By Oh Young-jin
According to news reports both local and international, most of us South Koreans were supposed to be riding an anxiety roller roaster on Monday afternoon.
Whether we liked it or not, news portals and 24-hour news channels kept us updated, without respite, on details about our military’s live-fire drills in the West Sea.
By the relentless intensity infecting the media, few of us would have passed those critical after lunch hours without considering the possibility of a second Korean War.
For over 90 minutes my heart beat a little faster and I kept my fingers crossed in silent prayer that there would be no North Korean counterattacks. No doubt many others were feeling not much different since there were no incidents of panic buying or an increase in the number of plane tickets and people flocking to the airports in desperate attempts to flee the country.
Despite such hair-raising, it was impossible to avoid the daily routine at my desk in the newsroom preparing for tomorrow’s paper.
Perhaps the only noticeable diversion from business as usual were the specific instructions I gave to a couple of my reporters to moniter market reactions and foreign investors’ moves. As we now know, the financial markets, by and large, took it in stride, with stocks holding ground and nothing remarkable in fluctuations of the won/dollar exchange rate.
Caught up in retaining a sense of calm, I don’t even remember if I even heaved a sigh of relief when I caught an update on television that the drill had finished in the absence of any North Korean provocation.
Of course, drill had been carefully prepared for so as to leave little room for Pyongyang to dare firing at us with a trumped-up excuse.
During the exercise, our Armed Forces fired small-bore, short-range anti-aircraft Vulcan Gatling guns, limiting the use of big guns such as K-9 self-propelled howitzers that are capable of hitting North Korean targets.
In what appeared to be another calculated move to further deter Pyongyang’s provocations, a United Nations team was reportedly sent to Yeonpyeong Island on an observation mission during the exercise.
Later, I analyzed how the citizens in the south could be so cool in the face of a distinct threatening possibility of another violent conflict certainly putting our lives on the line. A couple of plausible causes crossed my mind.
First and foremost, we have become so accustomed to the game of tug of war with the North Koreans. This analysis coincides with that of experts, who mention what they see as our “incredible sense of indifference” after six decades under the constant looming threat of North Korea. The experts just glean half of the story because that indifference is what keeps us from going insane. If we jumped in jittery surprise with every shot North Korea fired at us, we would have long ago turned into one big nuthouse.
For the past 60 years, we have been stuck in the technical state of war as the 1950-1953 Korean War ended in a truce rather than a peace agreement or a definite victory by either side.
Although the North’s Yeonpyeong attack on Nov. 23 killed the precious lives of two civilians and two marines in the first attack on our soil since the Korean War, past experience of a variety of the Stalinist country’s provocations and responding counteractions by Seoul teaches us that we somehow manage to avoid the worst.
The risk, of course, is that this knowledge-by-experience becomes wishful thinking and war breaks out over a slight faux pas by one party in this dangerous, reluctant tango between north and south.
But a closer examination reveals that many South Koreans, from a historical perspective, are geopolitically aware of the impossibility of another war on the Korean Peninsula without the agreement of big powers.
The first Korean War (there should be no second!) broke out on what historians agree was a misinterpretation by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin assuming the U.S. would abandon the South from its so-called nuclear umbrella in a declaration by Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
Contrary to Stalin’s expectations, the U.S. jumped in to deter the aggression of the Soviet-supported and China-assisted North Korean army.
The U.S.’s decision to come to Seoul’s rescue was as much attributable to the ultimate confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union for a global hegemony as to the pressure then U.S. President Truman felt in a whirlwind of McCarthyism.
Applying this experience to the current Korean situation and it is somewhat plain to see that the trigger for a second conflict between the two Koreas would come from an escalating confrontation between China and the United States rather than the barrels of millions of guns facing each other along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) or the Northern Limit Line (NLL) dividing North and South Korea.
The two global superpowers are already engaged in a serious competition, their interest now clashing most notably on the economic front. Flaunting its status as the primary engine of the world economy, China is moving to wrest the hegemony in Asia from the U.S. Then, it is sure to extend its reach beyond.
It can’t be ruled out that the vying will eventually reach a critical mass. It is worth remembering that the U.S. designated China as a competitor rather than a partner as early as during the Clinton administration.
One difference between now and the six decades ago is that the global economy has so enmeshed the interests of Beijing and Washington that neither can wage a war without risking their very existence and the entire world’s.
Another safety lever is that it will take some time for the temperature to rise as high with Beijing as the heat during the period of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation.
Perhaps we Koreans inherently know of this shifting balance of power in this superpower calculus, if not in elaborate terms, helping us not overreact in the latest flare-up of inter-Korean tension. Unfortunately, we don’t know how the two big powers will proceed the next time a belligerent shot is fired across the sensitive Korean border.