Bring 'sunshine' back
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By Choi Sung-jin
As expected, President Park Geun-hye mostly offered excuses and self-justifications in her special address to the National Assembly Tuesday. People heard few words of regret for the failed policies of her administration that have dragged down inter-Korean relations to their lowest point and left the nation at its most insecure in decades.
Many will ask: Why should President Park say she is sorry when North Korea is raising tensions with a nuclear test and missile launch?
Undoubtedly, the totalitarian regime in the north deserves blame and criticism from all quarters for threatening people with weapons of mass destruction, hurting regional peace and stability.
It takes two ― or three, or even four ― to tango, though. In the multilateral relationships constituting Northeast Asia, everything is relative: One country may have to take the biggest responsibility for anything gone awry but the others should also be held accountable for it, to varying degrees and in differing ways. At least such acknowledgement helps to resolve a crisis before it aggravates further.
In the aftermath of the North’s latest provocations, hawks seem to dominate the doves and voices demanding “terminating sanctions” drown out those calling for dialogue. These hawks praise Seoul’s decisions to introduce the U.S. missile defense system and shut down the inter-Korean factory park in the North Korean border city of Gaeseong while calling for a preemptive attack and even nuclear-arming South Korea. To them, the doves are either cowards or traitors or both.
Let’s calm down and think for a moment, however.
It does not take military experts to know that North Korea needs no nuclear weapons ― especially those delivered on missiles that fly very high and far - to deal a fatal blow to Seoul in which one fifth of the South’s population lives and nearly half of its wealth and other crucial functions are concentrated. The deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) platform, therefore, is to pressure China, and to a lesser extent Russia, by helping the United States keep its two regional, and global, rivals in check.
Naturally it will not pull the two continental powers closer to Seoul but push them closer to Pyongyang in a “new Cold War” structure.
The closure of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex amounts to the government shooting the nation in the foot, militarily and economically. The cash income from the joint factory town is too small to exert influence on the North’s decision-makers, but will incur billions of dollars of damages on 140 South Korean businesses and thousands of their suppliers hiring 125,000 workers. Government officials say the move was also aimed at prompting China to move. Beijing will only be glad if Pyongyang relocates 54,000 skilled North Korean workers to the Sino-Korean industrial zone. Moody’s is talking about the negative effects that the shutdown of the Gaeseong industrial park will have on Seoul’s credit rating.
More seriously, it will bring back the North’s attack line 10 km south while severing the last remaining line of communication between the two Koreas. In the cold reality of international politics, self-injury invites exploitation, not sympathy.
A preemptive attack, or surgical strike, assumes the attacker can get away with it and the conflict will end in a limited war at most. That will prove to be a very dangerous assumption if the nation under attack is a very desperate and unpredictable state such as North Korea. Few can tell for sure what will happen next. Even a limited conflict will cause thousands, or tens of thousands, of casualties on both sides. Koreans are no longer what they were in the 1950s. Just think of the trauma that continues to haunt the parents of dozens of dead marines and sailors who perished in the West Sea over the past decade and a half.
Nuclear-arming the South is impossible for now, a fact only those who demand it don’t seem to understand. It will justify the North’s atomic ambition, increase the possibility of nuclear weapons race in this part of the world, and force the U.S. to treat South Korea as it treats the North.
Sanctions and pressures cannot make the North abandon what it regards as its most important, if not the only, lifeline. The isolationist regime will do so only when it thinks there are no security and economic threats from the U.S. and South Korea by turning the armistice into a peace treaty through negotiations. Seoul and Washington say there will be no talks unless Pyongyang gives up its nuclear programs first. Chance would be a fine thing. In reality, however, that is like putting the cart before the horse by putting forth the ultimate goal as a precondition.
The hawks say that North Korea has continued to pursue its nuclear weapons program despite the two major agreements of 1994 and 2005. Journalists who’ve been around long enough know the U.S. has not exactly fulfilled its own share, either. After the 1994 Agreed Framework, Washington demanded far tougher inspections than agreed on, and days after the Sept. 19, 2005 accord, the George W. Bush administration issued unprecedented financial sanctions on North Korea. In both cases, the isolated regime reacted angrily, even saying it was stabbed in the back.
President Park’s anger is understandable in part but neither justifiable nor wise.
She must restart by resuming the “sunshine policy” that former President Kim Dae-jung started 18 years ago but her conservative predecessor Lee Myung-bak killed eight years ago.
What Park must remember is the sunshine policy’s original architect was her own father who pulled off the first inter-Korean breakthrough with the July 4, 1972, Joint Declaration, which called for reconciliation between the Koreas until their eventual reunification based on the three principles of “self-reliance,” “peace” and “grand national unity.” She is running squarely counter to this.
As long as the U.S. and China want the two Koreas to remain as they are now rather than moving too close to either one of the G2 nations, there is not much the Koreans can do. However, if there is the slightest chance of breaking the status quo it must be achieved through peaceful means by seeking a situation in which the U.S. and China can coexist in this part of the world.
That would be far more worthy of pursuing ― and ultimately ― much safer.
Choi Sung-jin is a senior writer of The Korea Times
and can be contacted at choisj@ktimes.com.