Bennett’s curse: US pullout

Bruce Bennett is a researcher at the Rand Corporation.

The spooky-sounding Rand dates back to the height of the Cold War, helping prepare the United States for war or other contingencies. Dr. Bennett is a Korea expert and we should feel better off with some of his plans kept in the pigeonhole.

So I was surprised to know he was speaking to a general audience, Tuesday.

Without the extensive network of Park In-kook, the former ambassador to the United Nations, now leading the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies, which sponsored Bennett’s lecture, the Rand man might have preferred to keep his 106th trip here in low profile.

I talked to him for about 20 minutes in a pre-lecture session.

I told him that we had met 20-plus years ago. Then, I staked out Bennett to catch him on one of his trips to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a quote on a tip about a ROK-U.S. chemical warfare plan.

“Do you remember Coral Reef’?” I asked him, referring to the codename for the operation. He remembered it.

One thing led to another. Now, he talked about VX, the nerve agent that North Korea used to kill Kim Jong-nam, the estranged half-brother of its ruler Kim Jong-un.

Bennett’s revelation was that the North most likely conducted human trials to know that the agent was 25 times more lethal when applied to the face than on the hands. I told him that they had no problem of supply — the nation being one big gulag. We agreed that it should be another reason for Kim to stand trial on crimes against humanity.

But what caught my attention was something he said twice in passing.

“If the United States leaves, it won’t come back” was his prediction, in the event that the U.S. and North Korea sign a peace treaty.

I didn’t have a chance to press on it with Bennett. But it is not hard to fathom his logic.

It is related to China or more accurately the importance the Trump administration is placing on it to resolve the North’s nuclear and missile challenges.

At present, the Korean Peninsula is technically at war as the 1950-1953 Korean War ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. Then, the North and China on the one side, and the U.S. and U.N. forces on the other, signed up to it, while the Syngman Rhee government from the South wanted to unify the nation but when it didn’t get its way, stayed away in protest.

The North has long pushed for direct dialogue with the U.S. on a permanent peace, knowing that it would be the best security guarantee it can get from its main enemy.

But this is only half of its strategy. The first and conjunctive part of the Bennett statement — “If the United States leaves” — captures the other half — its strategy of reunification.

The peace treaty would leave the United States with little reason to keep its forces in the South. Once the U.S. is out, the North could invade and conquer the South.

There are two precedents for the U.S. withdrawal. Washington declared the Acheson parameter setting its line of defense in Asia excluding South Korea. Less than six months later, on June 25, 1950, the North, backed by Chinese and Soviet forces, invaded the South.

In Vietnam, also a flashpoint in the Cold War, the U.S.-backed South Vietnam was invaded and absorbed by the Communist North, soon after the U.S. withdrew after a peace treaty. So the question is how relevant these precedents are for the future.

Trump is a key factor. Originally, he showed a strong disinclination to meddle in global affairs and wanted to disengage, although this tendency has relented lately.

If his isolation streak comes back, one could never say “never.”

Another scenario is the possibility of a tradeoff — the North’s promise to put a moratorium on or reduce its nuclear and missile development — in exchange for a peace treaty.

Then, what is the validity of the second and conclusive part of Bennett’s statement — “it won’t come back”?

After the start of the North’s 1950 invasion, the U.S. did come back with 15 other countries to the South’s rescue. However, it didn’t go back to rescue Saigon.

The key difference was U.S. domestic politics — a strong anti-communist sentiment at the start of the Cold War, which preceded the Korean War, and an isolation bug escaped by a protracted war in Indochina.

By this standard, now seems to be closer to the second case as the U.S. is fighting the longest war in its history in Afghanistan, one of the fronts opened by President Bush’s war on terrorism, 16 years after the 9/11 attacks. Now the tired U.S. is facing a young rival in China and a resurgent foe in Russia.

We can imagine what would happen, if Bennett’s curse becomes a reality. It is time for us — presidential candidates included — to decide whether we want to find out about it. Bennett is a Cold-War warrior so his line of thought may be a bit confrontational by post-Cold War standards. But considering the confrontational rather than the conciliatory aspects of human nature, betting on the best intentions of the other party sounds dangerously naive.

Lastly, I want to make clear Bennett didn’t in any way show any spite to put Korea under a bad spell as the word “curse” in the title indicates. Rather, it is my interpretation of his remarks, knowing that if realized, it could spell disaster.