This is the ninth in a "Letter to President Biden" series aimed at conveying policy recommendations through open letters from politicians, scholars and experts to the new U.S. president following his Jan. 20 inauguration. ― ED.
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Dear Mr. President,
The notion of strengthening the historic Republic of Korea-U.S. alliance while dealing effectively with North Korea presents you and President Moon Jae-in with a riddle on top of a riddle.
The initial riddle is to resolve the seeming contradiction in terms. It would seem impossible for the alliance to gain strength when South Korea's leadership is so eager to reconcile differences with North Korea. Then within that puzzle is the challenge of persuading North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un to show signs of doing away with his nuclear program if the historic bond between South Korea and the U.S. is really tightening.
We need to recognize there may be no resolutions to these riddles, but we should also look for answers however remote and difficult they may appear. May we dream the impossible dream in hopes of awakening from the nightmare of a nuclear holocaust and discover reconciliation and denuclearization are here at last.
On one level, the response to the first riddle is easy. The alliance will gain strength when South Korean and American negotiators come to terms on the South's contribution to the costs of sustaining U.S. troops and bases in the country. Everyone needs to forget about Donald Trump's demand that South Korea ante up $5 billion this year, more than five times as much as last year. A modest increase, as proposed by the South, should be fine.
Resolution of that issue should be a first step. Then comes the hard part ― how to deal with two extremely difficult, interconnected questions. The first is whether the U.S. and South Korea should conduct joint military exercises in the face of North Korean outcries and the danger of COVID-19 spreading among U.S. and South Korean participants. Second is how or whether to make good on controversial, oft-postponed plans to give South Korea operational control, OPCON, over all forces in Korea in the event of war.
American and South Korean defense experts believe OPCON is so complicated, so difficult, that the armed forces of both countries had better conduct annual or biannual war games, largely on computers, regardless of the danger of COVID-19. If professional sports teams can play entire seasons despite the pandemic, smart military planners can find ways and means to play their own elaborate games behind layers of protection and deception.
But then, what about provoking outrage from North Korea by staging what the North invariably denounces as an elaborate plan for invasion? South Korean leadership fears that efforts at reconciliation will fizzle for the remainder of President Moon's term, which runs out next year, if the South goes through with joint exercises. There's even been a high-level suggestion that emissaries discuss war games in advance with the North Koreans.
No way should you consider, much less accept, conferring with the North on war games, but how about muting the games, keeping them small-scale, forgetting about huge warplanes roaring above and troops on armored vehicles blasting away in training areas?
Let's say the Americans and South Koreans do get together on holding war games that are so low-key, so harmless as to convince the North Koreans there's nothing to worry about. Next comes the task of telling the North Koreans, how about showing our skeptical, dubious public that you will finally stop making nukes and the missiles to send them to distant targets?
Talking the North Koreans into biting on that bait is going to be extremely difficult, but the increased strength of the U.S.-Korean alliance and the build-up of South Korean armaments may give them pause. Maybe they'll realize, "the sooner we act, the less likely South Korea and the U.S. will be able to muster the sheer firepower needed for waging a war we're sure to lose."
As South Korean and U.S. negotiators are no doubt aware, North Korea is not going to fall for promises of lavish aid. Demands to foreswear nukes and missiles in return for bundles of $100 bills won't work as long as the North enshrines its nuclear program in its constitution as integral to the Kim regime's survival. Nor will the North Koreans be moved by appeals to humanitarian instincts. They don't care about the awful fates of the thousands caught within their gulag system.
Solutions to these riddles lie in the skillful application of sanctions, making them harsher if the North Koreans balk at talking but easing up as a reward for a modicum of cooperation.
Sure, it's said sanctions are useless, but then why does the North protest so much about them? Isn't there a way to display disarming goodwill by micro-managing sanctions, rewarding and reinstating them to make recalcitrant North Korean leaders see the light? The message to Kim Jong-un has to be clear: You conduct another nuclear test or test-fire a long-range missile and we go back to square one: large-scale joint exercises, reinforced by tougher sanctions.
It may be too much to expect this approach will get anywhere, but there may be no other way to get Kim to budge short of bombing his nuclear facilities and plunging into Korean War II. That's an option no one wants to imagine, much less consider.
Sincerely,
Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com), a longtime Korea correspondent, writes from Seoul as well as Washington for decades.
