By Kim Jae-kyoung
A noted North Korea expert said that South Korea and its allies, including the United States, should seek effective ways to penalize North Korea in a bid to prevent future provocations.
In an email interview with The Korea Times, Marcus Noland, senior research fellow for the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island and killing of civilians indicates a very dangerous escalation of North Korean belligerency.
“It is probably driven by the North’s succession process as much as anything else. The good news is for that reason that it might be self-limiting, while the bad news is that if the developments are not driven primarily by foreign policy goals, there is probably little that we can do to resolve it,” he said.
“I think that it is important that some real penalty be imposed on North Korea in order to help them calibrate the costs of future provocations. If not, it is practically an invitation for potentially catastrophic miscalculation in which some future provocation sets off an explosive escalation,” he added.
The American economist, who has closely monitored the development of the Korean Peninsula, pointed out that China has failed in its strategy of using North Korea as leverage to take a lead in diplomacy.
“China wants everyone to go to Beijing to discuss the situation. China’s diplomacy on this issue has been a failure — assuming that China actually wanted to contain North Korean belligerency,” he said. “This matter should go to the U.N. Security Council and penalties applied to North Korea.”
China has been criticized for remaining ambiguous on North Korea’s provocations seemingly to protect Pyongyang. On Sunday, China proposed an emergency meeting of the six nations early next month to discuss the situation on the peninsula.
However, Noland, who was previously a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President of the United States, said that the economic fallout of North Korea’s attack will be limited.
“From an economic standpoint, I don’t think that these developments will have major implications for the South Korean economy,” he said.
“Some commentary in South Korea has probably overestimated the impact of these events on world markets. My impression is that markets are reacting more to financial market developments in Europe than to military events in Korea.”