Korean missile testing is Trumped-up crisis

Apart from Donald Trump’s need for a dramatic foreign policy initiative, is there any good reason why we are having a crisis over North Korea’s nuclear weapons testing?

If the Pyongyang regime is planning an underground nuclear test soon, as Washington alleges, it will be the sixth bomb test it has carried out. That hardly qualifies as a new development that requires urgent action. The same goes for its ballistic missile tests, which have been ongoing for many years. Nothing new is going on in North Korea.

In South Korea, on the other hand, things are about to change a lot.

The winner of Tuesday’s election and South Korea’s next president, Moon Jae-in, favours a softer policy toward North Korea. He has even promised to re-open industrial and tourist projects in North that were financed by South Korea.

A decade ago, when Moon’s Democratic Party was still in power in Seoul, he was chief of staff to President Roh Moo-hyun, and the so-called Sunshine Policy of reconciliation with North Korea was the order of the day. The goal was to create commercial, financial and personal ties between the two Koreas, and to that end South Korea sent aid and investment to the North.

It’s impossible to say whether that would have led to a less militarized situation in the Korean peninsula, because in the 2008 election the conservatives won and scrapped the Sunshine Policy. The past nine years under right-wing governments have seen North-South relations re-frozen.

Now Moon has promised to reopen economic ties with North Korea in a policy his advisers call Sunshine 2.0.

This runs directly contrary to Trump’s policy of tightening economic sanctions against the North and even threatening military action to force Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Indeed, the Trump administration may have pushed a military confrontation with North Korea to the top of its foreign policy agenda precisely in order to pre-empt Moon’s new Sunshine policy.

Given the chaos that reigns in the White House, it could just be that Trump is making policy on the fly, and that he neither knows nor cares about the domestic politics of South Korea. But recent U.S. actions point to a deliberate attempt to get the confrontation going before Moon took office.

One clue could be the rush to deploy the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) system in South Korea before the election. It’s designed to intercept short- and medium-range ballistic missiles that North Korea might use to deliver nuclear weapons on South Korea.

THAAD was scheduled to be installed in South Korea between August and October of this year. Then suddenly it arrived in the country in March, and was “operational” by last month. Moon will now have difficulty reversing that decision.

On the other hand, Trump shocked the South Koreans by announcing at the end of April that South Korea would have to pay $1 billion for the THAAD system, despite an existing agreement that the U.S. would bear the cost. He also declared he was going to renegotiate the existing free trade agreement between the two countries, which suggests there is no clever plan.

Moon rightly believes there is no need for a crisis this year to resolve a problem that has been simmering for at least 15 years, but unless he goes along with it he will provoke a conflict with Donald Trump.

Could he win it? South Koreans are divided between a hard and a soft approach to North Korea, but they don’t want a war in which they would be the primary victims. Trump will find the new South Korean government reluctant to pursue his campaign against the North.