By Stephen Costello
The launch of the Hwasong 15 by North Korea on 19 November has provoked the usual reactions among government officials and outside specialists. This time however, the flood of reactions allows a particularly useful up-to-date review of where mainstream and more experienced views now are on the two central questions: what is the true situation; and how can it be addressed.
Such a review is particularly useful because four of the regional leaders have won new political support, have had initial meetings, and are settling in to their policy directions. Donald Trump, Shinzo Abe, Xi Jinping, and now Moon Jae-in have made their first moves. Vladimir Putin will be around for some years, and Kim Jung-un may eventually be among the longest-serving leaders.
China, Japan, Russia and North Korea have limited flexibility in their basic strategic postures. For them the external environment has changed little, and their statements reflect this. North Korea in particular has been consistent since the US destroyed the working Agreed Framework that Kim Jung-il had invested so much in. The outliers here are the US and South Korea. As democracies their ideological impulses are temporary, and always in conflict with their practical and strategic impulses.
The US is a contradiction here. The Clinton years, from 1993 to 2001 were a pragmatic and professional high point in US relations with Northeast Asia. That flexibility and ambition to make progress ― at least on the Korea issues ― provided room for Korea's first fully democratic administration to make enormous advances for the Peninsula. During the three years that Clinton's team overlapped with the Kim Dae Jung administration, from 1998 to 2001, goals and strategies reinforced each other. Europeans, Canadians, and East Asians were enthusiastic supporters of the denuclearization-and-development project.
For better or for worse, those three years probably provided the North Korean government the best vision it ever had of how they could escape their isolation, dependence and poverty. For this reason, it should not be a surprise that Pyongyang has insisted on a return to those mutually-advantageous structures, or something like them, for the past 16 years.
The mystery is why the US has been unable to recover from its blunders for so long. After all, the impact on Northeast Asia of the US policy reversal during Bush's eight years was in many ways equal to his administration's impact on the Middle East after the Invasion of Iraq. Of course there are differences, beginning with the lack of a hot war in this region. But the devastating impact of the US's destruction of a regionally-crucial multilateral structure is still being felt, all these years later. North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile programs are only the most obvious result. Ongoing tensions and arms proliferation are others. The difficulty for the US or China's neighbors to collectively confront its excesses is surely another.
Many expected the return of the US Democrats to the White House in 2009 to usher in a return to the strategic understanding, if not the activism, of the Clinton years regarding the Korea issues. But observers in the US and Asia were all wrong. Barack Obama's embrace of the Bush ― rather than Clinton ― understandings of Korea could be blamed on the geographical and intellectual isolation of Washington, or on the naivete and arrogance of leaders, or on shallow and domestic political pressures. By now it doesn't matter much. Trump has extended this record of bumbling into the third US administration in a row, and he has reinforced it by destroying ? for now ? much of the country's diplomatic capability.
South Korea remains the most flexible among all the others. That's why it's reluctance to play a central organizing role in coming months will inevitably weaken it. All the other governments have reasons to avoid leadership on the North Korea challenges. But not South Korea.
In the US this week, one of the better thinkers on these issues wrote a detailed rebuttal of the main arguments by mainstream scholars here. But his article did not contain any discussion of options for diplomacy and development progress. Not one word.
In the Atlantic magazine, Mira Rapp-Hooper, who was close to Kurt Campbell and Hillary Clinton, made one of the best assessments of the Trump administration's strategic incoherence. But she stopped short of spelling out how the US could do more than "manage" the DPRK better.
Former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter was interviewed on Public Radio, but he could not imagine that diplomacy could achieve any progress for the US. Other Washington scholars debated the meaning of Trump ignoring the 60-day lapse in DPRK missile launches, and his apparent disinterest in diplomacy.
The UN Secretary-General has been muted and unable to identify a way forward. So much diplomatic capability continues to sit on the sidelines.
The most striking fact among national leaders today is that not one of them has a plan for de-escalation of tensions and progress on central elements for security and development. Several say they want to find a diplomatic solution, but don't know how.
In this environment, the Democratic Party Leader, Choo Mi-ae, is travelling to Washington and to Beijing. She is working hard, but her task is impossible. She is trying to carry on the conflicting policies of the Moon administration, even though those can't work. On the one hand she embraces Washington's illusion that "pressure and isolation" will somehow cause Kim Jung Un to back down. She also embraces Trump's fear of talking to North Korea. She will be pressing the Chinese to step up sanctions. President Moon joins Trump in calling for sanctions, isolation, and building up Seoul's deterrent capability. But this weekend Ms. Choo will be proposing to North Koreans that they participate in the Pyongchang Olympics.
There are strategic thinkers in Seoul. It is time for the Blue House to begin talking to them.
Stephen Costello(scost55@gmail.com) is a producer of AsiaEast, a web and broadcast-based policy roundtable focused on security, development and politics in Northeast Asia. He writes from Washington, D.C.
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Such a review is particularly useful because four of the regional leaders have won new political support, have had initial meetings, and are settling in to their policy directions. Donald Trump, Shinzo Abe, Xi Jinping, and now Moon Jae-in have made their first moves. Vladimir Putin will be around for some years, and Kim Jung-un may eventually be among the longest-serving leaders.
China, Japan, Russia and North Korea have limited flexibility in their basic strategic postures. For them the external environment has changed little, and their statements reflect this. North Korea in particular has been consistent since the US destroyed the working Agreed Framework that Kim Jung-il had invested so much in. The outliers here are the US and South Korea. As democracies their ideological impulses are temporary, and always in conflict with their practical and strategic impulses.
The US is a contradiction here. The Clinton years, from 1993 to 2001 were a pragmatic and professional high point in US relations with Northeast Asia. That flexibility and ambition to make progress ― at least on the Korea issues ― provided room for Korea's first fully democratic administration to make enormous advances for the Peninsula. During the three years that Clinton's team overlapped with the Kim Dae Jung administration, from 1998 to 2001, goals and strategies reinforced each other. Europeans, Canadians, and East Asians were enthusiastic supporters of the denuclearization-and-development project.
For better or for worse, those three years probably provided the North Korean government the best vision it ever had of how they could escape their isolation, dependence and poverty. For this reason, it should not be a surprise that Pyongyang has insisted on a return to those mutually-advantageous structures, or something like them, for the past 16 years.
The mystery is why the US has been unable to recover from its blunders for so long. After all, the impact on Northeast Asia of the US policy reversal during Bush's eight years was in many ways equal to his administration's impact on the Middle East after the Invasion of Iraq. Of course there are differences, beginning with the lack of a hot war in this region. But the devastating impact of the US's destruction of a regionally-crucial multilateral structure is still being felt, all these years later. North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile programs are only the most obvious result. Ongoing tensions and arms proliferation are others. The difficulty for the US or China's neighbors to collectively confront its excesses is surely another.
Many expected the return of the US Democrats to the White House in 2009 to usher in a return to the strategic understanding, if not the activism, of the Clinton years regarding the Korea issues. But observers in the US and Asia were all wrong. Barack Obama's embrace of the Bush ― rather than Clinton ― understandings of Korea could be blamed on the geographical and intellectual isolation of Washington, or on the naivete and arrogance of leaders, or on shallow and domestic political pressures. By now it doesn't matter much. Trump has extended this record of bumbling into the third US administration in a row, and he has reinforced it by destroying ? for now ? much of the country's diplomatic capability.
South Korea remains the most flexible among all the others. That's why it's reluctance to play a central organizing role in coming months will inevitably weaken it. All the other governments have reasons to avoid leadership on the North Korea challenges. But not South Korea.
In the US this week, one of the better thinkers on these issues wrote a detailed rebuttal of the main arguments by mainstream scholars here. But his article did not contain any discussion of options for diplomacy and development progress. Not one word.
In the Atlantic magazine, Mira Rapp-Hooper, who was close to Kurt Campbell and Hillary Clinton, made one of the best assessments of the Trump administration's strategic incoherence. But she stopped short of spelling out how the US could do more than "manage" the DPRK better.
Former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter was interviewed on Public Radio, but he could not imagine that diplomacy could achieve any progress for the US. Other Washington scholars debated the meaning of Trump ignoring the 60-day lapse in DPRK missile launches, and his apparent disinterest in diplomacy.
The UN Secretary-General has been muted and unable to identify a way forward. So much diplomatic capability continues to sit on the sidelines.
The most striking fact among national leaders today is that not one of them has a plan for de-escalation of tensions and progress on central elements for security and development. Several say they want to find a diplomatic solution, but don't know how.
In this environment, the Democratic Party Leader, Choo Mi-ae, is travelling to Washington and to Beijing. She is working hard, but her task is impossible. She is trying to carry on the conflicting policies of the Moon administration, even though those can't work. On the one hand she embraces Washington's illusion that "pressure and isolation" will somehow cause Kim Jung Un to back down. She also embraces Trump's fear of talking to North Korea. She will be pressing the Chinese to step up sanctions. President Moon joins Trump in calling for sanctions, isolation, and building up Seoul's deterrent capability. But this weekend Ms. Choo will be proposing to North Koreans that they participate in the Pyongchang Olympics.
There are strategic thinkers in Seoul. It is time for the Blue House to begin talking to them.
Stephen Costello(scost55@gmail.com) is a producer of AsiaEast, a web and broadcast-based policy roundtable focused on security, development and politics in Northeast Asia. He writes from Washington, D.C.
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