North Korea: Part Deux

Lionel Beehner and Nuno Montiero have written a good piece for the Guardian on what they see as North Korea's Schellingesque strategy of brinkmanship. The story goes as follows; emboldened by a successful nuclear test in 2009 North Korean hardliners (flatliners?) feel free to provoke the South in a win-win scenario. An aggressive response from the South strengthens their hand domestically whilst anything else can easily be spun as a victory for the North's bellicose behaviour. South Korea and America are hamstrung in this regard and the best they can do is try to stay calm and wait it out. This is of course easier said than done as public opinion in South Korea demands an increasingly tougher stance (the South Korean defence minister seems to be the first casualty of this). We do know that this attack was premeditated as the North warned the South beforehand that it would respond to its annual military exercises; a warning that seems to have been ignored, and this seems to be a big part of the problem as noted by Beehner and Montiero. However, this is not the whole story. Whilst the North may feel upstaged by the recent G20 summit in Seoul, North Korea has been getting increasingly assertive for some time now. Leaving aside scary questions of just who's really in charge and power struggles inside North Korea, the North does have a consistent agenda of sorts through all this. They've consistently been hostile towards South Korean President Lee Myung-bak since he came into office with a tougher stance towards the North, rolling back the successful 'sunshine policy' of engagement between the two countries. They want direct negotiations with the US. They couldn't have been clearer on this point and they have sought to use their nuclear programme as a bargaining tool - understandable for a regime that doesn't want to appear to be weak and conceding ground on all issues, but has no other form of leverage. Much to North Korea's anger American policy has been one of intransigence - 'give up your nukes then we'll talk', 'we don't want to reward bad behaviour'; etc. This shows a startling lack of concern for the position of the North Korean leadership, which is exacerbated by their other consistent need: food aid (made worse by recent floods). Yes their recent actions have resulted in this being cut off, but its obvious that the regime places its own survival and strategic policy above all else, pushing food for its population to the bottom of the list. Confrontation has been placed ahead of cow-towing for aid on the priorities list: something which says a lot about who the regimes' real audience is: the military and other rival top brass who can make their life uncomfortable. So what does this all mean? Well for a start, despite all the talk in the media about the internal politics of North Korea being some kind of unknowable and mysterious dark force, the truth is quite the opposite. North Korea's internal power politics and their effects have been on show to the world for some time now and they've made it that way. Yes, we don't have an intimate knowledge of all the players and personalities, but the message has been a fairly consistent one: the regime is desperate to survive so can't appear weak but wants to talk. The ham-fisted response of America and South Korea has completely ignored this basic but essential point. The basis for any kind of progress in negotiations is to have an understanding of where the other person is coming from. The South Korean and American position is at best ignorant and displays an arrogance rooted in a sense of moral superiority that blinds them to any other alternatives. We all know the North's leadership has greatly wronged its population, and is a million miles away from Western-style democracy and capitalism, but this is no excuse for ignoring it. The response to intransigence is usually intransigence reciprocated, are we really still surprised by this?

N.B: Also consider the fact that the day before the shelling of Yeonpyeong South Korea said it would consider allowing the deployment of US tactical nuclear weapons on its soil. A practice that ended almost twenty years ago. Something about fuel and fire...