As
printed in Korea Policy Review
February
2006 Vol.2 No.2
Roh
Balances National Priorities and Alliance with U.S.
In carrying
out his election campaign pledge to reshape the U.S.-South Korean alliance,
President Roh Moo Hyun has skillfully balanced conflicting national
priorities during the first three years of his tenure.
Economic priorities make it necessary to avoid a sudden disruption of
the alliance. The U.S.-ROK Mutual Security Treaty creates a climate
of stability favorable for foreign trade and investment and for preferential
treatment by U.S.-controlled international financial institutions. The
U.S. force presence also provides an economic subsidy to South Korea
by enabling Seoul to maintain a much more formidable defense posture
than it could afford on its own.
At the same time, the favorable economic impact of the alliance is offset
by the constraints that it imposes on the scope and speed of the President’s
effort to carry forward the accommodation with North Korea initiated
by President Kim Dae Jung at his June, 2000, North-South summit with
Chairman Kim Jong Il.
The United States has attempted to slow down and, at times, to obstruct
the reconciliation effort, arguing that food aid and other economic
help from the South to Pyongyang undermines the six-nation diplomatic
effort to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. But President
Roh has pursued his North Korea policy undeterred, while demonstrating
his sensitivity to U.S. interests by sending South Korean forces to
Iraq, and by yielding to U.S. pressure for a new base at Pyongtaek,
facing China.
The alliance did not impede North-South reconciliation during the Clinton
Administration because the United States was itself pursuing improved
relations with Pyongyang. North Korean plutonium production was frozen
under the 1994 Agreed Framework. President Clinton welcomed the North’s
second-ranking leader, Marshal Jo Myong Rok, to the White House in October,
2000, and a month later, Kim Jong Il gave red-carpet treatment to visiting
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The U.S. commitment to normalized
relations with Pyongyang at that time was symbolized by the fact that
Secretary Albright paid her respects at the late Kim Il Sung’s
mausoleum, which Kim Dae Jung had not done in June.
From the start, the Bush Administration has been divided over whether
to continue the Clinton policy. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell
declared on March 6, 2001, that “we do plan to engage with North
Korea and to pick up where President Clinton and his Administration
left off,” only to be promptly countermanded by the White House.
Two days later, in the presence of Kim Dae Jung, Bush pointedly questioned
whether North Korea was honoring its existing agreements and, specifically,
whether its “secretive” leader, Kim Jong Il, could be trusted
to honor any new agreements. In reality, North Korea had scrupulously
observed the inspection provisions of the Agreed Framework, as the International
Atomic Energy Agency and U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency inspectors
had frequently declared.
Bush’s attack on North Korea, Iraq and Iran as an “Axis
of Evil” in his January, 2002, State of the Union address was
followed by increasingly explicit indications during 2002 that the White
House goal was not to continue the pursuit of normalized relations with
North Korea but, on the contrary, to promote its collapse.
On February 17, 2002, on the eve of a visit by Bush to Shanghai for
an Asian economic conference, the Financial Times reported that “the
trip will be dominated by the challenge of toppling Kim Jong Il’s
regime,” quoting a senior Administration official as saying that
“the key question is how we can get Russia and China to cut loose
the North Koreans.” European and South Korean engagement with
Pyongyang, said this account, “is little short of appeasement.
One official asked, ‘Don’t they feel they have blood on
their hands when they meet the North Koreans?’” Against
this background, it was not surprising when Bush, interviewed by Bob
Woodward for his book Bush At War, declared that “I loathe Kim
Jong Il. They tell me that the financial burdens will be so immense
if we try to – if this guy were to topple. I just don’t
buy that. Either you believe in freedom or you don’t.”
The divergence between South Korean policy toward the North and the
hard-line Bush approach has increased steadily since late 2002, when
the United States took a series of steps that culminated in the abrogation
of the Agreed Framework.
In October, the United States accused the North of cheating on the accord.
The CIA declared that the North had a secret weapons-grade uranium enrichment
plant in place that would be able to make “one or two” uranium-based
nuclear weapons per year by “mid-decade.” I have confirmed
from the concerned South Korean authorities that only sketchy, inconclusive
evidence in support of this assessment was presented to South Korean
intelligence officials during intelligence exchanges with the CIA both
before and after the publication of this assessment. South Korea was
told that as a “good ally,” it should accept the U.S. allegation
on faith.
The accusation that North Korea had cheated on the Agreed Framework
was used to justify a termination of the oil shipments to the North
required under the 1994 agreement. South Korea succumbed to intense
U.S. pressure for the oil cutoff. Predictably, this gave opponents of
the Agreed Framework within North Korea their opportunity to resume
the plutonium production that had been suspended at the Yongbyon reactor
since 1994.
The so-called “second nuclear crisis” with North Korea that
has subsequently intensified was welcome to Washington hard-liners,
who wanted to shift to a confrontational posture toward Pyongyang that
would set the stage for overt efforts to bring about “regime change,”
or at a minimum, to forestall economic help for North Korea as part
of a denuclearization agreement. As I have spelled out in Foreign Affairs,
(January and April, 2005), the Bush Administration has yet to present
evidence sufficient to establish that a weapons-grade uranium enrichment
program exists. Pakistan made clear on September 15, 2005, that it provided
only 12 prototype centrifuges to Pyongyang, not the thousands of already-manufactured,
ready-to-use centrifuges that would be necessary to make weapons-grade
uranium. Even before this, in February, 2005, the South Korean National
Intelligence Service announced its conclusion that North Korea did not
have a weapons-grade uranium capability. China has been more circumspect,
but has increasingly signaled that it shares the South Korean assessment.
As my own extensive conversations with Chinese officials make clear,
Beijing also questions whether Pyongyang has so far developed a militarily
operational, plutonium-based nuclear weapons capability.
The underlying assumption of the hard-liners in the Bush Administration
was originally that China would cooperate in bringing about a collapse
of the Kim Jong Il regime by putting economic pressure on Pyongyang.
China instead began stepping up its economic help to Pyongyang, made
clear that it did not want North Korea to collapse, and criticized the
United States for hamstringing the six-party nuclear negotiations. The
hard-liners then staged a temporary tactical retreat. They permitted
Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill to launch a serious negotiating
initiative with Pyongyang in mid-2005. The result was the September
19 six-party Beijing Declaration, which envisaged the eventual normalization
of U.S.-North Korean relations. Immediately thereafter, however, the
hard-liners deliberately set out to undermine Hill’s effort. An
“Axis of Evil” within the Administration – David Addington,
Vice-President Cheney’s Chief of Staff; Deputy National Security
Adviser J.W. Crouch, and John Bolton’s successor as Undersecretary
of State for Arms Control and National Security, Robert Joseph –
have orchestrated a campaign to depict North Korea as a “criminal
regime” with which normalized relations are not possible. The
cutting edge of this campaign has been the crackdown on a Macau bank
linked to alleged North Korean counterfeiting and drug trafficking.
If the charges against the bank are true and North Korea has suffered
a financial loss, as intended, from the crackdown, then further denuclearization
negotiations are likely to remain paralyzed unless China finds an under-the-table
way to compensate Pyongyang for the monetary losses it has suffered.
The steadily widening divergence between U.S. and South Korean priorities
in relation to North Korea was dramatically underlined when the U.S.
Ambassador to Seoul, Alexander Vershbow, made his January 17 appeal
for South Korea to join in treating Pyongyang as a “criminal”
regime. South Korea’s priority objective is to stabilize and liberalize
the existing regime in Pyongyang – a “changing regime”
policy – leading to a confederation and eventual reunification.
By contrast, the U.S. policy is “regime change.” Faced with
this divergence, President Roh is no doubt tempted to tell Ambassador
Vershbow that the South regards the alliance as military, not political,
in character, and that the United States, as a “good ally,”
should respect South Korea’s sovereign right to define its own
national priorities and to decide how best to defuse any remaining North
Korean military threat.
President Roh has resisted this temptation. Indeed, he has rarely expressed
explicit disagreement with U.S. policies, with the notable exception
of his November 12, 2004, Los Angeles speech declaring that it was “understandable”
for Pyongyang to pursue the development of nuclear weapons, “considering
the security environment they live in,” a reference, in part,
to the Bush National Security Doctrine with its explicit threat of preemptive
military action against potential U.S. adversaries. In my view, the
reason for his discretion is that he understands the economic value
of the alliance for South Korea. It is a common sense policy for Seoul
to avoid a sudden disruption of the alliance, so long as Roh does not
let the United States slow down the momentum of his economic aid and
military tension-reduction policies toward Pyongyang.
On a recent visit to Seoul, I was surprised to find that so many South
Koreans, of all political views, appear reconciled to the continued
presence of U.S. forces for the indefinite future. I repeatedly asked
why this was so, and explained why I was surprised.
After all, I said, North Korea is no longer in a position to sustain
a protracted invasion like the one in 1950. The Pentagon knows that
is the case, as emerging plans for force redeployments and reductions
show. So why does the United States still want to stay in Korea if the
North Korean threat is fading?
One reason, I suggested, is that the Defense Intelligence Agency and
the National Security Agency want to keep on spying on China with their
secret electronic monitoring facilities in Korea. Another is that Air
Force and Army units stationed in Korea might be useful in a war with
China over Taiwan. These reasons suggest that the divergence between
South Korean and U.S. priorities will grow in the years ahead, since
Seoul increasingly values close ties with Beijing.
Some conservatives replied promptly that North Korea is still unpredictable
and that the presence of U.S. forces will, therefore, remain critical
for security reasons for a long time.
A more common answer was that the U.S. alliance creates a climate of
stability favorable for foreign trade and investment. But no one mentioned
what I consider the real, unspoken, underlying reason why the prospect
of an end to the U.S. alliance is unsettling to South Korea: the U.S.
military presence and the alliance commitment provide the massive economic
subsidy to the South mentioned earlier.
This unspoken reason was once spelled out to me by a former U.S. Ambassador
to South Korea, the late William J. Porter, later Ambassador to Saudi
Arabia. In April, 1971, I was visiting Seoul for the Washington Post
and had a long conversation with Porter, who was a very plain-spoken
man. He was angry. He was engaged at that time in bitter negotiations
with the Park Chung Hee military regime over the size of the U.S. military
presence in the South. He had successfully pushed the Nixon Administration
to cut down the U.S. presence from 60,000 to 40,000 troops, but South
Korea was fighting it tooth and nail. “That’s not surprising,”
he said. “They have attached themselves to the big fat udder of
Uncle Sam and naturally they don’t want to let go.”
The subsidy provided by the U.S. presence enables South Koreans to postpone
hard choices concerning how fast, and how far, to move toward reunification,
and thus it postpones hard choices between civilian and military budgetary
priorities.
The U.S. presence enables the South to minimize the sacrifices that
would otherwise be necessary to maintain its existing high levels of
defense spending. By the same token, the withdrawal of U.S. forces would
force Seoul to decide whether it should seek the same level of security
now provided by the U.S. presence by upgrading defense expenditures
– or whether, instead, the goal of accommodation and reunification
with the North would be better served by negotiating a mutual reduction
of forces with the North.
Lower-income groups in the South would benefit from a diversion of resources
from military spending to social welfare programs. The South’s
upper and middle-income minority, by contrast, has acquired a vested
interest in the status quo. Without its U.S. subsidy, Seoul would have
to double or triple its military budget if it wanted to replace the
conventional forces now deployed for its defense by the United States
– not to mention the much higher outlays that independent nuclear
forces would require.
In addition to the direct costs of its forces in Korea, averaging $2
billion per year, the United States spends more than $40 billion annually
to maintain the overall U.S. defense posture in East Asia and the western
Pacific on which its capability to intervene in Korea depends. So long
as Seoul regards this U.S. economic cushion as an entitlement, it will
be under no compulsion to decide whether to move toward the confederation
envisaged in the June, 2000, summit, as a prelude to eventual reunification.
A significant portion of the South Korean defense budget goes to a vast
military-industrial complex. There are more than 80 defense contractors
in the South producing some 350 categories of defense equipment in nearly
150 factories. This powerful interest group, allied with leaders of
the armed forces, opposes reduced defense expenditures.
To be sure, there are certain aspects of the U.S. military presence
that are particularly crucial to the defense of the South: sophisticated
command and control and intelligence capabilities in particular. Seoul
would be wise to upgrade these capabilities to prepare for an eventual
U.S. withdrawal, even at a high cost. Some spending on them is already
underway and is justified. But that is very different from a broad-based,
across-the-board expansion of the armed forces designed to replace the
overall U.S. presence.
The South should respond to the recent U.S. force reductions and redeployments,
in my view, by offering to resume the dialogue on mutual force reductions
with the North agreed upon in the 1992 North-South Agreement. The Joint
North-South Military Commission envisaged in the agreement was never
implemented after the nuclear crisis erupted but should now become a
priority for President Roh. The agreement specifically provided for
negotiations on mutual force reductions under the auspices of the Joint
Commission.
Just as the military-industrial complex in the South opposes mutual
force reductions, so there is also a military-industrial complex in
the North, allied with hard-liners in the Workers Party. Force reductions
are not popular with this hard-line faction in Pyongyang. In the case
of the North, however, economic factors have made it imperative to reduce
defense spending, and Kim Jong Il is prepared to join in mutual force
reductions if the South is ready to do so, I was told in Pyongyang last
April. By contrast, since the South spends so much less of its GNP on
defense, the pressures for reductions are not as great as in the North.
The South’s rapid economic growth, together with the U.S. military
presence, have enabled successive regimes to avoid increasing the proportion
of GNP allocated to defense while, at the same time, steadily raising
the actual level of defense expenditures.
In addition to mutual force reductions, I have urged in my book, Korean
Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and the U.S. Disengagement (Princeton,
2002), that the United States and South Korea negotiate a pullback of
forces from the 38th Parallel in return for North Korean pullbacks,
as part of a broader accommodation with Pyongyang. Instead, the Pentagon
has pursued the U.S. relocation of U.S. forces as part of a policy of
confrontation with the North. In negotiations on the relocation of forces,
President Roh has not attempted to define a long-term approach to the
reduction of the U.S. presence in the context of improved relations
with Pyongyang.
The most striking example of the President’s desire to avoid disturbing
the status quo has been his decision to send South Korean forces to
Iraq. This has been done at a high cost to South Korea’s reputation
in the international community. The U.S. invasion of Iraq is widely
regarded throughout the world as a blunder of historic proportions that
will foster continuing instability in the Middle East and the Persian
Gulf, and is inflicting horrendous humanitarian suffering on the people
of Iraq. President Roh’s determination to back the U.S. adventure
in Iraq underlines his desire to avoid disruption of an alliance that
still has wide public acceptance in South Korea for economic reasons.
At the same time, on the plus side, it has strengthened his hand in
seeking to restrain the Bush Administration from pursuing a confrontational
policy with Pyongyang that could lead to war.
In conclusion, during his remaining two years in office, President Roh
could seek to make the alliance more compatible with his North Korea
policies in three ways.
First, he could pursue mutual North-South force reductions in bilateral
discussions with Pyongyang, resisting pressures from the Pentagon and
his own military-industrial complex.
Second, he could press for the more “open and equal” alliance
discussed by Ruediger Frank in the January Korea Policy Review, focusing
on preparations for the return of full operational control over South
Korean forces to Seoul and for an eventual shift from the existing Combined
Forces Command model to the more equitable Japan model, under which
co-equal Japanese and U.S. command structures and intelligence operations
are closely linked.
Finally, he could step up efforts to promote a trilateral peace treaty
ending the Korean War (The United States, North Korea and South Korea).
The Pentagon fears that a formal end to the Korean War would increase
pressures in the United States and South Korea alike for total U.S.
disengagement from the peninsula. But it should be remembered that the
U.S. presence is governed by the ROK-US Mutual Security Treaty, which
would remain in force even if a peace treaty ended the Military Armistice
Commission, the U.N. Command and other relics of the 1953 armistice
agreement. Given the huge network of U.S. bases and facilities in Korea,
it would take many years for a complete withdrawal, even if both sides
should want one in the years ahead.
