hankyoreh

John Feffer

North Korea has agreed to participate in the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. This is the result of the recent inter-Korean talks at Panmunjom.

Even Donald Trump seems to be enthusiastic about the turn of events. The U.S. president told South Korean President Moon Jae-in that he’s now willing to sit down for talks with the Kim Jong Un government.

Many Americans are breathing a sigh of relief.

So, why do so many Korea watchers in the United States seem so unhappy about these inter-Korean discussions?

Over the last week, The New York Times and Washington Post have featured op-eds and expert analysis about how Kim Jong Un has a secret agenda in these talks. The North Korean leader, according to these commentaries, is only interested in driving a wedge between Seoul and Washington. Therefore, the United States should be wary that the inter-Korean talks will somehow cut the Trump administration out of the loop, make agreements that compromise the US-ROK alliance, and extract unacceptable concessions from the Moon Jae-in government.

For instance, Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute writes in The New York Times that “Pyongyang regards South Korea as the weakest link in the gathering global campaign to pressure North Korea to denuclearize.” He urges Seoul not to “get played.”

The truth is: of course, North Korea is trying to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington. It is doing so because that is a normal practice in geopolitics. For instance, when the United States engineered a diplomatic opening to China in the 1970s, the Nixon administration specifically wanted to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing.

Moreover, North Korea has long relied on such wedge strategies. During the Cold War, it played China and the Soviet Union off each other to get the best deal from them. In the 1990s, it tried to do the same with Japan, South Korea, and the United States. For North Korea, such a wedge strategy is a weapon of the weak. It’s simply not strong enough to go up against any one country by itself. So, it uses the few diplomatic levers that it has available.

It’s actually a good thing that North Korea engages in normal geopolitics. It’s a lot better than making threats to blow up South Korea, Japan, or the United States. And yet, when North Korea does something relatively normal, like suggest negotiations with South Korea, many American pundits see nothing but a malign agenda.

Also, the “wedge” argument implies that South Korea needs the protective advice of its wiser elder brother in Washington, that it can’t negotiate effectively by itself with North Korea. This is a very insulting attitude.

It’s especially patronizing today given the inhabitant of the White House. Donald Trump has been the most erratic, the most petulant, the least informed, and the least diplomatic president in modern American history. It is far more reassuring for South Korea to take the lead right now in talking with the North and preparing the ground for possible negotiations around North Korea’s nuclear program.

Indeed, the Moon Jae-in government conducted the recent negotiations very effectively. The president also managed to extract a promise from the United States to postpone military exercises until after the Olympics. And after the negotiations were over, Moon went out of his way to thank Donald Trump for helping to make the talks possible in the first place. This was not an entirely accurate assertion, but it was a very politically shrewd decision.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about North Korea participating in the Winter Olympics. Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation argues that the world maintained an Olympic boycott against South Africa during the apartheid era, so why not against North Korea today? An international human rights organization has compared North Korea to Nazi Germany in rejecting the idea of North Korea hosting an event during the Olympics.

North Korea does have a terrible human rights record. But the priority right now is to avoid nuclear war. If North Korean participation in the Olympics can help ease tensions and improve the prospects for negotiations, then the world community should applaud the idea.

So, why has North Korea suddenly shown interest in talking with South Korea and participating in the Olympics?

This “charm offensive” is certainly a way to take advantage of a more engagement-friendly government in Seoul. To jumpstart economic change in North Korea, Kim Jong Un needs to find sources of capital, which South Korea has provided in the past, for instance through the Kaesong Industrial Complex.

But North Korea ultimately is sending a message to the United States. The ruling elite has done its homework. It knows that Donald Trump demands being the center of attention. By reaching out to Seoul, Pyongyang can help lure the Trump administration back to the negotiating table.

The skeptics believe that Kim Jong Un just wants more time to develop his nuclear weapons program. Perhaps. But at this point, North Korea has enough of a program to pose a credible deterrent – thanks to a number of missed opportunities by the United States to negotiate away North Korea’s nuclear program.

The bottom line is the same today as it has been for three decades. North Korea wants to prevent other countries from bombing or invading it. It wants international respect and legitimacy. And it wants access to the global economy, preferably on its own terms.

Nuclear weapons, in other words, are not an end. They are a means to an end. As long as North Korea isn’t pushed into a corner without any way out, it won’t consider using whatever nuclear weapons it has. The regime knows quite well how outmatched it is at every level – military, economic, technological. It knows that the country would be destroyed if it tried to use a nuclear weapon against an adversary.

The latest agreements between North and South Korea, then, should be celebrated, not treated with skepticism. When North Korea decides to use its words rather than its weapons, when it decides to talk rather than to rant, when it sits down to discuss trust-building projects, American observers should stop talking about wedges and start thinking about what the United States can do to build on this new, more peaceful trajectory.

By John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy In Focus

The views presented in this column are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.

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