Peace or appeasement with Pyongyang?

US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte (Top) and North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun arrive for the gala dinner during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting in Manila 01 August. The United States and North Korea agreed to work hard to successfully complete a six-nation agreement on disarming Pyongyang's nuclear programme, officials said on Thursday.(AFP/Jay Directo)


Peace or appeasement with Pyongyang?
By Sung-Yoon Lee

SEOUL - In the wake of the drastic reversal in the US administration's North Korea policy early this year - from one of rhetorical pressure and economic strangulation to a quixotic blend of unbridled appeasement of the Kim Jong-il regime - just what the six-party process on the denuclearization of North Korea has permutated into remains clear: a formal process for accepting North Korea as a de facto nuclear-weapons state and, consequently, a process for perpetuating the division of the Korean Peninsula.
The participants in the six-party process will protest that the denuclearization of North Korea remains the ostensible objective of the hitherto impressively unimpressive intermittent multilateral meetings in Beijing. But since its inception in August 2003, the six-party nuclear-dismantlement process has resembled more a multilateral forum for devising ever new and creative means for providing aid to North Korea than a serious forum for serious nuclear diplomacy. A separate inter-Korean forum exists for that very purpose of unilateral giving - it is known as the North-South Ministerial-Level Meetings, now into their 21st generous, if otherwise futile, round.
The latest six-party meeting (the 12th, counting all "rounds" and "phases") on the denuclearization of North Korea confirms that the multilateral negotiations, although some 100 days behind schedule as defined in the "breakthrough" agreement signed by the six parties on February 13, is on track and proceeding as planned - that is, planned according to the North Korean playbook. North Korea, by making such token gestures as shutting down its Yongbyon reactor and readmitting inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency - who themselves will actually be the ones vigorously monitored and chaperoned under the watchful eyes of the North Korean state - is guaranteed to reap the generous fruits of nuclear blackmail so long as the six-party process stays on its current trajectory.
A startlingly simple fact stands in the way of achieving the ostensible goal of the six-party process: there is simply no precedent by which nuclear diplomacy, in the absence of new pressures and a new political will with attendant regime change, has led to the complete denuclearization of a nuclear-weapons state. South Africa made a strategic choice after F W de Klerk became president in 1989 to end its political system of apartheid and dismantle its nuclear arsenal as a policy of gaining acceptance by the international community. Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus - which inherited Soviet nuclear weapons in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union - all made a strategic decision in the early 1990s to negotiate away their nuclear weapons and reorient themselves toward the United States and western Europe.
If there actually existed a magic formula for persuading a nuclear-weapons state to dismantle its nuclear arsenal for political and economic aid, one wonders why it was not applied to the Soviet Union in the late-1940s, Britain in the early 1950s, France in the late 1950s, China in the mid-1960s, India in the early 1970s, and Pakistan in the mid-1990s. States develop nuclear weapons to possess them and to revel in the power and prestige that such worldly possessions grant them, not to bargain them away for money or food - blandishments that carry a short expiration date.
The administration of US President George W Bush, now into its twilight legacy phase and desperate for any kind of diplomatic victory during its remaining 18 months in office - especially vis-a-vis the three "axis of evil" states - is apparently content to continue the new six-party process of accepting a nuclear North Korea and perpetuating the division of the Korean Peninsula. In line with maintaining the mirage of "progress" on the six-party talks, the US is now even studying the possibility of signing a peace treaty with North Korea to bring the Korean War of 1950-53, which ended in a ceasefire and armistice rather than a peace treaty, to a formal conclusion. Optimists on both sides of the Pacific are celebrating such a move, sighing with relief that genuine peace on the Korean Peninsula may finally be at hand.
Yet peace, not war, is what we've had on the Korean Peninsula over the past 54 years since the armistice was signed on July 27, 1953. The past 54 years of peace is the longest in Korean history since the arrival of the Atlantic powers in the mid-19th century. During this time South Koreans have enjoyed the greatest period of economic growth and material comfort in the history of the Korean nation. Such a peace, as imperfect as it has been, has existed not only despite the absence of a peace treaty with North Korea, but because of the presence of US forces in the South and the consequent balance of power between the two Koreas. South Korea's military power may now have equaled or even surpassed that of the North.
But more than victory in war, security in peace is what Koreans and Americans have striven for over the past half-century and is what they should focus on today. And the presence of US troops in South Korea has been and remains the greatest deterrent to North Korean adventurism and the disruption of the ongoing peace on the peninsula.
Ever since North Korea joined the World Health Organization in 1973 and thereby was able to open a diplomatic mission in New York the next year, Pyongyang has proposed bilateral peace negotiations with Washington, all the while as it was sending an assassin to kill South Korean president Park Chung-hee that summer (which led instead to the death of his wife, Yuk Young-soo, and a high-school student) and hacking to death two US soldiers along the Demilitarized Zone just two years later.
North Korea knows better than any other that a peace treaty is just an agreement on paper, one that often conceals the true hostile intent of the signatory. At the same time, North Korea calculates that the conclusion of such a peace treaty with the US would create enormous pressure for the eviction of US forces from the South. With the signing of a peace treaty and all the political spin celebrating the dawn of a new era and genuine peace on the Korean Peninsula, the very raison d'etre for US troops in South Korea would vanish.
Even a cursory glance at international history over the past century shows us that a "peace treaty" among hostile powers has all too frequently been little more than a historical canard. Often, a peace treaty or a non-aggression pact is patently useless in the prevention of war, its putative goal.
Although not directly responsible for the rise of Adolf Hitler, the prohibitively punitive Versailles Peace Treaty in retrospect stands rather unimpressively. The Kellogg-Briand Pact was an international treaty providing for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. At first it was signed by 15 nations in Paris in August 1928, including Germany, France, Japan, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all which went to war in the course of the next 15 years. Barely six months later, an "Eastern European" version (otherwise known as "Litvinov's Pact") was signed in Moscow among the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Latvia and Estonia. And, of course, the most infamous, deceitful and worthless "non-aggression pact" ever to have been devised was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, better known as the Stalin-Hitler Pact, conjured up and signed in August 1939.
The United States and Korea's regional neighbors may grow to learn to live with a nuclear North Korea. Practiced in the art of deception and well versed in nuclear blackmail, North Korea will go on reaping rewards from its powerful and wealthy neighbors as long as it does not completely dismantle its nuclear arsenal. For a state like North Korea that hangs on the precipice of economic collapse, nuclear blackmail is a necessary condition for regime survival and the prevention of absorption by its Southern neighbor. By condoning this extortion, the US may ensure North Korea's survival. In turn, this new situation implies the perpetuation of two separate Korean regimes on the Korean Peninsula, a policy that China favors and one that spells doom for the terribly suffering and politically persecuted people of North Korea.
Unbeknownst to the US, a peace treaty with North Korea might briefly tip the balance of power between the two Koreas in Pyongyang's favor. The US may have the wherewithal to live with the uncertainties of a nuclear North Korea. But rushing to sign a peace treaty with Kim Jong-il might lead to conditions that would break the de facto peace that has existed on the peninsula for more than half a century. Just as the absence of a peace treaty between Moscow and Tokyo does not imply an imminent war between Russia and Japan, an armistice in place of a peace treaty between Washington and Pyongyang does not imply the breakdown of the peace on the Korean Peninsula.
At the very least, the ill-advised rush to "peace" is a likely candidate for the historical annals of self-destructive appeasement. The great sacrifices made by Americans in the Korean War, the legacy of the close US-South Korea relationship over the past 60 years, and future US strategic interests in and around the Korean Peninsula should not be sacrificed at the altar of diplomatic peace. Real peace is won by resolve and sacrifice, while ephemeral peace is all too often concocted only by vowels and consonants.

Dr Sung-Yoon Lee is a visiting professor of Korean studies at Sogang University, Seoul.

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