North Korea continues to stymie U.S. presidents
When North Korea claimed to have tested a hydrogen bomb Wednesday, Republican presidential hopefuls blamed the Obama administration’s foreign policy. North Korea, however, presents a special case that has bedeviled U.S. presidents.
Isolated, unpredictable and seemingly answerable to no one, North Korea possesses a massive military stationed along its border with South Korea. It is capable of launching an artillery barrage on nearby Seoul, the South Korean capital and heart of the world’s 13th largest economy, that would devastate a metropolitan area of 26 million people only 35 miles from the border.
That is why North Korea seems to always get away with acts that deserve a swift response.
On Jan. 23, 1968, North Korean patrols snatched the U.S. spy ship Pueblo from international waters and pulled it into the port of Wonsan. The ship’s crew was kept hostage for nearly a year as President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, grappled with the correct military response. North Korea returned the crew of 82 after months of negotiations.
Richard Nixon, then a GOP presidential candidate, was sharply critical of Johnson’s response. “When respect for the United States has fallen so low that a fourth-rate power like North Korea will hijack an American ship on the high seas,” Nixon told the Chicago Tribune, “this is a time for new leadership.”
Nixon soon got his turn. On April 14, 1969, a North Korean MiG fighter shot down a U.S. spy plane in international airspace, killing 31 U.S. servicemen. As I write in my new book, Nixon’s Gamble, national security aide Alexander Haig urged a military response but warned Nixon that he had to “prepare for the potential North Korean responses, which could be dire.” In the end, Nixon did next to nothing.
On Aug. 18, 1976, Nixon’s successor, Republican Gerald Ford, faced his own crisis. A group of U.S. officers went into the DMZ separating the two Koreas to cut down a poplar tree that was obscuring the view of North Korea from U.S. positions. North Korean troops attacked them, killing two U.S. officers. In perhaps the only successful retaliation to a North Korean provocation, a U.S. force returned to finish cutting down the tree.
In 2006, North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon, a move that stirred members of both political parties to point at each other. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., blamed former president Bill Clinton for weakening sanctions, while Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill blamed the Bush administration.
The Bush administration pushed for tougher economic sanctions, but there was no military response, just as after later nuclear tests in 2009 and 2013.
North Korea will remain unpredictable, veering back and forth from flexing its military muscle to trying to improve relations with other nations from a position of strength. It will also continue to pose a conundrum for presidents seeking an appropriate response to its escalating provocations.