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

North Korea has ample reason to build a nuclear-power-generating capacity, given its vulnerability to a cutoff of crude oil. From a national security standpoint, Japan’s nuclear power capacity, its fast-breeder reactor program, its plutonium stockpile, and its solid-fuel rockets with ICBM capabilities could all plausibly appear threatening to a country that it once colonized and exploited. Japan has some forty-one nuclear plants generating 30 percent of its electricity, with another ten under construction. It has set a goal of meeting 43 percent of its demand for electricity through nuclear power by the year 2010.

The North Koreans must also have come to the conclusion that, whatever the American threats, a military strike against it was wholly unlikely. For one thing, South Korea is deeply opposed, not least because of memories of the way its capital, Seoul, only thirty-five miles from North Korean troops at the DMZ, was totally destroyed during the Korean War. In March 1999, when the United States was once again stridently issuing warnings about possible North Korean weapons of mass destruction and insisting that Pyongyang was developing ballistic missiles to deliver them, the South Korean defense minister ruled out participation by his country in a U.S. plan to create a regional missile shield, the theater missile defense (TMD). He further stated in the clearest possible terms that Seoul was opposed to any preemptive attack on North Korea even if war tensions were to rise to unbearable heights on the peninsula. 5

Equally important, a new Korean war would almost certainly end the Japanese-American alliance. Since the Americans would inevitably take some casualties and the Japanese would refuse to participate at all militarily, the American public would want to know why. The Japanese-American Security Treaty was badly strained by a similar pattern during the Gulf War; a repetition in Japan’s “backyard” might well snap it. The American military therefore tacitly gave up on a military option and turned to the idea of imposing sanctions against North Korea if it did not rejoin the control regime created by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allow the IAEA to resume inspections of its nuclear facilities.

The threat of sanctions also proved meaningless, although it did reveal to the American government how little its strategic thinking fits the actual complexities of the region. The legal basis for imposing sanctions would have to be Articles 41 and 42 of the United Nations Charter, which authorize the Security Council to impose interruptions of economic and diplomatic relations and militarily enforced blockades to give effect to its decisions. China would have vetoed the use of either article. Nor was it clear that there had ever been any legal basis for sanctions, because North Korea had formally and in a legalistic sense quite properly declared its intent to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Such sanctions would have involved some combination of acts that would include interrupting North Korean telecommunications, cutting off desperately needed remittances of money from Koreans in Japan, prohibiting people and vessels from going there via a blockade, and stopping all trade. North Korea promptly announced that it would regard any blockade as an act of war and would retaliate directly against Seoul. This caused the South Koreans to lose their enthusiasm for sanctions. The suggestion that Japan join in the use of sanctions against North Korea proved acutely embarrassing, revealing as it did both the extent to which Japan was already involved in propping up North Korea economically and the extent of the Japanese guilty conscience over its mistreatment of its own sizable resident Korean population, many of whom support North Korea. 6

Once the Americans had started to talk about sanctions, the Japanese government ordered a full-scale analysis of what might be involved. The secret report that resulted was subsequently leaked to the press and published in the monthly magazine Bungei Shunju . 7It revealed Japan as North Korea’s second most important trading partner after China, and the organization of Koreans in Japan allied with North Korea, Chosen Soren, as a remitter of huge amounts of foreign currency to the North, as well as large shipments of prohibited cargo such as computers and integrated circuits. All the large Japanese banks, including Daiichi Kangyo, Fuji, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Sakura, Asahi, Sanwa, and the Bank of Tokyo, have correspondence agreements with North Korean banks. Individual Japanese contributions to North Korea amount to at least ¥60 billion to ¥70 billion per annum—an amount equal to the value of North Korea’s total trade with China—and Korean operators of pachinko (pinball) parlors, many of whom are allied with Japan’s Socialist Party, have in the past contributed as much as ¥100 million on Kim Il-sung’s birthday. Any Ministry of Finance attempt to freeze these assets in Japan, the government report stated, would be ineffective since most private remittances and shipments go through third countries and then through China before reaching North Korea. Thus, even if the Americans had gotten U.N. approval of sanctions and avoided a Chinese veto, Japan concluded, they could not have successfully been implemented.

As is often the case, American policy toward North Korea in 1994 was belligerent but ineffective. The threat of a military intervention to destroy possible North Korean nuclear facilities lacked credibility, was not supported by either the South Korean or Japanese people, and might have destroyed relations with China. In this context former president Jimmy Carter undertook a mission of personal diplomacy to resolve the situation. Carter had long been interested in Korea. As president he had advocated withdrawing American military forces from the peninsula as part of a post-Vietnam reassessment of the failures of American policy in East Asia. He had been forestalled by implacable opposition from cold warriors in Washington, the assassination of Park Chung-hee, the anti-U.S. revolution in Iran, and the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan.

In 1994, the American ambassador to South Korea, James T. Laney, a former missionary in Korea and president of Emory University in Atlanta, was a close friend of Carter’s and was aware of the former president’s willingness to undertake personal diplomacy whenever it seemed he might be helpful. Laney also knew that Kim Il-sung regarded Carter as less hostile than most American officials because of his aborted attempts in the late 1970s to bring peace to Korea. Although without evident enthusiasm, the Clinton White House did finally approve a Carter visit to Pyongyang.

As it turned out, Carter almost surely kept the United States from making a tragic mistake in a region long dominated by the military. His mission was quite comparable to the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China twenty years earlier. Whether Kim Il-sung was personally satisfied with a former president rather than a sitting president, we do not know, but clearly it was a better opportunity than negotiating with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had nothing to offer him in return for his compliance with its inspection requirements. The Americans, on the other hand, could deliver goods North Korea badly needed, and also wring concessions and economic assistance from the Japanese and the South Koreans. Carter’s visit, like Nixon’s to China, was also testimony to the legitimacy of an isolated regime, something the United States had long denied. Kim Il-sung therefore agreed to freeze his nuclear program and opened negotiations on what he would require in order to permanently stop his weapons project and shift to a Westernapproved form of nuclear power generation.

So ended the first phase of one of the potentially most serious confrontations of the post–Cold War era. Had the United States government followed the advice of its military, it might have produced its own version of the Russian catastrophe in Chechnya (as it may yet at some point in the future). Had the North Koreans pursued their nuclear program (as they may still decide to do), they would have achieved their own Iraq-like status as the true pariah of East Asia. The United States could have avoided this confrontation had it opened some constructive channel of communication with Pyongyang years ago; instead, our soldiers continue to glare at theirs across the table at Panmunjom, within the Demilitarized Zone between the two parts of Korea. The West’s master theorist of war, Karl von Clausewitz, once argued that even after hostilities have commenced it is desirable to keep some channels of communications open among belligerents; failure to establish diplomatic ties in peacetime was, he thought, inexcusable. American—North Korean relations have been an apt example of his point.