Korea-Japan intelligence sharing
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By Stephen Costello
Three months ago a policy specialist here in Washington asked for my responses to his questions about Japan-Korea-US cooperation with Aegis platforms, and intelligence sharing about North Korea. Today these issues have come up again due to statements about how the ROK government would use THAAD radar information gathered about North Korea and possibly shared with Japan. The North Korean missile launch of 3 August landed within Japan’s exclusive economic zone, and prompted Japan’s Self Defense Forces to be prepared to shoot the next one down.
1. This Aegis system is only useful for detecting one or two missiles and doesn’t detect short-range missiles on land ― so how useful will these drills be in stopping an actual attack from North Korea?
As you imply, the system that is being tested, linked trilateral MD for ballistic missiles, is almost irrelevant to possible attacks from North Korea. They would more likely use artillery or short-range missiles, or many other means to damage South Korea, if they wanted to.
2. How exactly is this related to the intelligence-sharing pact of 2014? If that agreement already existed, how big of a new step is this joint exercise? Why doesn’t the agreement recognize direct sharing between Korea and Japan?
The Intelligence Sharing Agreement has long been used as a proxy for dueling national interests and policies, and ideological posturing by the three governments (US, Japan and Korea). Its utility was mainly to clean up laws that would have prohibited joint action between Japan and Korea. Because of the new exercise's primarily symbolic role, it serves as a substitute for more serious, meaningful and long-term diplomacy by the three. The absence of direct Japan-Korea sharing is an indication that this is being done to please the US and continue with rather transparent posturing in order to avoid political risk and the responsibility for lowering tensions.
3. Will these exercises pave the way for more cooperation? What do you expect the future of cooperation between these countries will entail?
I doubt these exercises will pave the way for anything more ambitious. The fundamental distrust between insecure actors (Abe and Park) will keep it minimal. In a way, the over-hyped declarations over this by the US, less-so by Japan, and even less by Korea, perfectly show how limited this cooperation is.
4. How are China and Russia responding to this?
China and Russia are responding exactly as expected. On the one hand, they would oppose any military cooperation in East Asia that includes the US, for ideological reasons. Both have become more opposed to US policies and interests. On the other, they are correct that the goal of such MD plans is to counter and balance against Chinese and Russian capabilities, however modest they may be. The real question is whether ambitious US MD plans are upsetting the goals or laws of the ABM Treaty and fueling a more rapid arms race. The other real question regards the logic of the 15 year attempt to sanction and isolate the DPRK into capitulation. No serious scholar believes this strategy will work, so it is a substitute for more ambitious actions.
5. Who else is in opposition to these exercises? What might be reasons for concern?
Opponents will include many arms control professionals. Russia and China are looking for cheap ways to counter US qualitative and quantitative advantages and that ought to be our long-term focus. There are important debates on those issues.
Other opponents will be in Japan and Korea. In Korea the worry is that conservative, anti-communist nationalists, given an outsized voice by President Park, would subordinate Korea's nascent independent role as mediator and/or arms control advocate (without damaging the ROK-US alliance) by joining in an approach to Northeast Asia developed by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld and adopted by Obama, that forces them to choose between US and Chinese political tactics and security fears. To many of them, Korean diplomatic flexibility vanishes when they sign up to be part of a perceived military-first, minimum-diplomacy US approach to that neighborhood. The fact that this US approach has produced a nuclear North Korea, makes everyone less safe, and has no practical end-game is also relevant here.
6. Without the threat from North Korea, would this cooperation be happening?
North Korea and its increasing threats are central to all of this. The only reason this MD cooperation could be considered rational is that the NK issues remain unresolved, and certainly unaddressed, which allows them to be cast as great threats. Without them, this question would be a clear debate about how we follow the law and logic of the ABM Treaty while balancing against real threats from China.
The narrow and a-historical nationalisms of Prime Minister Abe and President Park have prevented their administrations from seeing and acting to support bilateral or trilateral military cooperation, "defense" or otherwise. For these reasons, this exercise fits perfectly into the urgent but shallow political needs of all three, without contributing any significant practical military advantage. In many ways, cooperation between Korea and Japan is logical and needed. It is also a requirement for democratic middle powers to not only share intelligence on North Korea - which is the selling point for the current exercise - but to jointly do a range of common security, contingencies-other-than-war, natural disaster, and asset-maximization tasks.
Aegis systems and naval platforms are nice to have, but humanitarian capabilities may be more relevant to both public needs and strategic interests. Hospital ship: $300 million, Chinook CH-47 helicopter: $30 million, Aegis Destroyer: $2 billion. Many in Japan and Korea do not buy the argument that "historical" bad feelings prevent this sort of cooperation. Such bad feelings are often manipulated by minority groups for political advantage.
Today, it’s possible that political dynamics may be changing in Korea and Japan. If they do, MD will fade quickly in significance, to be replaced by more useful bilateral and multilateral cooperation, and by real disarmament and denuclearization. We’ll see.
Stephen Costello 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. He can be reached at scost55@gmail.com.