S. Korea vows fast response
SEOUL, South Korea — President Park Geun-hye of South Korea ordered the country’s military Monday to deliver a strong and immediate response to any North Korean provocation, the latest turn in a war of words that has become a test of resolve for the relatively unproven leaders in both the North and South.
“I consider the current North Korean threats very serious,” Park told the South’s generals. “If the North attempts any provocation against our people and country, you must respond strongly at the first contact with them without any political consideration.
“As top commander of the military, I trust your judgment in the face of North Korea’s unexpected surprise provocation,” she added.
Since Kim Jong Un took power after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, in late 2011, the North has taken a series of provocative steps and amplified threats against Washington and Seoul to much louder and more menacing levels. The North has launched a threestage rocket, tested a nuclear device and threatened to hit major U.S. cities with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. And Kim Jong Un has declared that the Korean Peninsula has reverted to a “state of war.”
At the same time, there are signs that he is interested in turning his attention to the economy, including the promotion of an economic technocrat, Pak Pong-ju, to a key post.
Park’s comments stand in contrast to the usually dismissive tone that South Korean leaders take toward the North’s threats, and reflect the criticism aimed at her predecessor and fellow conservative, Lee Myung-bak, when the South was seen as not retaliating decisively after North Korea aimed an artillery barrage at a South Korean island in 2010, killing four people.
Analysts have been weighing whether the North’s intensifying threats — most judged to be hollow, given the limits of the North’s arsenal — simply continue the North’s long-standing practice of bolstering domestic support and trying to badger other nations into supplying aid.
“Kim Jong Un certainly is more aggressive than his father, and behind his aggressiveness is a confidence following the North’s successful launching of a long-range rocket and its nuclear test,” said Cheong Seong-chang, senior fellow at the Sejong Institute, a private research institute in South Korea. “What is clear is that compared with his father, who had absolute control on power, the young leader will cling harder to nuclear weapons as a tool of consolidating his power.”
“By raising these nuclear threats, he is ensuring that his country has regained the military balance it had lost to prosperous South Korea before shifting his attention more to the economy,” Cheong said. “He is more calculating than all these threats make outsiders believe.”
Kim Jong Un’s decision to launch the rocket in December and detonate a nuclear device in February followed the North’s growing frustration, analysts said, that its strategy of using threats and provocations against Washington and Seoul seemed less effective in recent years. Instead, the allies spearheaded more U.N. sanctions.
The sanctions coincided with the allies’ joint military drills, during which Washington demonstrated its political resolve to defend South Korea by taking the unusual steps of publicizing the training missions of nuclear-capable B-52 and B-2 bombers as well as F-22 stealth fighter jets.
The White House says that despite bellicose rhetoric from North Korea, President Barack Obama’s administration has not seen changes in the regime’s military posture.
White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday the U.S. has not detected any military mobilization or repositioning of forces from Pyongyang to back up the threats from Kim Jong Un.
For her part, Park must stand up to the North’s growing nuclear threat while seeking to defuse tensions. Her election campaign last year focused on a promise not to be blackmailed by the North, a popular conservative stance in the past few years. Since the North’s 2010 attack on Yeonpyeong Island, the South has amended its military’s rules of engagement to allow front-line units to respond more quickly, not wasting precious minutes waiting for permission from Seoul.
Amid fears that possible military skirmishes between the two Koreas could blow out of control, Washington last week concluded three years of negotiations with Seoul and signed an agreement to respond jointly to North Korean provocations. The move was designed to bolster deterrence against the North and to prevent unnecessary escalation.
In the North, Pak Pong-ju, an economic technocrat, was made a full member of the Politburo on Sunday and was given more power Monday when the rubber-stamp parliament, the Supreme People’s Assembly, made him premier, a post in charge of the economy. The best-known top military leaders under Kim were given lesser promotions. The two men — Hyon Yong-chol, the chief of the general staff of the Korean People’s Army, and Kim Kyoksik, minister of the People’s Armed Forces — were made only alternative members of the Politburo.