B00BY4HXME EBOK (28 page)

By late 2007, North Korea’s strategists had good reason to feel happy about results of their diplomacy and brinkmanship. The US administration had given in, resumed aid, and even the revival of KEDO seemed likely after the February 13 declaration. Aid from the South helped to make up for the innate inefficiencies in the North Korean economy. In the long run, the Sunshine Policy might not have been as good for the North Korean regime as Kim Jong Il and his lieutenants seemingly assumed, but its destabilizing potential was unlikely to be noticed until much later. In
addition, China had become increasingly involved in the North Korean situation, so North Korean diplomats could and obviously did hope to resume their old game of skillfully manipulating rival sponsors. But then things suddenly took an ugly turn.

To a large extent the new North Korean crisis was a result of Pyongyang’s own miscalculations, but political changes within South Korea also played a major role in creating a new challenge for the North Korean regime.

By 2005–2006, the South Korean public was increasingly dissatisfied with the Roh Moo Hyun administration. Rightly or wrongly, Roh’s government was seen as responsible for an economic slowdown. It also became clear that the noble past of pro-democracy fighters did not shield them from the scent of corruption. The political Right at the same time acquired charismatic leadership in the shape of the former Seoul Major Lee Myung Bak (nicknamed “the bulldozer,” due to his passion for demolition and construction). By late 2007 few doubted that the Right was well positioned to win the next elections by a landslide. In a last-ditch attempt to save his legacy and the Sunshine Policy, President Roh rushed for a second summit with the North, which took place in Pyongyang in October 2007. Among other things, he promised to open another industrial zone similar to that of Kaes
ŏ
ng. But it was too late: elections were won by the Right and in February 2008, Lee Myung Bak became the new president of the Republic of Korea. Tellingly, the domestic North Korean media did not report the results of the elections for some two months.

The issue of North Korea remained marginal during the campaign. The foreign media usually only bother to mention Korea in relation to some North Korea—induced crisis, so people outside the Korean peninsula tend to assume that South Koreans see the North Korean issue as a defining or at least very important part of their country’s political agenda. This has long ceased to be the case. A poll taken before the 2007 presidential elections encapsulates this spirit quite well. In the poll, would-be South Korean voters were asked to name “the most important task of the next president.” Of the participants, 36.1 percent said that this should be “economic development and creation of jobs”; 27.4 percent said “closing the
income gap and improving welfare”; 22.4 percent wanted “political and social unity”; 11.2 percent wanted “political reform and leadership”; and only a meager 2.4 percent said that the would-be president should, first of all, concentrate on “improving inter-Korean relations.”
¹⁹

The results of the 2007 elections are often interpreted as a sign of the 386ers’ demise, and the Kim-Roh decade as a deviation from the “normal” state of affairs. Such views are especially common among US conservatives—those few, of course, who care about Korea at all. However, this is an overly simplistic interpretation. In spite of the 2007 setback, the nationalist Left—with its instinctual anti-Americanism and measured sympathy for the Pyongyang dictatorship—is bound to remain an important force in Korean politics for decades to come. For better or worse, the old Right-leaning consensus is dead, and South Korean politics will likely see the pendulum-like movement from the Right to the Left and back.

Even though the North Korean issue was secondary for his politics, the Lee Myung Bak administration had rather different ideas about how to deal with the North. He accused the two previous administrations of propping up the North Korean regime and making it even more dangerous. He also emphasized the need for strict reciprocity in dealing with North Korea—aid should be conditioned on meaningful political concessions from the North.

These views were epitomized in the “Vision 3000” plan, officially known as “Vision 3000, Denuclearization, Openness.” Vision 3000 describes what will become possible if North Korea surrenders its nuclear weapons. In such a case, the South promises, the North will see a flood of aid on a hitherto unthinkable scale. Within merely a decade, South Korean aid will help to increase the average per-capita annual income to the level of US$3,000, some three times the current level (which, by the way, would be achievable only with annual growth exceeding the 20 percent mark—hardly a realistic assumption). As the name itself suggested, the North Korean government was expected to improve economic efficiency by initiating Chinese-style reforms.

Needless to say, this proposal was clearly a nonstarter and was rejected outright. On May 30, 2008, the official North Korean wire agency, KCNA,
described the “No nukes, opening and 3,000 dollars” (this is how the official name of the “Vision 3000” plan is rendered into North Korean English newspeak) in its highly idiosyncratic English:

No nukes, opening and 3,000 dollars peddled by traitor Lee Myungbak as a policy toward the north suffices to prove that he is desperately pursuing the confrontation between the north and the south in ideology […] Lee’s pragmatism is little short of a hideous act of treachery as it is intended to sell off the national interests to the outsiders and make the dignity and sovereignty of the nation their plaything.

Soon afterward, President Barack Obama took office. It was initially assumed that Obama would pay little attention to the North—and this was bad news for Pyongyang, too.

Faced with this new and unfavorable situation, the North Koreans resorted to the tactics they had used in the past with so much success. Obviously, North Korean strategists decided that it was time to manufacture a new crisis—as usual, to squeeze necessary concessions from their adversaries/donors.

The first incident took place in July 2008, when a South Korean housewife was shot dead during the early morning while walking on the beach in the K
ǔ
mgang tourist zone. It remains an open question as to whether the shooting was indeed an accident or a part of a North Korean tension-building strategy. At any rate, the North Koreans took an unusually tough stance when it came to investigating the incident and the K
ǔ
mgang resort’s operations were halted.

In November 2008 it was the turn of the Kaes
ŏ
ng city tours. At the time, anti-Pyongyang activist groups had begun to send balloons with leaflets into North Korean territory. The North Korean government demanded the immediate cessation of such activities and when Seoul refused to take measures, the North Korean authorities halted tours to Kaes
ŏ
ng. In order to further increase the pressure on Seoul, they also introduced measures that greatly restricted the activities of the Kaes
ŏ
ng industrial zone.

North Korean strategists seemingly assumed that the deterioration in North-South relations would make the South Korean public uneasy, and therefore would force the Lee administration into a softer approach toward the North. This was a miscalculation. None of the tourist projects are of economic importance to the South and the average South Korean voter cares about the North much less than North Korean policy makers presumed. Hints of the possible closure of the Kaes
ǒ
ng industrial zone failed to produce the desired result as well, since the project is very marginal within the South Korean economy.

At the same time North Korean strategists began to raise the stakes in their deals with the United States. In April 2009 they again launched a long-distance missile that could theoretically have hit targets in Alaska and Hawaii—that is, if it worked properly. The launch, like the previous long-range missile tests, was a failure. Nonetheless, the North Korean media told the public that Juche science again succeeded in putting a satellite in space.

To further emphasize the message, the North went one step further and in May 2009 conducted a second nuclear test. Unlike the 2006 test, the second nuclear test was a technical success and demonstrated to the world that North Korea has indeed developed a workable nuclear device.

The UN Security Council produced another stern resolution (Resolution 1874), once again duly supported by the Chinese. However, merely a few months later Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited Pyongyang, and Chinese aid to the North was increased further. After the nuclear test the volume of trade between China and North Korea began to grow with remarkable speed, tripling throughout between 2006 and 2011.

As was expected by those who are accustomed to North Korea’s negotiation style, the barrage of threats and bellicosity was followed by a charm offensive. In July 2009 the flood of macabre abuse aimed at Seoul and Washington suddenly ceased and, all of a sudden, the North Korean media started to express their goodwill toward both South Korea and the United States.

As a sign of goodwill, Pyongyang agreed to release two US journalists who in the spring of 2009 had crossed the Sino-Korean border. They had spent a few months under arrest, and then an “unofficial” US delegation
led by former President Clinton flew to Pyongyang and negotiated their release. The Hyundai Group chairwoman also came back from Pyongyang with a Hyundai employee who had allegedly plotted the defection of a North Korean female employee.

The “crisis manufacturing strategy” has worked well in the past, but by 2008–2009 both Washington and Seoul had had enough. This time, neither was going to reward North Korea merely for its willingness to reduce tension and return to the status quo.

To a very large extent, earlier US willingness to give concessions was based on the assumption that the North Korean nuclear issue could be solved through diplomacy. In other words, it was assumed by many in Washington that the North Korean government could be convinced and/or bribed into surrendering its nukes. This was a misconception, of course, since the North Korean government has neither the intention nor, frankly, a valid reason to surrender its nuclear weapons. However, for a while this illusion was shared by many in Washington, making negotiations and concessions possible. But such hopes disappeared by 2008.

The United States has taken an approach often described as “strategic patience” (also known as “benign neglect”). The term implies that the United States will not do anything of significance until the North demonstrates its sincere commitment to denuclearization by taking certain measures that will clearly and irreversibly diminish its nuclear capabilities. The approach of Seoul has been even harsher.

By early 2010, the North found itself in a new and unfavorable situation, with both major adversaries-cum-donors suddenly becoming unreceptive to the customary mixture of threats, tension-building provocations, charm offensives, and minor concessions. Pyongyang’s strategists therefore decided to increase pressure by reminding the world of their ability to create additional problems for the United States and the ROK.

This might seem illogical, but such an approach is rational, since North Korea does not risk too much by driving tensions higher. Certainly, North Korean policy planners know that if a war were to break out they would lose it quickly. But they also know that war would be prohibitively costly for democratically elected politicians in Seoul and Washington.

At the same time, North Korea might actually have advantages over the South at the level of border skirmishes and small-scale raids. The North is aware that the South is incapable of inflicting damage on anything of value to the North Korean regime. If a major exchange of fire were to occur in the DMZ or the NLL (the latter is a disputed maritime border that divides the two Koreas in the Yellow Sea), the South Korean military might be perfectly capable of sinking a few North Korean warships or wiping out a coastal defense battery or two; or, perhaps even destroying a command headquarters, complete with a few dozen unlucky colonels and a couple of one-star generals. However, neither the rusty warships of World War II vintage nor the lives of humble colonels are of much significance to Pyongyang. The domestic political impact of such a military misadventure is also not going to be large since the government-controlled media will either hide a disaster or even present a humiliating defeat as a great triumph.

At the same time, such an exchange of strikes and counterstrikes might have a significant political impact on South Korea. First of all, South Korean voters are not fond of tension, and they might, in the long run, penalize their government for its inability to keep North Koreans quiet and nonthreatening. Second, the South Korean economy is very dependent on foreign markets and foreign businessmen who don’t like media reports about a war that is, allegedly, “likely to erupt in Korea next week.” Such reports are gross exaggerations, to be sure, but overseas car importers are not supposed to understand the intricacies of the inter-Korean politics better than your average journalist.

This asymmetry means that North Korea can raise the stakes with relative impunity when it chooses to do so—as long as the risk of skirmishes escalating to a full-scale war remains low.

With this in mind, in 2010, Pyongyang simultaneously pursued two tension-building programs, one directed at Seoul and another targeting Washington. The message they wanted to deliver was still the same, however: Pyongyang wanted to show that it cannot just be ignored and neglected, and that it is cheaper and safer to pay North Korea off than suffer the trouble it is capable of creating.

In order to drive this message home in Seoul, the North Korean military undertook two important and somewhat unprecedented operations. In March 2010, in a bold raid, North Korean submariners torpedoed the South Korean naval corvette, the
Cheonan
. It sank immediately, taking 46 lives, roughly half of its crew. A few months later in November, North Korean artillery shelled the island of Yeongpyeong, located in disputed waters near the NLL (South Korea’s claim to the island itself is not disputed by the North). It was the first major artillery attack on South Korean territory in decades.