By Kim Young-jin
The United States would not hesitate to engage militarily against further aggressive behavior by North Korea, a leading U.S. expert said Thursday, stressing that Washington would maintain its role in East Asia despite shifting regional dynamics and internal strife.
“We must maintain a steady course to assure the North Korea regime that there is no military solution to their problem and no advantage in reckless acts of intimidation,” John Hamre, president of the Washington D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told an international forum in Seoul.
“We Korea and America together are prepared to respond as needed. If we have to fight a war, we will. We won’t start it, but we will win if it happens,” the former U.S. deputy secretary of defense said.
Despite a recent warming trend, tensions remain high over the North’s two deadly attacks last year. Seoul has vowed a strong military response to any further provocation after Pyongyang sank the warship Cheonan and shelled Yeonpyeong Island, killing a total of 50 South Koreans.
Washington has strongly backed its ally in the aftermath of the attack, conducting joint shows of force in waters off the peninsula.
Many analysts say the Obama administration is quietly pushing for more engagement with the North, including the possible resumption of the six-party talks on Pyongyang’s denuclearization, in a bid to manage its belligerence and growing nuclear program.
The sides recently held rare bilateral talks in New York amid a flurry of diplomacy over how to restart the forum.
Seoul and Washington want Pyongyang to take concrete denuclearization steps before the talks resume, while the North wants an unconditional return to talks, which halted in 2009 after the North stormed out in response to international sanctions.
Hamre expressed skepticism over the ability of the forum to bring about the North’s complete denuclearization, in part due to Beijing’s willingness to look the other way over the program that includes a uranium-enrichment component.
“I think China sees a greater risk from North Korea instability and collapse and uncertainty about where that goes, than it does by North Korea having nuclear weapons,” he said, adding that regional players must remain steady in their postures toward the program.
In the wide-ranging keynote address at the Korea Global Forum 2011 co-hosted by the Ministry of Unification, the expert said neither China’s ongoing rise nor fierce political wrangling on Capitol Hill would diminish Washington’s role in the region.
The Obama administration is concerned over China’s ongoing military-buildup that apparently seeks to keep pace with the country’s rapid economic growth.
Hamre said that while the build-up -- and the increased chance for miscalculations among forces in the region that come with it was ominous, it did not seem to reflect a desire to fundamentally change the international order. “China is demanding power and influence and respect within its sphere, it is not demanding a change to the international system,” he said.
As for the partisan wrangling in Washington that boiled over during the recent debt-ceiling debacle, Hamre, once a reported candidate for Secretary of Defense, said it would not affect Washington’s committed presence in the region.
“The harsh debate underway in America is not about foreign policy. There is a broad consensus on how Obama has handled the crisis on the Korean Peninsula,” he said. “Is America so preoccupied with its domestic battles that it will abandon Asia? The short answer is no.”