Belt, road and Moon

By Stephen Costello

The Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative (NAPCI), inherited and embraced by the Moon Jae-in administration, remains a logical structure around which to build its relationships in the region. In fact it may be the most well-grounded and widely-supported external initiative by this government.

Among the reasons for this are its overlapping infrastructure and development imperatives with the Chinese Belt and Road (B&R) plans, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Asia Development Bank (ADB), the World Bank, the rail connections between South Korea and China and Russia, and the long-planned Korea-Japan bridge/tunnel.

The NAPCI's geostrategic, political and security dimensions have not been as well appreciated, however. It is entirely possible that these interconnected economic development projects will be the basis for solving and moving beyond the North Korea nuclear and missile programs. This is likely whether they are realistically and smartly promoted by President Moon or must wait for the next occupant of the Blue House or White House.

Feelings of unease and dread have seeped into many South Koreans since the new U.S. administration provoked the current crisis this year. One writer noted that, due to the intentional raising of fears and talk of war, and the lack of diplomatic imagination, many feel they live on an island, rather than a peninsula. The North Korea crisis has long had this effect, and the deals that were effective in addressing it, including the U.S.-DPRK deal and ROK-DPRK engagement of the 1990s, were dependent on a road map that led directly to NAPCI and its matching ambitious projects.

As scholars and diplomats have pointed out for decades, South Korean presidents have long seen the regional benefits, as well as the peninsular benefits, of any successful South-North cooperation. The Sunshine Policy was just a modernization of long-understood principles of how regional interests could be helped by inter-Korean cooperation. At the time, Kim Dae-jung had the international and strategic background, the first non-ideological and non-Cold-War government, and the luck to be in office during three of Bill Clinton's six years of activism toward the DPRK.

The basis of that 1998-2008 engagement was that the South-North initiative was driven primarily by economic development. That was the case then, and it remains the case today. The abandoned light water reactor project made this clear. The Mt. Geumgang agreement and Gaeseong Industrial Complex were both confidence-building demonstrations, and they would have lead inevitably to more sustainable and internationally-connected industrial policies in the DPRK. But they would do so only if the engagement projects proceeded with political support from the top. Fatally, that support evaporated in 2001 on the U.S. side.

After President Moo's visit to China last week, it is useful to imagine how Korean leverage could be used to effectively get China fully cooperating on a big project they support, rather than trying to get them to support a failed project cooked up on the other side of the world by amateurs.

Under those previous deals, South-North and North-U.S. cooperation would quickly and necessarily involve explicit and binding security dimensions. A peace treaty to end the Korean War, normalization of relations, end of U.S. hostile policy (ongoing since 1953), and even some inter-Korean military cooperation all provided this. A denuclearization plan would always be baked into any comprehensive agreement. The number of governments and NGOs with large stakes in any serious and workable plan is significant.

In the U.S., its national interests have been cast in two broad ways over the past 20 years. On one hand, the U.S.-North engagement of 1994-2001, and robust South-North engagement from 1998-2001, were understood to be aimed at a renaissance in regional economic development. This is how they were understood by many stakeholders. Perhaps the most vulnerable yet interested stakeholder at the time was North Korea. These elements were also quite obvious. This is the logical basis for the Moon government's Northeast Asia initiative, with its focus on comprehensive, connected and common.

On the other hand, there was always another view of U.S. interests, primarily anchored in the U.S. Republican Party. In that view, which preceded Bill Clinton and continues in more extreme form today, North Korea is grouped with China and Russia as primarily communist. Its missile and nuclear weapons programs are to be viewed as threats rather than defenses, and diplomacy is rejected in favor of coercion. This view emerges from the U.S. Cold War, from its bureaucratic history, and from political/power dynamics, and it conceives of the North Korea problem as exclusively a matter of coercion in both its analysis and the range of actions to address it.

For those who view the problem in military terms, or who still cling to the communist vs. non-communist division as the most important reality, the NAPCI will seem naive at best, and a surrender to China at worst. Among this group, a large contingent views the U.S. confrontation with China and North Korea as so great that it should determine U.S. actions on the Korean Peninsula, regardless of South Korean interests. During the 17 years since the U.S. reversed its working engagement with North Korea, this group has expanded. It now includes the great majority of policy and journalist positions in Washington.

For these reasons, any discussion of NAPCI in Washington, in which South Korea and its wide range of supporters propose to advance ambitious plans while at the same time wholeheartedly embracing President Trump's global diplomatic and economic isolation, military coercion, and refusal to negotiate with North Korea, will be dismissed. People may politely agree with the "spirit" or with the economic underpinnings, but they will know that the NAPCI is a nonstarter as long as Seoul can't become a more independent player.

A key slice of Seoul's potential friends in Washington, including the most important congressmen and senators, and experienced former diplomats, will be terribly frustrated. They will see that the NAPCI is exactly what Kim Dae-jung and Clinton were doing successfully, and that the new proposals are grounded again in sound economic, political and security logic.

But they will know from the news that it will go nowhere as long as Seoul gives up its independence to a distracted and incapable Washington, with its extreme strangulation policy toward North Korea. They will wish Seoul was able to act as a real friend to the U.S., and take up leadership when the U.S. cannot.

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.