This is Tim Beal’s second book on North Korea. Beal, a retired academic from New Zealand who has written extensively on Asia, published North Korea: The Struggle Against American Power in 2004 arguing that Pyongyang was badly misunderstood and mistreated by accident and design. Crisis in Korea paints a similar, albeit updated, picture over a wider canvas. It seeks to explain the Cheonan incident – when a South Korean corvette was sunk by a mysterious explosion in March 2010 – and the shelling of South Korea’s fortress island Yeonpyeong by North Korea the following November. Beal’s main thesis is that South Korea’s hard line leader Lee Myung-bak is heading towards a Second Korean Civil War during which he can achieve his predecessor Syngman Rhee’s ambition to “march North” and reunite the country by force. Aided and abetted by neo-conservatives in the United States keen to promote regime change and a Barack Obama administration that has taken its eye off the ball distracted as it is by Afghanistan and Iraq.
Beal challenges head on the conventional wisdom in the West about Pyongyang. He says the North was not responsible for the sinking of the Cheonan, and the barrage against Yeonpyeong was a response to provocations by Seoul. The US, he says, is continuing to use its military power – and the 60-year-long economic embargo – to drive the North Korean economy into the ground. Washington is planning its attack against a North that no longer has either the ability nor the ambition to drive the Americans off the peninsula by force, while wildly exaggerating the extent and effectiveness of Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction programme. Beal has a point. Seoul spends more on its military that the North’s gross domestic product, while the combined military expenditure of the US, Japan and South Korea is more than 250 times bigger that of Pyongyang.
Beal could have added that while the North may be the world’s ninth nuclear weapons power – after Israel – it’s a gnat compared to the Washington elephant. The US has 100,000 times more nuclear firepower in its Trident fleet alone than Pyongyang demonstrated with its 2006 test. And neither of Pyongyang’s two tests to date were successful. The nuclear explosions reached criticality before the plutonium was optimally compressed – causing the core to prematurely break up before large parts had undergone fission, resulting in a massively reduced yield. And with one failed and two partly successful launches of Taepodong 2 Pyongyang doesn’t have a reliable launch platform. Even if it did work, its payload capacity is incapable of carrying the North’s current weapon. Thus US strategists speculate that the only use for Pyongyang’s half dozen nuclear bombs is to delay and destroy invading US forces on the ground in the North.
As Crisis in Korea explains, the past couple of years have heard sabres rattling more loudly in Seoul than Pyongyang. Both the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents are the consequence of a disputed maritime border. The Northern Limit Line is a unilaterally imposed border that not even Washington acknowledges. The Cheonan was in these disputed waters when it was hit by an explosion that resulted in the death of 46 of its crew. Beal doesn’t just explain the incident, he exonerates Pyongyang, saying the explosion was not the responsibility of the North, but a conspiracy against it. Yet the circumstantial evidence is strong. The South’s joint investigation group sexed up the dossier but the best one can claim for the North is the Scottish verdict of not proven.
The most prominent victim of the drama was Japanese Democratic Party Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. Elected on a platform that promised the removal and relocation of US bases in Okinawa, he bent to pressure from Washington and reneged on his promise when the Pentagon argued in the immediate aftermath that their deployment was essential to protect Japan from North Korea. Consequently forced to resign, it gave US neo-cons back-to-back wins.
If Cheonan was not proven, Yeonpyeong was literally a smoking gun. The question is not whether but why? Endless speculation can’t get away from the fact that the South Korean Navy was conducting live firing exercises into disputed waters within 12 miles of the North Korean coast that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea designates as territorial. Despite a call on the hot line asking the South to desist, firing continued – triggering the perhaps not unexpected response.
Crisis in Korea is a well-written and referenced book making some powerful points, even if it goes a conspiracy theory too far. But Beal balances the neo-con fantasies that gave George W Bush his “axis of evil” soundbite. Washington and Seoul run a whole cocktail of military exercises which scale up from reinforcing the South, through coping with instability in the North through to outright regime change. This war of attrition applies the lessons the US learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Forcing Pyongyang to maintain high levels of military expenditure keeps the civilian economy weak and the population hungry for change.
Yet Pyongyang won’t go quietly. And anyone who thinks that Beijing will stand by and let the US march its troops up to the Yalu River should stop watching Fox News. Most likely, long before Washington moves, the Chinese will intervene to tweak the regime in Pyongyang to “save the revolution” and make it safe for Market Leninism. But if Seoul and Washington get this wrong, the next Korean war will see a much stronger China go head to head with the US.
