Chalmers Johnson - Blowback, Second Edition - The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

The Seoul Olympics of 1988, which the North boycotted, brought worldwide attention to the prosperity of South Korea. Russia and China, both of them caught up in domestic-reform movements, took notice. The only Communist country that respected the North Korean boycott was Cuba. In 1990, Russia opened diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea; in 1992, China followed suit. On December 18, 1992, Kim Young-sam was popularly elected president of the Republic of Korea, the first civilian head of state since 1961.

The North did not like any of this, but did not totally foreclose adjusting to the new southern realities. Ever since the end of the Cold War, North Korea had very tentatively signaled an increased openness to discussions with unofficial South Koreans about the future of the peninsula, while also trying to shield itself from the infinitely greater economic power of the South. In 1990, a North Korean commented to a Chinese official, “What we have hung out is not an iron curtain, but a mosquito net. It can let in breezes, and it can also defend against mosquitoes.” 1The North’s dictator for life Kim Il-sung died on July 8, 1994, just before he was scheduled to attend a first-ever Korean summit meeting with Kim Young-sam.

The U.S. news media have dismissed North Korea as a “rogue state” and its leader Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung’s son and successor, as a “mad prince . . . whose troops (and nukes) make him the Saddam Hussein of North Asia.” 2What we know about that land, however, suggests that it is less a rogue state than a proud and desperate nation at the end of its tether. Having been driven into a corner, it has offered the world a textbook example of how to parlay a weak hand into a considerable diplomatic and economic victory over a muscle-bound but poorly informed competitor.

The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 precipitated an acute crisis in North Korea. Even if it was not prepared to abandon its ideology and reform its economic system of juche (self-reliance), the northern leadership still could not help noting that the endgame of the Cold War was particularly dangerous for players on the Communist side. The former leaders of Romania were put up against a wall and shot; the former leaders of East Germany were tried and given heavy sentences by the courts of a newly unified Germany. Meanwhile, in another sign of the North’s potential fate, the United States persisted in its boycott and embargo of Communist Cuba even though that island’s regime no longer posed any kind of threat to it. Asked why the United States was willing to engage North Korea while still maintaining a strict embargo against Cuba, a “senior administration official,” speaking on condition of anonymity, said with a smile, “To my knowledge [the Cubans] do not have a nuclear weapons program.” 3This difference, in a nutshell, is the secret of how North Korea caught the Americans’ attention.

As the 1990s began, it became clear to North Korea that it had to try something short of war to break out of the trap in which the end of the Cold War—which had stripped it of its main allies and their economic support—had left it. It began by trying to open relations with Japan, inviting a delegation led by a senior Japanese politician to visit Pyongyang. In September 1990, only a few weeks after President Roh Tae-woo of South Korea had met with President Mikhail Gorbachev of the USSR in San Francisco and obtained Soviet diplomatic recognition, the then vice president of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, Shin Kanemaru, led a joint Liberal Democratic Party–Socialist Party delegation to the North Korean capital. The idea of going to North Korea was entirely Kanemaru’s and was vigorously opposed by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the time, however, it was widely assumed in South Korea that Japan was deliberately trying to undermine its increasingly friendly relations with the USSR, just as the North Koreans naturally assumed that Kanemaru, as a representative of Japan’s longstanding, one-party government, was coming as an official spokesman.

As it turned out, Kanemaru’s visit was just the last hurrah of one of Japan’s most corrupt politicians trying to further line his pockets. As Tokyo political commentator Takao Toshikawa has put it, “It was very much a personal initiative: a last chance for diplomatic glory in old Shin’s declining years, and also a brazen attempt to generate huge kick-backs out of the flow of grants, yen credits, etc., that would flow to Pyongyang once the principle of paying reparations [for Japanese colonial and wartime acts of brutality] was established.” While in Pyongyang, Kanemaru, “drunk and slightly senile, is suspected of having promised the North Korean strongman [Kim II-sung] grants and low-interest loans totalling ¥100 billion.” 4

Ever since this meeting the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied that what took place in any way represented official policy. More important, from a North Korean point of view, Kanemaru was arrested in March 1993 on bribery and corruption charges and died shortly thereafter. His downfall seemed to convince Pyongyang that its Japanese initiative was not viable. Kim Il-sung then evidently decided to see if he could deal directly with the United States.

As a result of the end of the Cold War, North Korea had lost the patronage of the USSR. For the previous forty years, the Soviet Union had competed with the People’s Republic of China to curry favor in Pyongyang, and this was the chief international structural condition that allowed the North to prosper and become somewhat independent of both. In 1974, following the first OPEC oil crisis, North Korea’s Soviet ally sponsored its entry into the International Atomic Energy Agency so that the Soviets could help North Korea develop a nuclear-power-generating capability. In 1985, North Korea adhered to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, also at the Soviet Union’s behest. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea lost not only Soviet nuclear aid and any continuing reason to participate in Western-dominated atomic control regimes, but also its second most important source of fuel oil. China, previously its leading source, now compounded these difficulties by asking North Korea to pay largely in hard currency for Chinese oil imports (though they also accepted some barter payments).

Under these circumstances, in March 1993, North Korea gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Whatever its reasons—including fear of Japan, energy demands, post—Cold War isolation, and thoughts of possible “posthumous retaliation” (Raymond Aron’s phrase) against Japan and a triumphant South Korea—North Korea developed the foundations for a small future nuclear-weapons capacity, or at least convinced the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it had. It has never actually tested a nuclear device. (It is highly unlikely, in fact, that it yet has one to test.) The initial American reaction was belligerent. The Pentagon talked about “surgical strikes,” á la the 1981 Israeli attack on an Iraqi reactor being built at Osisraq. Patriot missile brigades were transferred to Seoul, and the United States seemed poised once again to use force on the Korean peninsula.

American policy on nuclear nonproliferation has long been filled with obvious contradictions, and the officials in charge of the Korean branch, through overreaction and an almost total ignorance of their adversary, played right into the North’s hands. Until the five Indian nuclear tests of May 1998, the United States had more or less refused to acknowledge that in addition to Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union, proliferation had already occurred in Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Africa; that South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, and Taiwan had technologically proliferated without testing; and that Iraq—perhaps Iran, too—was almost surely pursuing a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. The U.S. doctrine of nonproliferation also ignores the fact that there is something odd about a principle that permits some nations to have nuclear weapons but not others and that the United States has been only minimally willing to reduce its own monstrously large nuclear strike forces.