hankyoreh

editorial writer

South Korea is spending a total of 37.456 trillion won (US$34.5 billion) this year on defense. That’s 1.750 trillion won (US$1.6 billion) more than last year. Japan is spending even more: an all-time high of 4.980 trillion yen, or (US$42.3 billion). In particular, it has raised the budget for weapons targeting China, including the Osprey (a vertical takeoff and landing transport aircraft), F-35 fighters, and the P1 patrol aircraft. China’s defense spending, which totaled 808.2 billion RMB (US$129.3 billion) last year, is expected to reach US$140 billion this year, ranking it second in the world. It has risen at a rate of over 10% a year since the 1990s. Even economically struggling Russia has been ratcheting up its defense spending, which amounts to US$64-74 billion (third in the world).

In addition to its busy arms race, Northeast Asia is also home to the greatest density of troops in the world - more than five million all together. The US ambassador to South Korea, Mark Lippert, hinted at the future of the Northeast Asian arms race when he declared on Jan. 27 that Japan should increase its armaments to suit its status as the world’s third largest economy. The US, which spends more than 600 trillion won a year on defense, would very much like to pass some of that burden off on Japan and South Korea.

There are many different divisions at play among North and South Korea, the US, China, Japan, and Russia, but all of them have turned to the Korean Peninsula for excuses. All conflicts ultimately end up at the armistice line. And the evolution of this situation has produced a kind of “auto-suggestion goal” that only reinforces the status quo. On Jan. 22, US President Barack Obama said the US had no choice but to use economic sanctions and online propagation of information to push for regime change in Pyongyang. “Over time you will see a regime like this collapse,” Obama said at the time. While the remarks did seem more or less off the cuff, it was still extraordinary to hear a US president talk directly about a North Korea regime collapse scenario. In his State of the Union address two days before, he laid out his diplomatic “accomplishments,” including normalized relations with Cuba, but made no mention at all of North Korea. The implication is that he is not planning any changes to the “strategic patience” policy - applying pressure on Pyongyang and waiting - over the last two years of his term. Indeed, the US has spent the last few years working harder on building a trilateral alliance with South Korea and Japan than it has on solving the North Korean nuclear issue through dialogue.

The “North Korea regime collapse” is a phantom that comes ultimately from Seoul. Speaking recently at a World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs Yun Byung-se declared that reunification would “come suddenly in an unexpected way.” He went on to say that “that day is now at hand, and the administration is working to lay a solid foundation for reunification.” It‘s the worst possible form of the “unification jackpot” mind-set, a strategy-free “absorption” scenario where we just sit back and wait for unification to drop in our laps.

But now there’s a new phantom around: the “creative defense” offered up by the Ministry of National of Defense in a recent briefing to President Park Geun-hye. The idea is that the ministry will neutralize the North Korean nuclear and WMD threats by developing an “anti-symmetric weapons system that Pyongyang cannot match,” including laser beams, high-power microwave weapons, and electromagnetic pulse weapons - all by the early 2020s. It also wants to develop a new operational posture based on the Internet of Things and big data techniques. It’s a quixotic blueprint, an attempt to achieve the kind of firepower even the US has yet to achieve, and in a very short time frame. It’s also a scenario where North Korea, which spends a fraction of what we do on defense, is understood to be a military heavyweight, rather than a country that might collapse at any moment. Maximizing the threat is a formula for beefing up armaments.

Unification will not happen without many positive changes. The most crucial foundation is one of peace, and that starts by improving relations with the North. We need to work with the other countries to find a solution to the nuclear issue, one grounded in better ties with Pyongyang. That effort itself is a peace-building process. By the time the nuclear issue is resolved, the peace system will be in place and unification will be an imminent reality. If there is such a thing as “creative defense,” this is it.

For now, Seoul and Pyongyang keep talking about improving relations, but neither is willing to make the first move. It’s a battle of egos. Seoul has said it has no intention to taking preemptive action on the preconditions that Pyongyang insists must be met before talks can happen - most crucially, the partial or complete lifting of the May 24 Measures, sanctions imposed in the wake of the 2010 ROKS Cheonan warship sinking. If we do have any intention of taking an action like that, then it both works better and looks better to take the first step. The window of opportunity for turning things around the Korean Peninsula doesn’t stay open for long. With all these phantoms floating around, change looks even more unlikely when we’re only focusing on armaments.

By Kim Ji-seok, editorial writer

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