No easy solutions to North Korean mess
Pyongyang is capable of striking back if attacked and is likely to launch a massive artillery barrage against Seoul — a scenario that will soon see the US stuck with fighting a land war in Asia
orth Korea is big nowadays: United States President Donald Trump has made it clear that he plans to finally solve the “North Korean problem” — that is, he’ll get North Korea to denuclearise itself.
This is nothing very special. For the past 25 years, every new US president has promised to do something about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Some have tried negotiations, others have emphasised pressure. Neither approach has worked so far.
The Trump administration, which seems to rank North Korea high among its foreign policy problems, is choosing the hard line, but with a twist: Trump hopes to cajole China into joining him in a really tough sanctions regime. The issue was discussed during the summit meeting between Trump and the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, in April: The administration has apparently indicated its willingness to reconsider some of America’s anti-Chinese policies — including on difficult trade issues — if China “fully cooperates” in getting tough on North Korea.
The US administration’s assumption is that Chinese sanctions would push North Korea to the brink of an economic disaster and thus prompt the leaders in Pyongyang to reconsider their nuclear ambitions. Given that China controls about 90 per cent of North Korea’s foreign trade and also provides the country with vital aid, including shipments of subsidised fuel, the expectations seem reasonable.
The problem is, however, that Beijing has valid reasons not to be too harsh on Pyongyang. While Chinese leaders do not like North Korea’s nuclear programme, they are afraid that truly comprehensive sanctions might, indeed, push North Korea to the brink of economic collapse, which would be followed by political disintegration. From their point of view, North Korea in a state of civil war would be a greater threat than the nuclear-armed but relatively stable North Korea that exists now. Even worse, a crisis in North Korea might result in a German-style reunification of the country under Seoul’s control — that is, the emergence of a united, democratic and nationalistic Korean state that would probably be an ally of the US. This is not an outcome that would be welcomed in Beijing.
Provoking a crisis
Apart from this, the Chinese experts know that North Korea sees nuclear weapons as the only guarantee of the regime’s survival and thus will not surrender its nukes even under the greatest pressure imaginable. Thus, a Chinese boycott of North Korea — something the Trump administration would like to see — would be highly unlikely to produce the desirable result of denuclearisation, but much more likely to provoke the kind of crisis that China fears.
So the expectations of the Trump administration are misplaced. Beijing would rather deal with consequences of a trade war with Washington than with those of a real war nearby — even though it is no hurry to advertise this position.
But should we worry about it? Should we regret that the pursuit of Trump’s Chinese dream will probably last for another few months? Perhaps not, because the alternatives are much worse. The first alternative would be negotiation — but that will not work either. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un believes that before he negotiates he needs to develop and deploy an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of hitting the continental US. His engineers are working on this project with remarkable speed and are likely to achieve success in matter of years, if not months — even though Trump tweeted that such an ICBM “won’t happen”.
So, once it becomes clear — once again — that neither sanctions nor negotiations are effective, and North Korea gets close to becoming the world’s third country theoretically capable of obliterating San Francisco, how will the US president react? A military strike may be considered as an option — at least, this is what some key people in the US administration have indicated many times.
However, North Korea is capable of striking back if attacked and is likely to do so — perhaps by launching a massive artillery barrage against Seoul, the huge capital located very close to the North-South border. If that happens, the South Koreans will shoot back, and in no time, the US will find itself fighting a land war in Asia.
So perhaps one should be thankful that the Chinese are now considering cooperation on sanctions, buying time while extracting concessions from the US on other issues. A war would be much worse. One should also hope that belief in a Chinese miracle will survive long enough for Trump to learn the lesson his predecessors had to grudgingly accept: The North Korean nuclear problem has no easy solution. In the past, it has usually taken a year or two before a new US administration came to accept this inconvenient truth.
Andrei Lankov is a professor of Korean history at Kookmin University in Seoul and director of korearisk.com.