North Korea's Trojan Horse
By Danny Gittings
Wall St Journal
August 21, 2003SEOUL -- Over the last few days, Pyongyang has been stepping up its demands for the United States to concede to a nonaggression pact during next week's multilateral talks on the nuclear crisis, claiming that only then will it feel safe from a pre-emptive strike by Washington.
"The only thing the DPRK wants is the conclusion of a nonaggression treaty," said a dispatch from the Korean Central News Agency Monday, referring to North Korea by its official title of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "The purpose of the DPRK's proposal of a nonaggression treaty with the U.S. lies in checking a new war on the Korean peninsula."
It's a demand which some in the Bush administration see as fairly harmless. They seem ready to make concessions on this point during the Aug. 27-29 six-party talks -- which also involve China, Japan, Russia and South Korea -- although not in the form of a binding pact, as North Korea is demanding. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has suggested Pyongyang could be offered some kind of written guarantee, possibly in the form of a congressional resolution.
The argument in favor of a nonaggression pact is that there's little to be lost in formally renouncing an option you're unlikely to use. Although many in Seoul and Pyongyang persist in believing otherwise, hardly anyone in the Bush administration is currently contemplating a military strike on North Korea's nuclear facilities, due to the lack of accurate intelligence about where parts of the program are located, as well as the risk of massive casualties in any retaliation.
There are, however, serious flaws with this reasoning. Not least that, freed from even the remotest possibility of facing the threat of force, North Korea will have even less incentive to abandon its bomb making. Or that it assumes you can strike a deal that Kim Jong Il's regime will keep, when all the evidence to date suggests otherwise. But in this case there's also another -- so far largely overlooked -- concern: That Pyongyang's real purpose in seeking a nonaggression pact is to use it as a Trojan horse to rupture the already strained U.S.-South Korean military alliance.
Here in Seoul, less than 40 miles from the front line and well within range of North Korean artillery shells, I found longtime observers of Pyongyang's negotiating tactics far more worried about the demand for a nonaggression pact than those calmly contemplating the idea a continent away. And with good reason. For while Kim's propaganda machine claims that North Korea needs assurance that it wouldn't face a pre-emptive strike, recently revealed documents show Kim has told his soldiers such a pact would never achieve that goal.
"History shows that while there have been no small instances of countries hostile to each other concluding treaties or agreements, these countries have done that only to buy time until they have capabilities to overwhelm their opponent countries," Kim is quoted as saying in the June 2001 issue of Kunin Saenghwal (Soldier's Life), an internal publication of the North Korean military.
"Lessons of the past make it clear that dramatic measures such as treaties and agreements cannot prevent a war and cannot secure peace. Even in the case we establish diplomatic relations with the United States in the future and change the armistice into a peace treaty, that fact will remain unchanged. The American imperialists had diplomatic relations with Iraq and Yugoslavia for several decades. But once these imperialists came to dislike them, they attacked those countries, turning them into rubble overnight."
The documents, apparently obtained through Japanese sources, were first revealed by Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, in an article in Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy earlier this year. In a further illustration of the futility of trusting Pyongyang's promises, Kim reportedly made these remarks on Oct. 12, 2000. That's the day Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok -- Kim's No. 2 in charge of the North Korean military -- left Washington after being feted at the White House, during the final stages of the Clinton administration's love affair with Pyongyang.
All this raises a question: Why is his external propaganda machine so shrilly demanding a nonaggression pact after the Dear Leader has told his troops that it won't deter the pre-emptive strike he professes to fear? The answer, according to veteran observers such as Lee Dong-bok, a former legislator with long experience of negotiations with the North, is that although Kim doesn't see much value in a nonaggression pact as such, he still believes it can serve his devious purposes in a different way -- by driving a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea.
Mr. Lee predicts that as soon as Washington concedes some kind of nonaggression assurance, which may happen as early as next week, North Korea will follow up with a host of other demands and insist that such an assurance will be worthless, unless these are also met. First on the list would be the cancellation of all joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises, such as Ulji Focus Lens, the simulated war game now under way to test how the two forces would respond to an emergency on the peninsula. Since Pyongyang has repeatedly denounced this exercise as an aggressive act, it would be sure to seize on any kind of nonaggression assurance as further ammunition.
Ridiculous as this might sound, the Clinton administration has already set a precedent for caving in to such demands, canceling the Team Spirit military exercises in 1994 in order to conclude the Agreed Framework with Pyongyang. That agreement failed to stop Kim's regime from starting a secret uranium-enrichment program, and North Korea repudiated it altogether last December when it threw international monitors out of its plutonium facilities in Yongbyon.
Although the Bush administration is made of sterner stuff, the current South Korean government is most definitely not. Only this week, President Roh Moo Hyun, a fervent supporter of continuing his predecessor's "sunshine policy" of one-sided concessions under a slightly different name, apologized to Pyongyang after demonstrators tore up pictures of Kim in protest at the North's aggressive behavior. So it's not difficult to foresee how his administration will react when North Korea demands the cancellation of all future exercises before it will accept any nonaggression assurance. And with Russia and China also certain to side with Pyongyang, the U.S. is at risk of being outnumbered on this issue at the multilateral talks that begin next week.
Nor will it stop there. Another veteran observer of North Korean behavior told me to expect "salami-style" negotiating tactics. After targeting the joint military exercises, Pyongyang will move on to something else -- most likely Operation Plan 5027, America's long-standing contingency plan for crossing the Demilitarized Zone and toppling Kim's regime, and another traditional target of North Korean wrath. "How can you retain such an aggressive plan now that you've given us a nonaggression assurance?" will come the cry from Pyongyang, echoed by its friends in Seoul, Beijing and Moscow.
Then there are the more ambitious targets. Mr. Lee predicted that the U.S.-South Korean joint military command, the mutual defense treaty between the two countries and even the American military presence in South Korea would also become vulnerable. All three exist for the sole purpose of countering North Korean aggression, a purpose which Pyongyang -- and its allies in the South -- would be quick to argue had disappeared in the event of a nonaggression agreement.
Of course, Kim's regime couldn't expect to win on every issue -- at least not directly. Even the Roh administration recognizes the need for U.S. forces to remain, while China and Russia would probably worry about the destabilizing effects of a sudden withdrawal. But that's not the point. By couching such demands in the seemingly more reasonable context of a logical corollary of a nonaggression agreement, Pyongyang could whip up public sentiment among young South Koreans against the U.S. presence.
After an outpouring of public protest last year following the death of two South Korean girls in a traffic accident involving American soldiers, such sentiment has been dying out in recent months, leaving North Korea searching for a way to stir things up again. A second such outburst -- so soon after last year's huge protests -- could put the U.S.-South Korean alliance under huge strain, and re-ignite calls in Washington for a troop withdrawal, so achieving Kim's goal through other means.
None of this is to argue against next week's negotiations. At this stage, there is probably no alternative -- at least until a few rounds of fruitless talks have proved the futility of such a course, and the need to move on to other options. But it does mean taking care to avoid falling into the trap of Kim's Trojan horse, and realizing that offering nonaggression assurances is fraught with far more danger than might immediately be apparent.
Mr. Gittings is The Asian Wall Street Journal's deputy editorial page editor.
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