Wise Counsel (Sorta) on North Korea… from FOX, No Less

In the FOX Forum, Mallory Factor realizes what anyone who lives in South Korea already knows — South Koreans no longer fear North Korea’s military, but they are really concerned about North Korea collapsing:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has a flair for the dramatic. Last month’s launch of a Taepo-Dong 2 missile as NATO’s leaders gathered for their 60th anniversary summit brought North Korea to the attention of the world again. And the recent news that the United States and our Asian allies now consider North Korea a fully-fledged nuclear power with the ability to deliver its weapons into South Korea and Japan has raised suspicions that the test was more successful than comments by our government indicated at the time.

Still, though, one should not make too much of North Korean bluster or even actions. Last year, I visited the Demilitarized Zone that separates the Koreas at the village of Panmunjom. The DMZ appears to be one of the tensest borders in the world, with scowling soldiers, propaganda banners, and scores of landmines separating the two sides. But the South Korean perspective on the North Korean threat would surprise many Americans accustomed to thinking of South Korea as a country under constant fear of attack, dependent upon the American military presence as a “tripwire” for its life. Briefly put, the South Koreans aren’t nearly as worried about a military attack from the North as Americans still think they are.
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No one believes unification would be easy: after sixty years of living in a closed society, North Koreans are cut off from the realities and uncertainties of modern life. The task of unification would be as much psychological as it would be economic. Indeed, many South Koreans fully recognize the psychological aspects of the North-South standoff. Noting the military and economic backwardness of the North, they respectfully suggest that the United States inflates the importance of North Korea by giving Kim Jong Il more attention than he really deserves. Kim Jong Il pushes the U.S. in order to draw a response and attention he would not otherwise get. South Koreans wonder why we respond and appear to take him so seriously. This viewpoint, so different from what one hears from Washington, is widespread in South Korea.

With the rise in East Asian economic power, the United States can no longer assume that the countries in this region will blindly follow our lead in either economics or national security. If we want to preserve our influence both politically and economically, we must stay engaged in the region and better understand the actual concerns of East Asians themselves. Hundreds of thousands of American deaths in three wars in East Asia between 1941 and 1973 show that we ignore Korea — and the entire Pacific Rim — at our peril.

To be precise, you get two viewpoints in South Korea, the first one being the one mentioned above, while the second one — often expressed in the pages of the Hankyoreh Shinmun — expresses concern over why we don’t respond to Kim Jong-il…by sitting down with him and giving him what he wants. There is also concern about North Korea’s WMD programs, although again, this is driven just as much by fears that said programs could lead to a war South Korea doesn’t want as it is by fears that the North will nuke Seoul (or to put this another way, Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs are America’s — and Japan’s — problems, but if America initiated a military conflict in Korea, that would be Seoul’s problem).

At any rate, Factor is right — if the United States wants to preserve its influence in the region, it needs to take into account Seoul’s interests in North Korea. The only caveat I might apply is that, at least for now, the major concern of the South Korean government is not that the United States is making too big of the North (something that might have applied what GWB and Roh Moo-hyun were in charge), but rather that the Obama administration might be tempted to cut out the South Koreans and hold bilateral talks with the North, something that could — by playing into North Korea’s long-time strategy of tongmi bongnam (“open to the United States and isolate the South”) — complicate the Lee Myung-bak administration’s attempts to bring a semblance of reciprocity to inter-Korean relations.