Planning for a Peaceful Korea (2001)

345 Pages·2001·0.73 MB·English

by  Strategic Studies Institute

PLANNING FOR A PEACEFUL KOREA
Edited by
Henry D. Sokolski
February 2001
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ISBN 1-58487-044-3
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Nicholas Eberstadt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. v
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. xi
Introduction
Henry D. Sokolski. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. xiii
Chapter 1. Planning for a Peaceful Korea: A Report
of the Korea Competitive Strategies Working Group
Henry D. Sokolski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 1
Chapter 2. North Korea’s Strategy
Stephen Bradner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 23
Chapter 3. The North Korean View of the Development
and Production of Strategic Weapons Systems
Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr.,
and Sharon A. Richardson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 83
Chapter 4. The Last Worst Place on Earth:
Human Rights in North Korea
Jack Rendler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 113
Chapter 5. China’s Goals and Strategies for the
Korean Peninsula
Eric A. McVadon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 131
Chapter 6. China’s Goals and Strategies for the
Korean Peninsula: A Critical Assessment
Larry M. Wortzel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 215
Chapter 7. Japan’s Grand Strategy on the
Korean Peninsula: Optimistic Realism
Victor D. Cha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 227
Chapter 8. Economic Alternatives for Unification
Marcus Noland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 267
Chapter 9. Conventional Arms Control in Korea:
A Lever for Peace?
Bruce William Bennett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 291
Working Group Participant List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 329
About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 331
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PREFACE
Nicholas Eberstadt
As a new millennium dawns over the Korean peninsula,
millenary hopes and expectations are very much in evidence
among students of Korean affairs. Half a century after the
surprise attack that launched the Korean War, almost 5
decades into the continuing high-tension military standoff
that has followed the 1953 Korean War ceasefire, there is
suddenly a pervasive and growing anticipation that this
tormented and divided nation may now be on the threshold
of a new and momentous era: an era of genuine peace, in
which the “Cold War structure on the Korean peninsula” is
at last dismantled, and a reconciliation between the
antagonist governments based in Pyongyang (the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK) and Seoul
(the Republic of Korea, or ROK) commences in earnest.
According to some influential voices in both Korea and
the West, in fact, the advent of this remarkable new time for
Korea is already at hand—heralded by, and prefigured in,
the drama of recent events. In this exegesis, the year 2000
was Korea’s anno mirabilis. By this telling, the year was
marked by occasion after occasion that would once have
been judged impossible by observers of contemporary
Korea. After all, the June 2000 Pyongyang summit—the
courteous, first-ever meeting between the chiefs of the two
Koreas—was extraordinary, and entirely unprecedented.
North Korea’s subsequent proposal (first reported by
Russia’s president) to shelve its program of ballistic rocket
tests if other countries would launch the DPRK’s satellites
was, for the DPRK, also unparalleled. The spectacle of
North and South Korean soldiers working conjointly (on
their respective sides of Korea’s “demilitarized zone”) to
reestablish the long-severed rail link between Seoul and
Pyongyang—as they were indeed doing later in the
year—would have been unthinkable even months before.
v
And with the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s award of the
year 2000 Peace Prize to ROK President Kim Dae Jung for
his work for “peace and reconciliation with North Korea in
particular,” respected and far-removed elements of the
international community registered their own judgment
that something tremendously important and promising was
gathering on the Korean peninsula.
To one important contingent of students and statesmen,
the notion that contemporary Korea should be heading
toward an epoch of peace is entirely unsurprising. Quite the
contrary; to them, a peace breakthrough on the Korean
peninsula is the natural and perhaps even inevitable
consequence of the security policies they have advocated.
These are the proponents of what has variously been called
the “sunshine” or “engagement” approach to relations with
the DPRK—an approach that maintains that it is possible
to alter the DPRK’s menacing patterns of international
behavior, and even the regime’s inner character, through
positive external inducements and rewards.
Since early 1998, when the Kim Dae Jung government
was inaugurated, ROK policy toward the DPRK has
incarnated this theory; by 1999, with the coalescence of
what came to be known as the “Perry Process,” the
governments of both Japan and the United States became
de facto subscribers to the same theory, and joined in the
experiment. Engagement theorists, both in the academy
and in government, hold that a fundamental change in
North Korea’s international behavior is in evidence today;
that the change is attributable to the approach they
champion; and that further salutary changes can be
expected the longer and more vigorously their preferred
policies are pursued.
What fuels these theorists is easily grasped—when
hazard is close by, one should always hope for the best. A
generation hence, historians may be better placed to judge
the fruits of their theories—and the exertions these theories
have occasioned—than are we today. From our present-day
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vantage point, however, it may be well to emphasize that
the engagement theorists’ interpretation of current events
in the Korean peninsula is by no means the only one that can
be drawn from those events—nor even necessarily the most
compelling among competing explanations.
For all the understandable excitement that the recent
turn in inter-Korean atmospherics has engendered, this
fact remains: that the North Korean government, up to this
writing, has taken no concrete steps to lessen its
conventional, nuclear, and ballistic capabilities to threaten
compatriots in the South, or South Korea’s allies abroad.
And despite the high hopes invested in it by serious people
in many countries, the fact remains that the engagement
theory is at heart curiously, indeed strikingly, ahistorical.
Indeed, one would be hard pressed to offer a single historical
example of a situation in which a lasting peace framework
has been constructed with a closed, repressive state in the
manner that the engagement theory currently proposes to
build with the DPRK.
There is, of course, a first time for everything. Millennial
thinkers steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition have
always professed that the day will come when the wolf shall
dwell with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6); but that day, according to
their same teachings, will be the final day of human
history—when life on earth shall end, and reign of the
eternal afterworld shall begin.
Modern-day Korea, to be sure, is hardly the first spot on
the globe where messianic notions have been embraced and
incorporated into foreign policy. Throughout the ages,
statesmen and men of affairs have often been tempted by
romantic and even utopian visions in their conduct of
international relations. But in the international arena, the
pursuit of such temptations has consequences. And
unfortunately, the historical record suggests those pursuits
have seldom contributed to the security and well-being of
the populations in whose name they were undertaken.
vii
Moreover, despite the acclaim (and self-congratulation)
that the engagement theory has been accorded in some
quarters, there are already signs that the North Korean
policies informed by it have begun to sag under the weight of
their own internal contradictions. The engagement
approach has reached an impasse, for it is now Pyongyang’s
turn to take steps in the envisioned Korean peace process.
For engagement policy merely to maintain
credibility—much less to advance—it will be incumbent
upon the DPRK to make a major gesture, and soon—to
recognize the right of the ROK to exist, for example; or to
demobilize part of its enormous and offensively-poised
conventional military force; or to offer verifiable assurances
that it is eliminating its multifaceted program for the
development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Any of these confidence-building initiatives, however,
would require of the DPRK a total departure from
long-entrenched state practices—and a relinquishment of
central regime priorities. Pyongyang has always
maintained that its claim to authority over the entire
Korean people is absolute and non-negotiable; further, it
has repeatedly emphasized that it regards military power
as its very key to survival.
Ordinarily, governments are not expected to bargain
over their self-identified vital interests, much less trade
them away. Yet this is precisely what the next phase of the
engagement approach would seem to expect of the DPRK.
Little wonder that the engagement process, despite
seemingly spectacular early headway, now looks to be so
very stalled.
Like the millennium itself, the millennial moment in
Korean security policy appears to be passing. Certainly it
should, at least for the sake of South Korea and her Western
allies. Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington will all assuredly be
better served by a less age-defying, and less other-worldly,
approach to dealing with the North Korean threat.
viii
To be sustainable and effective, a strategy for DPRK
threat reduction must begin by striving to grasp the inner
motivations, external objectives, and military capabilities of
the North Korean regime—and must continue by
unflinchingly facing the implications of those inquiries. It
should carefully and deliberately move to lower Western
vulnerability to North Korea’s diverse instruments of
menace, while simultaneously denying Pyongyang the
means by which to further perfect its techniques for
international military extortion. It should aim to anticipate
the manners and means by which Pyongyang might find it
advantageous to create tension or promote conflict—and
prepare to press the regime in its own arenas of comparative
disadvantage (such as economic performance and human
rights).
No less important, a strategy for reducing the external
threats posed by the North Korean regime must attend to
the complex particulars of constructing a sturdy regional
security architecture for post-DPRK Korea. In the final
analysis, every one of the great powers of the Pacific—the
United States, Japan, China, and Russia—could help the
ROK in the great task of building peace and prosperity on
the Korean peninsula. By contrast, the DPRK—the real,
existing DPRK that we know today—has absolutely nothing
positive to contribute to such a project.
With the change of administrations in Washington,
current U.S. policy toward North Korea will naturally
undergo review and scrutiny. The essays in this volume
offer a distinct alternative to the current engagement
approach. These authors collectively suggest the outlines of
a strategy for promoting peace and security in the Korean
peninsula manifestly sounder than the ones contemplated
or implemented by Washington in recent years.
Peace and freedom in Korea, as this volume underscores,
can be treated as a practical strategic objective, one that
policymakers need not rely on miracles to attain.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Edited volumes, as a rule, involve a relatively large cast
of characters, and this volume is no exception. In addition to
the volume’s various authors, this book benefited from the
guidance and support of Nicholas Eberstadt of Harvard
University; Andrew Marshall, director of the Office of Net
Assessment in the Pentagon; Dr. James Smith of the U.S.
Air Force’s Institute for National Security Studies; Colonel
Joseph Cerami of the U.S. Army War College; and Ms.
Marianne Cowling of the Strategic Studies Institute. In
addition, the group leadership and participation of Dr.
David Blair of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces,
Dr. Robert Dorff of the U.S. Army War College, and Dr. Seth
Carus of the Center for Counterproliferation Research were
critical to the conduct and success of the competitive
strategies meetings held in June and July 2000.
Special thanks also are due to Marin Strmecki and the
Smith Richardson Foundation, without whose support this
project and the many activities of the Nonproliferation
Policy Education Center (NPEC) would not be possible.
Finally, perhaps most important of all was the research and
editorial assistance this book and entire project received
from NPEC’s research coordinator, Ms. Marianne Oliva.
Without her help, nothing would have been accomplished.
With it, the efforts of everyone else were made whole.
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INTRODUCTION
Henry D. Sokolski
The monographs in this book were all commissioned as
part of a year-long project sponsored by the
Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC), the U.S.
Air Force’s Institute for National Security Studies, and the
U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. They
were written to help three working groups develop
strategies to curb the threat posed by North Korea’s
strategic weapons programs.
Central to these groups’ efforts was competitive
strategies analysis. As detailed in an earlier Strategic
Studies Institute volume, Prevailing in a Well-Armed
World, this approach requires analysts to examine four sets
of questions. Stephen Bradner in his monograph, “North
Korea’s Strategy” (Chapter 2 of this volume), examines the
first three sets of questions. These concern what one’s
strategic assumptions and goals are, who the likely key
third actors are, and what strategies would make the most
sense for each party to pursue. The last set of questions
concerns what the relative costs and risks might be of the
alternative strategies devised. These questions were
discussed in consultations with experts and government
officials after the working groups made their findings
regarding the first three sets of questions.
The groups’ final report, which is this volume’s first
chapter, has received a good deal of attention. Its
recommendations concerning U.S. nuclear and space
cooperation with North Korea were detailed in The Asian
Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post and were also
highlighted in The New York Times, USA Today, and
Aviation Week. More important, the report caught the
attention of senior-level officials within the State
Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the
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