utopian, and even millennarianist visions of a better world. But succumbing to such temptations has consequences for the conduct of international relations. And unfortunately, the historical record suggests such beliefs translated into action have seldom contributed to the security and well-being of the populations in whose name they were undertaken.
Moreover, despite the acclaim (and self-congratulation) that the "engagement" theory has been accorded in some quarters, there are already signs that the North Korean policies informed by it have begun to sag under the weight of their own internal contradictions. The "engagement" approach has reached an impasse It is now Pyongyang's turn to take steps in the envisioned Korean peace process.
For "engagement" policy merely to maintain credibility -- much less to advance -- Pyongyang must make a major gesture, and soon. These could include recognizing the right of the South to exist, for example, or demobilizing part of its enormous and offensively-poised conventional military force, or offering verifiable assurances that it is eliminating its program for the development of weapons of mass destruction.
Any of these confidence-building initiatives, however, would require of the North a total departure from long-entrenched state practices -- and a relinquishment of central regime priorities. Pyongyang has always maintained that its claim to authority over the entire Korean people is absolute and non-negotiable. Further, it has repeatedly emphasized that it regards military power as its very key to survival.
Ordinarily, governments are not expected to bargain over their self-identified vital interests, much less trade them away. Yet this is precisely what the next phase of the "engagement" approach would seem to expect of North Korea. Little wonder the "engagement" process, despite seemingly spectacular early headway, now looks to be so very stalled.
Like the millennium itself, the millennial moment in Korean security policy appears to be passing. For the sake of South Korea and her Western allies, this is not a loss. Seoul, Tokyo and Washington will all assuredly be better served by a less age-defying other-worldly approach to dealing with the North Korean threat.
To be sustainable and effective, a strategy for reducing North Korea's threat must begin by striving to grasp the inner motivations, external objectives and military capabilities of the regime -- and must continue by unflinchingly facing the implications of those inquiries. It should carefully and deliberately move to lower Western vulnerability to North Korea's diverse instruments of menace, while simultaneously denying Pyongyang the means by which to further perfect its techniques for international military extortion. It should aim to anticipate the manners and means by which Pyongyang might find it advantageous to create tension or promote conflict -- and prepare to press the regime in its own arenas of comparative disadvantage (such as economic performance and human rights).
No less important, a strategy for reducing the external threats posed by the North Korean regime must attend to constructing a sturdy regional security architecture for post-North Korea. In the final analysis, each and every one of the great powers of the Pacific -- the U.S., Japan, China and Russia -- could help the South in the great task of building peace and prosperity on the Korean peninsula. However, the North Korea we know today has absolutely nothing positive to contribute to such a project.
With the impending change of administrations in Washington, current U.S. policy toward North Korea will undergo review and scrutiny. The Bush administration would do well to construct more realistic, less romantic, policies than its predecessor. For peace and freedom in Korea can be treated as a practical strategic objective. It is a goal policymakers need not rely on miracles to attain.
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