China must step in and control sociopathic neighbour North Korea

DRIVING through Kerry a few summers ago, I decided to drive the back road from Tralee to Listowel to take in a little-known piece of Irish history.

In the tiny village of Lixnaw (population under 300) a marble memorial plaque commemorates the 29 Irishmen, mostly from Mayo, Limerick, Cork and Kerry, who were killed in the Korean War of 1950-53 while conscripted in the US Army. They were posthumously granted American citizenship.

In the grounds of Belfast City Hall stands a further monument to the 208 soldiers of the Royal Ulster Rifles who were killed or wounded in 1951 at the battle of so-called Happy Valley in the successful defence of Seoul from Chinese troops.

The Korean War began when four columns of Soviet-manufactured tanks and tens of thousands of troops stormed across the 38th Parallel, the boundary between the two Koreas since 1948. The North Korean premier, Kim Il-Sung, banked on rapidly overrunning the South.

An American-led UN taskforce was rapidly dispatched to Korea under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. By the winter of 1950, the North Korean communists were in retreat, pushed back towards the border with China. But when China’s Mao Zedong ordered 300,000 of his troops to intervene on North Korea’s side, the course of the war was dramatically reversed. From mid-1951, though, the war settled into two years of attrition before an armistice was agreed.

The Korean War might be the ‘forgotten war’, sandwiched as it was between the horrors of the Second World War and the controversies of Vietnam, but expect to hear more of it in 2011. Sixty years on, many of the same fault lines remain and no formal peace treaty has ever been made. Nearly 30,000 US troops remain stationed there in support of the UN Command.

In an age of peace, there exists the tempting illusion that the status quo is inevitable and — provided the US, South Korea and others leave things alone — eternal. The same thinking pervades in relation to Iraq: if the US and its allies had not invaded Iraq, so this thinking holds, Saddam’s regime would have remained an unrealised threat. In other words, undisturbed by America’s predations, troublemakers in distant lands will keep themselves to themselves; tyrants seeking greater power will remain merely aspirational; the occasional demonstration of aggression will be met with an appropriate reprimand; and a broadly acceptable calm will hold indefinitely.

Should Korea become an issue in Irish politics, expect to hear this view repeated again and again. Beware wolves in sheep’s clothing, however: a few Irish politicians, especially from the Sinn Féin end of the spectrum, would probably rather forget their trips to North Korea, their solidarity messages to the Workers’ Party of Korea, their visits to its embassies to celebrate the late dictator Kim Il-Sung’s birthday.

The chilling news of North Korea’s artillery attack last month on South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island certainly marked a very serious escalation of an already tense situation on the Korean peninsula. It comes on the heels of the latest revelation about North Korea’s nuclear programme: that the Communist regime had secretly built a stunningly modern nuclear facility to enrich uranium.

In 2002, a naval skirmish killed four South Korean sailors; in 2006 the North conducted an underground nuclear test; in 2009 it launched missiles over the Sea of Japan, had another nuclear test and declared the 1953 armistice invalid; and in March this year the North fired a torpedo at a South Korean warship, sinking the vessel and killing 46 sailors.

This behaviour is fully in keeping with the ultra-militaristic ideology of a regime that remains publicly committed to uniting the peninsula by force.

Many analysts, though, tend to focus on the succession issue; they interpret the attack on the island as an effort to bolster the reputation of Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-Il’s 27-year-old son and anointed successor. Their conclusion is that North Korea will play nice once the young man is firmly in power.

Hence, Washington shares to a certain degree the South Korean tendency to play down North Korean aggression as “provocations”. And weren’t we taught as children that the best way to deal with a provocation is to ignore it? In fact, as both its adversaries and supporters should realise, North Korea is not a squalling, attention-hungry child. It can never play nice.

No-one wants the tensions between North and South Korea to escalate into full-scale combat, of course. But neither can North Korea be allowed to attack unprovoked its sovereign neighbour at will.

The truth is, though, that Washington has little direct political or economic leverage on North Korea. (Europe, of course, has none whatsoever.) No-one has had much luck stopping North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons or from selling its deadly expertise and materials to nuclear wannabes like Syria.

But military force against North Korea is not a viable option either: South Korea is held hostage by 10,000 missiles within range of Seoul.

All roads to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, therefore, run through China, its single largest trading partner and most generous aid donor. North Korea is not a viable state without Chinese support. The Chinese, therefore, are in the best position to pressure North Korea to cease this aggression, and has the most at stake. Certainly, a war in the region would disrupt China’s lucrative trade with the West.

SO we hope China will rein in its sociopathic neighbour. We hope Kim Jong-Il wants aid or summitry or an unfettered palace ascendancy, not the destruction of the South, and that the Yongbyon nuclear facility is just a bargaining chip.

But we can’t know. What we do know is that Beijing has, to date, refused to use its leverage to thwart Pyongyang’s nuclear programme, fearing political instability in the North that might include a tussle over nukes, refugee flows into China and, above all, American troops on its border — the very event that triggered Beijing’s entry into the Korean War in 1950. China has been unwilling even to implement existing sanctions against North Korea.

While the Chinese may see North Koreans as troublesome, even spoiled, country cousins, they keep the Korean Peninsula divided. China does not want a powerful Korean neighbour on its northern flank. Besides, the North distracts its rivals in Washington and Tokyo with its provocations — leaving them less time and resources to focus on China’s rise.

The challenge in 2011 will be for the rest of the world to persuade the Chinese that North Korea’s actions are antithetical to its security interests because they increase the need for American forces in the region.

Beijing’s rationalisation for continuing to support North Korea derives from the vain hope that they can prop it up indefinitely. But the North Korean state will falter and fall at some stage; the sooner the better.