Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
Facing a collapsing US financial system, the new president had more than enough to do without chasing what was, in the view of his advisers, an unreliable negotiating partner in pursuit of will-o’-the-wisp outcomes. The “bandwidth” of attention could accommodate only so many issues, and these had to be ones that either the president absolutely could not avoid or he had a fair chance of winning. North Korea did not fall in either category. Those who looked at the experience of the past eight years quickly came to the conclusion that there was no basis for a deal with Pyongyang, and thus no reason to expend high-level time or effort trying to achieve one.
The irony is that during Obama’s first term, there were more high-level policy meetings (the so-called Deputies Committee and the highly secret “small group” meetings) on North Korea than any other Asian problem, sometimes at critical moments, on a few occasions with heated debate, but often on mundane issues that lower-level officials could just as easily have handled. By late 2009, the administration had adopted a strategy dubbed “strategic patience,” refusing, it said, to become exercised over North Korean actions or to rush back to negotiations after every new “provocation” from Pyongyang. Critics would charge that strategic patience was turning into “strategic passivity,” but as usual it wasn’t the critics who made the difference—it was reality. Once again, events would prove that the stakes in Korea are always too high, and the confrontations too volatile, for Washington to hope that it could simply wait out the North Koreans.
For the first four years of the Obama administration, the center of gravity of Washington’s approach toward North Korea was negative, rather than proactive. In the words of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the United States was not going to “buy the same horse twice.” That turned out to be more or less the totality of US policy. Unlike the first Bush administration, Obama’s advisers were not opposed to sitting down with the North Koreans, but their deep skepticism that anything useful could be achieved, that there could ever be a “deal,” meant that they were not inclined to look for or to exploit possible openings.
The question is often asked why the North went ahead with such provocative actions when it had a new US administration offering a better path.
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The evidence suggests that Pyongyang’s decisions about backing away from the six-party agreements and conducting the nuclear and
missile tests had already been made before the elections and that there was never any hope that the North would back off, no matter who came to office. The six-party process, never favored by the North Koreans anyway, had run its course, and the hothouse atmosphere building around the political succession in Pyongyang ensured that timelines, perspectives, advice, and decisions would all take on a different color in the North Korean leadership than in the past.
If Washington wanted to see old patterns broken, it would soon get its wish, though not in the way it hoped. Following the North’s second nuclear test, the UN Security Council on June 17, 2009, passed a new resolution (1874)—once again with the Chinese and Russians agreeing to a condemnation of the North Korean missile and nuclear tests. Beijing, however, made sure to include in its own name a proviso:
The sovereignty, territorial integrity and legitimate security concerns and development interests of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea should be respected. After its return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that country would enjoy the right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy as a State party. The Council’s actions, meanwhile, should not adversely impact the country’s development, or humanitarian assistance to it. . . . The issue of inspections was complex and sensitive, and countries must act prudently and under the precondition of reasonable grounds and sufficient evidence, and refrain from any words or deeds that might exacerbate conflict. Under no circumstances should there be the use of force or threat of the use of force.
This careful language carving out space for continued Chinese economic and political interaction with Pyongyang turned out to be more than rhetoric. Over the next several years, Sino-DPRK trade would grow (from under $3 billion in 2008 to almost $6 billion in 2012), official visitors would travel back and forth in increasing numbers, infrastructure projects in the North funded by the Chinese would rapidly proceed, and overall Chinese economic involvement in North Korea would increase significantly. And all of this support flowed to North Korea from China no matter how irksome Beijing found its neighbor to be.
Following the passage of UNSC resolution 1874, North Korea made a classic turn from tough to mellow. In this case, however, it did so with added urgency because of the growing need to establish external and internal conditions that would support the political succession under way in Pyongyang.
In March 2009, before the missile and nuclear tests, two young American journalists had gone to the North Korean border with China to research a story on defectors. The two women recklessly followed their guide across the ice-covered Tumen River into North Korea, were taken prisoner and roughed up by border guards, and then transferred quickly to Pyongyang, where they were interrogated and scared out of their wits, but not badly mistreated. After an “investigation” lasting a month, in late April the North announced that the two would go to “trial,” an event that took place in early June. The sentence was twelve years of “reform through labor” for both women, “with no chance of appeal.”
The sentence was shocking, but the chance of the two Americans ever having to serve time was practically nil. It was by now common practice for an American of rather high-level, or at least high-profile, stature to come to Pyongyang to take home US citizens who crossed illegally into the North. Several well-known figures offered to go, but all were rejected by Pyongyang. At last the Obama administration offered up former vice president A1 Gore, whose network the journalists had worked for, but the North Koreans told Washington that it had to be Bill Clinton or the prisoners weren’t going anywhere.
Several ranking officials in the administration were firmly opposed to using Clinton for such a mission, worried that doing so would send the wrong message not only to Pyongyang but also to Seoul and Tokyo. Those arguing against sending Clinton were forceful, and the matter seemed resolved until Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pointed out that the administration faced a public relations nightmare if word got out that the journalists could have been released but weren’t because the White House refused to send the former president.
Even after the administration resolved to send Bill Clinton to extricate the two Americans, there was considerable nervousness in the White House that the North Koreans might lure him to Pyongyang and then not produce the journalists. That was never actually likely, however, because the North—and especially Kim Jong Il—wanted any visit by Clinton to go well. Kim had hoped to receive Clinton in Pyongyang in the last months of 2000, when US–North Korean relations seemed to be on an upward path. By meeting Clinton now, he could let Washington know that he had still not entirely given up hope of returning to it. Equally, Clinton’s presence in Pyongyang gave Kim the chance to show his son and successor how it was possible to command conciliation and contrition from the United States.
Before he left, Clinton received a briefing held at his wife’s house in Washington, DC, where he was given strict marching orders—essentially: go, come back with the journalists, and do not under any circumstances smile. Standing around the snack table that evening, the former president
asked one of the briefing’s participants, “Do you think I really have to be so careful?” As it turned out, he did.
Much of the one-day schedule for Clinton’s early August visit was worked out ahead of time in secret contacts between US and DPRK officials. In the end, the North Koreans stuck exactly to the agreed-upon arrangements. During a brief meeting before dinner, Kim gave Clinton an overview of North Korean policy, and Clinton weighed in with his own views of the value of denuclearization to the North. Kim agreed, but the conversation went no further. One of the participants thought Kim was trying to make clear to Clinton that he had tried a path of engaging the United States, but it had been blocked.
At the lavish banquet that followed, Kim might have noticed how closely the small American delegation (which included an American physician) was watching and calibrating his every gesture for evidence of his health. Undoubtedly, he saw how nervous they were. When during the meal Kim offered to take Clinton to a showing of the famous North Korean mass games, with tickets he playfully suggested he had purchased for the occasion, the Americans threw up their shields. Clinton pretended not to hear Kim’s invitation. There was no way he was going to be photographed, like Madeleine Albright was in October 2000, sitting next to Kim at one of those displays. After several attempts by Kim’s aides to convince the Americans that they could not refuse such an offer by their leader, the North Korean leader waved them off. It was all right, he said lightly; he had already “returned” the tickets. The delegation’s plane took off the next morning, with the two journalists aboard.
The Clinton visit might have provided an early opening for a thaw with North Korea, a chance to convince Kim to “unclench” his fist, but Washington was not in a frame of mind to probe. By the time the administration was ready, in late 2009, the situation had already taken another bad turn.
On May 23, 2009, a little more than a year after leaving office, former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun committed suicide. News of his death came in the midst of the run up to the North’s second nuclear test. Even if he had been so inclined, Kim Jong Il could do little more at that moment than offer condolences.
But Kim had another chance to reach out to the South in August when, a few weeks after the Clinton visit, Roh’s predecessor Kim Dae Jung died. The North Korean leader quickly decided (possibly with prodding from pro-dialogue figures in the South) to use the opportunity to send a small delegation to Seoul carrying an important message for the then
South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak. The delegation consisted of two high-ranking party figures—Kim Ki Nam, the senior party secretary in charge of ideology, and Kim Yong-gon, director of the Central Committee’s United Front Department, handling engagement with (and intelligence operations against) South Korea.
In typical fashion, President Lee’s conservative advisers, including his unification minister, Hyun In-taek, did what they could to irritate and humiliate the visitors before letting them get to the Blue House. Both North Korean officials had been to Seoul before, but never with the burden of a sick and possibly dying leader on their shoulders, and they knew they had to endure these insults in order to get the message to the South Korean president. They met with Lee early in the morning on August 24. The South Korean press line was that the president had been firm and agreed to nothing. One South Korean newspaper wrote that the North Koreans’ message “conveyed the North Korean leader’s willingness to improve inter-Korean relations, but had nothing on an inter-Korean summit.” But that was hardly true. The essence of Kim’s message was simple and clear: let’s talk.
A former highly successful and well-respected businessman, Lee Myung-bak had been a popular mayor of Seoul (2002–2006) and a one-term member of the National Assembly (1996–1998), in an odd twist of fate having defeated in the 1996 election none other than Roh Moo-hyun, who would later precede him in the Blue House. Lee took over the presidency in February 2008, unwilling to follow the previous two administrations’ line of engagement with North Korea. The new president was not so much a hard-liner as a deeply religious man, not so much a statesman or a politician as a businessman capable of understanding world events in terms of broad trends. Lee’s perspective and insights were impressive to Americans who met him. President Obama and his senior foreign-policy advisers, in particular, found Lee’s grasp of developments in Northeast Asia and his insights into North Korea refreshing.
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Translating those views and that broader perspective into an effective policy, however, proved to be another matter—especially given the difficult situation presented by a North Korean regime undergoing a political succession.
In the presidential election of December 2007, the South Korean public, concerned as usual with domestic economic issues but also disillusioned with the pro-engagement policies toward the North the previous two administrations had followed, voted for Lee over the somewhat flamboyant Chung Dong-young by fairly large margins among all age
groups. It was different enough from the normal pattern—older voters going for the conservative candidate, younger voters tending toward the progressive one—that it caused many analysts to wonder if there had been a major shift in the fundamental outlook of the Korean electorate. South Korean conservatives, after ten years in the policy wilderness, were straining to get back into power and to undo the damage they thought a decade of pandering to the North had produced. Among those involved in setting the administration’s initial policy course were figures from the nation’s old-line anticommunist wing, a group that held fast to the belief that a sizable minority of the population remained under the sway of North Korea and that the communists continued to have dangerous influence in such areas as labor, the arts, and education. In some respects, Lee’s administration brought South Korean policy toward the North back a quarter century, to the era of Chun Doo Hwan, when there was virtually no contact between the two Koreas and the rhetoric within the South was often harsh and ugly. It might be a new century, but the old battles were not over.