Three Lessons from Pyongyang's Test
By Greg Sheridan
NORTH Korea's nuclear test and missile launchings offer sad and perhaps startling lessons. Lesson No.1: So far, the Barack Obama charm and kindness offensive has had no positive results in any conflict anywhere in the world.
Obama may believe he can change the world with a smile, a willingness to consult, extravagant official humility and a dose of undeniable charm. He is indeed not George W. Bush. Guess what? It makes not one tiny jot of difference to North Korea's Kim Jong-il or, indeed, to any of the world's dictators, terrorists, nuclear rogues or other bad guys.
Soft power is not going to solve North Korea.
Lesson No.2: China is overestimated as a geo-strategic partner and as a central player in any solution to the problems North Korea presents. China is the one nation in the world that could bring Kim's regime to an end without the use of force. China provides the food, fuel and consumer goods that keep North Korea, barely, functioning.
Beijing issued a mild rebuke to Pyongyang for its latest test, a rebuke notably milder in language than some it has issued in the past.
But China continues to keep North Korea going.
Why? Because the status quo suits China. There is no evidence Beijing is worried by the humanitarian plight of North Korea's half-starved population. When a big international conference on North Korean human rights was held in Melbourne recently, US, Japanese and South Korean diplomats attended. No Chinese diplomat was there.
If South and North Korea reunited on the model of East and West Germany the whole peninsula would become a democracy. And despite the bizarre fashion a few years ago for analysts at the Australian National University to pronounce the US-South Korean military alliance on its deathbed, a reunited Korea would almost certainly remain an ally of the US. Although China doesn't like the trickle of refugees it gets from North Korea now, it would hate sharing a 1400km border with a bold, prosperous, rich ally of the US. The refugee flow would then be the other way.
Far better to have a Stalinist buffer state, so long as it does not become so erratic as to directly endanger Chinese security.
Beijing has reaped many other benefits from North Korea. The long saga of the six-party talks has done nothing to dissuade North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons.
But the six-party talks have conferred splendid benefits on Beijing. They not only afforded Beijing great prestige from hosting them, they also offered Beijing a superb diplomatic lever with Washington. The US State Department bent over backwards not to annoy the Chinese in case it led to them going slow on the six-party talks. Now Kim's tests have shown us, whether the Chinese were acting in good faith or not, they have achieved absolutely nothing that we want on North Korea.
Lesson No.3: Nothing will deter the North Koreans from keeping and developing their nukes. Both hawks and doves should realise this.
Former CNN correspondent Mike Chinoy, representing the doves, in his book Meltdown presents the eight years of Bush as a long parade of missed opportunities when the North Koreans, who longed to give up their weapons, were insulted, rejected and frustrated by Washington.
In truth Bush alternately tried hard and soft policies with Pyongyang, but nothing worked for long. That the North Koreans used whatever Bush did as an excuse for going their ownway does not mean they would have gone any other way had he acted differently.
Former Bush official John Bolton argues a kind of mirror reverse of Chinoy's position: that if only Bush had been tougher he would have forced the North Koreans to crumble. But there is no evidence for this. Bolton is so hawkish in his calls for regime change in Pyongyang that he teeters on the brink of calling for military action against at least its nuclear facilities, but sensibly he always shies at this final hurdle.
Military action against North Korea would be utter folly.
Seoul, is barely 30km from the border. Across the border is a range of gentle hills. In those hills North Korea has nestled thousands of artillery pieces. The North could cause untold devastation in Seoul in the first hours of any conflict.
What, then, is to be done? The problem cannot be ignored. The North Koreans have an appalling record of nuclear and missile proliferation, specifically to Syria and Iran.
Nor can we be sure the North will never use its nukes. Part of the frustration the international community has with North Korea comes from a failure to understand its bizarre internal political culture.
Stalinist dictatorships are best considered as national equivalents of the narcissistic personality in psychology. They are completely self-obsessed. North Korea's interlocutors keep trying to devise a system of incentives and disincentives. But the North Koreans make entirely different calculations. Their paradigm is utterly foreign. This is a classic weakness of realism as an analytical tool in foreign policy. Realism holds that states act on the basis of their interests rather than their ideologies. This is wrong throughout history but especially wrong of regimes such as Kim's. Kim will act in his own interests, but his evaluation of his interests may bear no resemblance to our evaluation.
Nonetheless, some things can be done. One is to make maximum effort to prevent North Korea from proliferating nuclear material and technology. South Korea this week signed up to the Proliferation Security Initiative. Obama's enthusiastic embrace of the PSI is a good sign. The PSI allows member nations to intercept any North Korean cargo suspected of being related to nuclear proliferation. It was widely regarded as one of Bush's most assertive and bellicose actions, routinely deplored in the Third World.
That Obama pursues it shows there is little to separate him from Bush on Korean policy.
Investment in missile defence is another precaution dictated by North Korea's nuclear delinquency and here Obama foolishly is pulling back from Bush's position. Missile defence, ineffective against large numbers of missiles, does have a good chance of working against a couple of missiles launched by a rogue regime.
Broad trade and financial sanctions should be maintained against North Korea to retard its nuclear efforts. We should continue to reassure Pyongyang that no one plans any military action against it.
Korean culture, which the North has warped with its Stalinist cult of personality, is inherently very intense. I had the pleasure of meeting the previous president of South Korea, Roh Moo-hyun. He did strike me as an unlikely guy to be president, but certainly he was a rational actor. Last week he committed suicide.
