The Korean Peninsula and Indo-Pacific Power Politics

Status Security at Stake

Jagannath P. Panda, Jagannath P. Panda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000030464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book assesses the strategic linkages that the Korean Peninsula shares with the Indo-Pacific and provides a succinct picture of issues which will shape the trajectory of the Korean Peninsula in the future.This book analyses how critical actors such as the United States, China, Russia and Japan are caught in a tightly balanced power struggle affecting the Korean Peninsula. It shows how these countries are exerting control over the Korean Peninsula while also holding on to their status as critical actors in the broader Indo-Pacific. The prospects of peace, stability and unity in the Korean Peninsula and the impact of this on Indo-Pacific power politics are explored as well as the contending and competing interests in the region. Chapters present country-specific positions and approaches as case studies and review the impact of power politics on stakeholders' relationships in the Indo-Pacific. The book also argues that the Korean Peninsula and the issue of denuclearization is of primary importance to any direction an Indo-Pacific Partnership may take.Bringing together scholars, journalists and ex-diplomats, this book will be of interest to academics working in the field of international relations, foreign policy, security studies and Asian studies as well as audiences interested

Part I
Critical perspectives

1 America’s conflicted strategy for the Korean Peninsula

From “fire and fury” to “denuclearisation”

Donald Kirk

Crossroads

In an era in which the future of both Koreas, and North-East Asia, hung in the balance, US policy on the Korean Peninsula at the outset of the presidency of Donald Trump seemed confused, uncertain, and dangerously ambivalent. Some of America’s most knowledgeable, influential, and powerful officials were at odds with Trump over his unpredictable decisions. They also battled one another over what policies to pursue and feared for the future of US relations with North and South Korea as well as with other countries in the region, the rest of Asia, and the world.

America’s shifting policy on Korea during the Trump administration ranged from threats and counter-threats to summits and deal making, inspiring moods and responses from roseate optimism to deep scepticism relating to the near, mid-, and distant future of the Korean Peninsula. From hovering on what seemed to be the brink of war in 2017, the year in which Trump threatened to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea and referred to North Korea’s Leader Kim Jong-un as “rocket man”, the two Koreas in 2018 veered towards rapprochement and dialogue on a scale never witnessed since the division of the Peninsula between the Soviet-backed North and the Americanised South on either side of the 38th parallel after the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945.¹

To superficial appearances, the process reached what was widely described as “a historic milestone” on June 30, 2019, when Trump and Kim staged their third meeting – this time in the dramatic setting of the heavily fortified Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. In an atmosphere of mounting excitement, Trump clapped Kim on the shoulder as they shook hands on the North-South line. The greetings between them seemed portentous, laden with hope that this time, perhaps, the yearning for reconciliation would survive recriminations and intimidation.

“Nobody had expected this moment”, said Trump. “It’s significant”, said Kim, talking in Korean, an interpreter at his side. “We want to bring an end to this unpleasant past and create a new future”. It was not just that Trump met Kim in the truce village of Panmunjom, or for a few seconds stepped across the line into North Korea, then made his way with Kim through besieging cameramen and security people on the southern side to Freedom House. There was no denying the whole occasion was “a very historic moment”, as Trump proclaimed before he and Kim settled down behind closed doors for 50 minutes of serious talking.²

Trump emerged from that conversation, away from the pervasive cameras and microphones of the media, saying that he and Kim had “agreed to have teams set up” to return to talks that had simply not been happening since their disastrous second summit in Hanoi on February 28, 2019. However, if the two said a word about “denuclearisation”, as promised during their first summit in Singapore the previous June, neither talked about it publicly. There was no mention of US demands for shutting down the North’s main nuclear complex at Yongbyon 60 miles north of Pyongyang or for a full accounting of where the North was hiding other facilities for making nuclear weapons and missiles. Nor, apparently, was anything said about lesser issues, including return of more remains of those missing in action from the Korean War.

Nonetheless, by his own account of what he called “a very productive meeting”, Trump “outlined the tremendous prosperity” that would befall North Korea “when this whole thing gets settled”. In other words, if Kim would just get rid of his warheads and missiles, he could be sure of massive rewards for an economy hobbled by sanctions imposed after missile-and-nuclear tests last staged in 2017. The hope was that the economic bait would outweigh Kim’s perceived need for a nuclear programme for defence against enemies, notably the United States.

A day after the president had tweeted the idea of seeing Kim while in South Korea meeting Moon, the burst of publicity surrounding the occasion at the DMZ enabled him yet again to lay claim to have come up with the solution to North Korea. “When I came into office, it was a fiery mess”, he said. “Nothing was happening. In two and a half years we have had peace”. In fact, he declared, standing beside South Korea’s president Moon Jae-in before they flew up to the DMZ between the two Koreas for the meeting with Kim, that if Barack Obama had remained as president, “we would have been at war with North Korea”.³

Trump was at pains, before and after seeing Kim at the DMZ, to defend the record of his previous two summits with Kim, in Singapore on June 12, 2018, and in Hanoi on February 28, 2019, even though the North Koreans had done nothing to get rid of their nuclear programme – and were assumed to have added several warheads to the 60 or so they were believed to have fabricated up to the Singapore summit. Standing with an American army officer at Observation Post Ouellette below the North-South line, he said, “You have 35 million people within range of their weapons”. He did not say, of course, that hundreds of North Korean artillery pieces remained in place above the DMZ – not a topic of consideration in demands for the North to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical, and nuclear.

The meeting at the DMZ, if nothing else, offered respite from the mood generated on the last day of February 2019 when Trump, in Hanoi, announced the failure of his second summit with Kim. “We’ll end up being very good friends”, he said after breaking off the conversation, but the fact was that the talks had come to a halt after it had become obvious that both sides were getting nowhere with their basic demands.⁴ The Hanoi meltdown came as a shock after predictions that the two would surely issue a statement, however meaningless, pledging cooperation beyond the vague commitment to “denuclearisation” that each of them had signed after their first summit in Singapore the previous June. The most that Trump could take away before walking out of the meeting in Hanoi’s historic Metropole Hotel was an impression – not a guarantee – that Kim would not test nuclear warheads and long-range missiles as previously conducted in 2017.

The Hanoi summit failed over the basic issue of sanctions versus denuclearisation. Kim demanded an end to most of the sanctions imposed by the United States and United Nations (UN) after those tests, while Trump refused to budge without a firm agreement that North Korea would actually close down its nuclear programme. Trump put on the table the US call for closure of the North’s central nuclear site at Yongbyon, 100 kilometres north of Pyongyang, and surrender of the North’s nuclear weapons, probably a few dozen. He also wanted a list of other sites in North Korea where engineers and technicians had been fabricating or testing warheads and missiles.

“To me it’s pretty obvious, they have to denuclearise”, Trump said at a press conference.⁵ Maybe so, but Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, who died in December 2011, had rejected the South Korean offer of massive aid in return for denuclearisation.

Unlike his father, however, Kim Jong-un had indeed given the impression that he had given up his nuclear ambitions and was ready to talk. In his New Year’s speech in early 2018, he announced he was basically done with testing nuclear warheads and missiles and would henceforth focus on the economy. Next, he agreed that North Korea would send athletes to the Winter Olympic Games to be held in Pyeongchang, nestled in the mountains in the South Korean portion of Kangwon Province, divided at the 38th parallel in 1945 and then again in the Korean War that ended with American and South Korean forces wresting still more of the province from the North. Finally, Kim m...