Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

Roh Moo-hyun

How war preserved a ribbon of land

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Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ ~ By Eleana J. Kim

(Duke University Press, Durham/NC, 2022, ISBN #978-1-4780-1835-3)

Review by John Feffer (Summer 2024)

I have had the rare opportunity to visit the Demilitarized Zone from both sides of the divided Korean peninsula. On the northern side, the excursion was part of an itinerary to demonstrate to visiting Americans the peaceful intentions of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the aggressive posture of the joint U.S. and South Korean forces.

Our North Korean military guide was mostly intent on proving that the U.S. and its puppet ally had constructed a concrete wall spanning the peninsula along the DMZ that could only be seen by binoculars from the northern side. The view through the lenses was not convincing, although South Korea indeed has put in anti-tank fortifications along the border that might, if you squint at a section obscured by trees, look like a wall.

The trip from the southern side was organized by a peace organization and focused on the poignant reminders of a divided land and a separated people: We viewed the severed train line, the razor wire, the evidence of land mines, the abandoned buildings, the military installations. Also accessible from the south were the farming villages that abut the Civilian Control Line, which marks the beginning of a highly regulated area just south of the DMZ.

What lies between the two frontiers that one can visit from the north and the south is a narrow band of land that stretches across the 160-mile width of the Korean peninsula. The DMZ is a mere 2.5 miles wide. Given the million-plus landmines in the area as well as the military installations on either side, it is far from a “demilitarized” zone.

But the DMZ, because of the absence of people in that 2.5-mile-wide strip, has also been celebrated as a nature preserve, home to cranes, bears, and otters. For several decades, activists and academics have emphasized this ecological rarity — a strictly monitored no-go zone — as a potential model for transforming the division of the peninsula into a jointly-administered peace park. Let the animals show the way.

For the most part, the governments of both sides have not cooperated on such a vision, either because of cycles of mutual hostility or, when that hostility has ebbed, the ambitious plans they have cooked up together to promote economic cooperation that would come at the expense of this militarized nature preserve. 

These are the contradictions that Eleana Kim explores in her book Making Peace with Nature, a deep dive into three case studies of nature in and around the DMZ. She looks at how ponds, birds, and landmines all challenge conventional notions of the DMZ as a pristine preserve, a land of economic opportunity, and/or a zone of peace.

Along the way, she grapples with the essential problem facing those who desire an environmentally sustainable reunification of the peninsula. When the two Koreas are at odds with one another, nature flourishes during the standoff. But when the two countries are busy negotiating — as they did during the era of the sunshine policy and, again, during Moo-Hyun Roh’s subsequent “peace and prosperity” tenure — their joint plans for economic development cut right through the zone of biodiversity, just as a reconnected north-south train line, in the works for a couple decades, would eventually do. “Peace and life” was one such South Korean government tagline, and both sides have also spoken of “peaceful utilization.” Environmentalists, however, see through these anodyne slogans to the grubbier economic plans that threaten the balance of nature in and around the DMZ.

That balance, Kim explains, can be seen not just in the large and easier-to-spot mammals (bears, deer) that live in or near the DMZ. It can be found also in the humble pond, or dumbeong, that support an endangered giant water bug and a variety of aquatic plants. These are not untouched areas. In the inhabited region south of the DMZ proper, where farmers grow rice and other products, the dumbeong are an old-fashioned resource for irrigating rice paddies. The geopolitical peculiarities of the DMZ region have thus preserved older forms of human interaction with nature.

Birds, meanwhile, have become a prominent symbol of the shadow reunification of the peninsula, for they cross back and forth across the DMZ without any regard to military checkpoints. Ornithologists on both sides of the border have long engaged in the routine banding of birds to determine their migration and flight patterns, discovering in the process this aerial reunification. Kim cites the famous story of a pair of father-son ornithologists separated by the Korean War. The son, based in the south, received a notification one day that one of the birds that he had banded, a purple-backed starling, had been captured and identified in the north by none other than his father.

“Due to the near-total impossibility of communicating between the two Koreas, neither father nor son had known during the intervening 15 years whether the other had survived the war,” Kim writes. “As the story goes, Pyong-Oh’s parents treasured the aluminum metal band, imprinted with the code C7635, weeping as they caressed it, missing their distant son.”

But, as she points out, this sentimental story obscures the fact that the birds are not free, how their existence depends on places to feed, rest, and breed, and those are under constant threat from human encroachment in the form of farming, industry, residential construction, and military installations. At the same time, the military standoff between the two Koreas has also preserved sites vital for their survival. And despite the standoff, the flyways of the birds have led to transnational networks of scientific cooperation that go well beyond the father-son team separated by the DMZ.

Kim’s third case study, landmines, deliberately challenges the notion of a pristine environmental enclave at the DMZ. Upwards of a million landmines are buried in and around the zone. Accidentally triggering these mines, farmers and other residents of the towns bordering the DMZ have lost their limbs and their lives. Periodic flooding has sent mines even further south, and the government in Seoul has been slow to acknowledge, much less compensate, the victims of these mines.

Though a powerful chapter, the section on landmines reveals a curious blind spot in the research. Kim rarely discusses how North Korea has contributed to the militarization and environmental degradation of the border region. She hammers home the unfortunate reality that neither the U.S. nor South Korea has signed the Treaty to Ban Landmines, but fails to point out that North Korea hasn’t signed it either. For obvious reasons, Kim was not able to conduct research on the other side of the border. But she has a tendency in the book to ascribe all negative attributes of border militarization to the U.S. and South Korea, as if North Korea is just a passive observer in this process.

Making Peace with Nature is a powerful, though often overly theoretical, analysis of the nature-culture-military dynamic at play in the DMZ. It offers a useful corrective to the twin narratives that the DMZ is either just an untouched zone of nature or an area to be exploited economically for the purposes of peaceful reunification. The DMZ is certainly a geographic and geopolitical anomaly that lends itself to high-flown rhetoric and ambitious plans. But it is also a real place that deserves the careful study that Kim has produced.

At a 70th milestone, no progress in an unending war

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Historian Bruce Cumings on slim prospects for a Korean peace treaty | By the editorial staff of Hankyoreh (Summer 2023)

Historian and author Bruce Cumings. Photos by Stephen Wunrow

July 27, 2023, marked the 70th anniversary of the signing of the armistice agreement that halted the Korean War. This 70-year milestone also represents an ongoing threat today, as concerns of clashes related to North Korea’s nuclear program have recently flared up, and no peace treaty is in the offing.

During an interview with the Korean newspaper Hankyoreh, Bruce Cumings, author of The Origins of the Korean War and a distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago, assessed that the prospects for peace in the Korean peninsula are challenging, given the “strategic patience” polices of the Joe Biden administration and the increased pressure by the Suk-yeol Yoon administration against North Korea

In particular, Cumings criticized U.S. policies of the last few decades for being too entrenched in the theory that North Korea will collapse, commenting that the U.S. could begin to solve the Korean Peninsula problem by coolheadedly perceiving reality.

The following is an excerpt of a recent interview by Hankyoreh:

Hankyoreh: In marking the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, the two Koreas are each claiming that they have won and are expressing hostility toward each other. No sober reflection is to be found. What is your take on  current developments regarding the Korean Peninsula?

Cumings: North Korea is moving closer to China and Russia; and South Korea is moving closer to Japan and the U.S.  So it’s not quite a Cold War situation, but it is a new alignment. North Korea had wanted normalized relations with the U.S. for many years. I don’t think they want that now. And I don’t think the Biden administration would be at all interested in normalizing relations. So you have an alignment of three [countries on each side]: China, Russia, and North Korea; and South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

This is unusual because several years ago, China and North Korea were having rather difficult relations. So I think as long as the war in Ukraine is going on, and American relations with China are getting worse, and they’re very bad with Russia, this has the effect of freezing the relationship between the two Koreas.

The ideal situation from my point of view is when you have a liberal president in South Korea and a liberal president in Washington, which happened during the Clinton administration. And that showed that direct talks with North Korea could be very fruitful, including freezing their plutonium for eight years.

Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun (both past progressive South Korean presidents) did as much as they could to try and keep the U.S. and North Korea talking to each other. I think they made great achievements. And President [Jae-in] Moon also tried to do his best to engage with North Korea, but he was saddled with Donald Trump, who was a very erratic president — one day he’s wanting to blow North Korea out of the water and the next day he wants to talk to Kim Jong-un. So unfortunately, the Biden administration’s policy is one of strategic patience like the Obama administration.

We haven’t had any substantive talks with North Korea; it’s not a strategy. It may be strategic patience, but what’s the strategy? The result of it is that North Korea just piles up more atomic bombs and ICBMs, which can’t be the goal of the U.S. policy toward Korea. So I’m pessimistic now. But we hope that in the future, both in Seoul and Washington, you would find presidents interested in engaging with North Korea.

Hankyoreh: It’s been more than 40 years since you wrote The Origins of the Korean War. I am aware that a historian is not one who predicts the future, but I can’t help but ask whether you had any idea of how the future of the Korean Peninsula would turn out at the time you were writing the book.

Cumings: Well, when my first volume of The Origins of the Korean War came out in 1981, both Koreas were under dictatorships. And in the case of South Korea, the Gwangju rebellion had just occurred the year before my book appeared. The situation was quite terrible in South Korea. A crisis that began with Gwangju lasted seven years, until June 1987. I had my book banned by [then-President and dictator] Chun Doo-hwan, which only made it sell more copies. It was kind of an underground publication in Korea.

When I came to Korea, I came back with Kim Dae-jung in 1985 as part of a foreign delegation to protect him. And that was my first visit in almost 15 years, because I had not been able to get a visa. South Korea wouldn’t give me a visa because of my criticism of the dictatorship. And the KCIA people followed me everywhere. It was almost funny because, as an American, I knew I had the privilege that they weren’t going to hurt me, but they certainly did follow me.

But you’re right, at the end of that decade, historical changes took place with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I wracked my brain to try and figure out what might happen to the two Koreas. I was asked many times for my opinion because my book had circulated. I have argued that North Korea is not going to collapse. And we shouldn’t expect it to collapse, but have to deal with the reality that North Korea and the North Korean leadership know how to hold on to power. I took a lot of criticism, including from my wife’s family. And also for some editorials that I wrote because Koreans in the South expected unification to be around the corner when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Maybe more important, the Bush and Clinton administrations premised their policy toward North Korea on the idea that North Korea was on the verge of collapse, which lasted all through the ’90s. I consistently argued that that was foolish. I don’t like to brag about anything, but I’d been right. And the reason that I’ve been right, I think, is because I try my best to understand the nature of the North Korean regime, from its inception in the late 1940s down to the present.

Koreans are one of the oldest people in the world in terms of continuous occupation of their territory for thousands of years. And the primary political forum that they had for those thousands of years was a dynasty, a monarchy. And the North Koreans have never known anything but the monarchy, or Japanese dictatorship, or the dynasty of kin. And we can all deplore that and say, “Isn’t that terrible,” and so on. But it does not affect North Korea whatsoever.

President Clinton and his advisors became interested in engaging with North Korea. In 1994, Jimmy Carter flew to Pyongyang and met [North Korea founder and leader] Kim Il-sung. Working with Kim Dae-jung in Seoul, they engaged in North Korea and had a variety of talks. I was very optimistic at that time.

But then George W. Bush just demolished the Clinton policy toward North Korea, and we came close to attacking North Korea. And North Korea, I think, had no choice but to go ahead and develop nuclear weapons. I say that because if I were running North Korea in the context of the war in Iraq and the “axis of evil,” and all of those things Bush did, I would think that nuclear weapons were my only deterrent to attack by the U.S.

Hankyoreh: Since the new administration [of current president Suk-yeol Yoon] came to office in Seoul, inter-Korean relations and the relations between North Korea and the U.S. have clearly deteriorated. What do you think is behind this change?

Cumings: I think it’s a combination of North Korea continuing to build up its nuclear arsenal and shooting off missiles. We have an adversarial relationship between Pyongyang and Washington, one of the worst in a long time. And then you have a conservative president in Seoul who follows his predecessors like [right-wing past presidents] Park Geun-hye, Park Chung-hee and others thinking that the way to deal with North Korea is to get tough and confront it. And that never has worked. It yields no positive outcome. With that combination, I’m quite pessimistic right now on the 70th anniversary of the armistice that anything good is going to happen.

I can’t emphasize enough that American policy has been so stupid toward North Korea most of the time, based on fallacious assumptions, not on any kind of intelligence-gathering or real knowledge of the North. It’s based on false assumptions.

For 20 years, the assumption was that North Korea was going to collapse because the Eastern European communist countries had collapsed, and they thought North Korea was a puppet of the Soviet Union or a creature of the Soviet Union. So when the Soviets collapsed, presumably North Korea would collapse. And I’ve always argued — in my first book, and ever since then — that North Korea, North Vietnam during the ‘50s and ‘60s before the war ended, and China all represent anti-colonial revolutions, not revolutions guided by Moscow.

All the Eastern European regimes were implanted by Stalin and a country like East Germany had almost 400,000 Soviet troops on its territory when Gorbachev allowed East Germany to democratize. There were no Soviet troops in North Korea after 1948 or in China. The American policymakers from the Roosevelt and Truman administrations never understood the power and the force of the anti-colonial revolutions in the world which lasted from 1945 to the collapse of the Portuguese Empire in 1975. And it’s a very important instructive point, especially for young people, that often intelligence goes forward based on completely erroneous assumptions. And then you follow policies that are completely erroneous.

I can give one example: In 1995, John Deutch was the head of the CIA, and he gave a public testimony in Congress where he said the only question today is not if North Korea will collapse but when North Korea will collapse. And within 48 hours, the head of the North Korean army, Kim Kwang-jin, said it was no longer a question of whether we will have a new Korean War but when. This kind of summarizes what was wrong with American policies. If you have a collapse the likely outcome would be a second Korean War, not something like East Germany collapsing.

Hankyoreh: I think this is one of the reasons why you believe this kind of maximum pressure on North Korea will not work.

Cumings: The unfortunate fact is that in the last almost 20 years, North Korea has become impregnable because it has nuclear weapons and delivery systems of all kinds, from cruise missiles to ICBMs. And it’s not an arsenal like the Soviet Russian arsenal or the U.S. arsenal. But it’s enough to deter anybody from attacking North Korea. And therefore, maximum pressure on North Korea doesn’t mean much except that the country is sanctioned by the U.S. and South Korea in many, many ways, and that hurts ordinary people. But it clearly does not hurt the leadership. So I suppose maximum pressure is more related to President Yoon’s standing with the South Korean people trying to show that he’s tough and so on. But it doesn’t fundamentally work.

Hankyoreh: What do you think North Korea’s current strategy toward the U.S. is? Could we say that its intention to give up nuclear weapons has definitely decreased in the time since 2018-2019 when the North and the U.S. had talks going on? As the crisis deepens, some point out that the U.S. should have accepted the closure of the Yongbyon nuclear facility in 2019.

Cumings: One of my friends who was in North Korea asked, “How many times can you sell the Yongbyon facility to the United States?” I think this was another attempt to do so. And North Korea now has a stockpile of plutonium that’s much larger than it used to be. Back in 1994, it had 6,000 fuel rods pulled out of the Yongbyon reactor, enough for a couple of bombs. But now they have much more. So in a sense, it’s an obsolescent factory for plutonium. And I don’t think the U.S. took it very seriously.

I’m talking about serious people, not President Trump. I believe President Trump did some good things in Korea like suspending South Korean and American joint military exercises that the North sees as quite threatening. And he met twice with Kim Jong-un, which was good. But he was very erratic and knew nothing about the Korean situation or hardly any other international situation. But I give him credit for doing something no other sitting president had done. And I’m sure he got to know Kim Jong-un a bit during their meetings. But when Trump and his aides walked out of the meeting in Hanoi, without even eating lunch with the North Koreans, it was very humiliating and made things very tough for Kim Jong-un to go back to Pyongyang empty-handed. It was gratuitous and stupid. Even if nothing was going to be accomplished, they could have at least had lunch together. And since then, relations have really gone downhill.

Hankyoreh: On the topic of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader is making gestures that his daughter Kim Ju-ae could be his successor. What should we make of this display?

Cumings: I could be wrong, but I think the North Koreans are just playing with the world opinion and South Korean opinion. Let’s face it, Kim Jong-un is not going to retire anytime soon. He’s in his late 30s. I would expect him to hold power for several decades. Why is he parading his daughter? I don’t know. But it could be that he thinks it’s funny that world opinion and the world press suddenly says, “Oh, this must be the successor.” He has a son as far as I know. Nobody has seen him. Given the kind of conservative dynastic arrangements of North Korea, I would expect the son would succeed Kim Jong-un, not the daughter. Kim Jong-un is a little overweight, but he’s very robust. He doesn’t seem to have chronic health problems. And so even the South Koreans and many Americans wouldn’t like to hear this, I’m pretty sure he’ll outlive both of us. Well, maybe not you.

Hankyoreh: The U.S. government seems to have returned to the “strategic patience” of the Obama era, emphasizing unconditional dialogue but with no action. Do you think it would be possible to resume North Korea-U.S. dialogue under Biden?

Cumings: The Biden administration will say any day of the week it is ready for unconditional talks with North Korea at any time about denuclearization. It’s kind of like if you were to be holding a machine gun and I say I will be happy to talk to you about gun control when you get rid of your gun. Meanwhile, I have 50,000 machine guns trained on you.

In the case of North Korea, the U.S. intimidates North Korea time and time again with American nuclear weapons, in bombers and the USS Kentucky nuclear submarine full of nuclear weapons which came to Busan recently. This has been a consistent policy of one president after another to use nuclear blackmail against North Korea. I think it should be outlawed to threaten a non-nuclear country with nuclear weapons. The U.S. did so from 1950 to 2006. Then North Korea got the bomb and now it’s asking North Korea to give up their deterrent. For the U.S. to continue to send the USS Kentucky to South Korean ports politically means it has no interest whatsoever in talking to North Korea because it’s putting an insurmountable obstacle in front of the opening of talks. And then combined with North Korea and China and Russia being closer than they have in decades, it’s just a stupid policy.

Maybe when Biden is re-elected, he’ll have the freedom to pursue a more constructive policy toward North Korea. I was at a conference with Siegfried Hecker, a physicist who directed the Los Alamos National Laboratory for many years, and has done wonderful work on North Korea. He’s been there many times. Siegfried said that he gave a presentation to the U.S. Senate after he had been to North Korea. He talked to the Senate and testified about his trip to North Korea.

And after he was done, Biden came over and sat with him for two hours to talk about North Korea. Biden could not have a better advisor than Siegfried Hecker. So that gives me a little bit of hope. Right now, because an election is coming up, he doesn’t want to go overboard and try something new with North Korea. But in a second term, we’d have a president who at least knows a lot about North Korea.

Hankyoreh: If Trump were to pull out a victory in 2024, what kind of approach do you think he would take? Do you think Kim Jong-un would anticipate Trump coming back?

Cumings: That’s a very hard question to answer because I think he was very happy to meet with Trump. I think it was just awful that Trump and his people got up and left the table in Hanoi. However, Trump did several things like suspending the military games and meeting directly. The trouble is, if Trump were reelected, this country would be in a crisis unlike any before because vast numbers of Americans really love Trump, and he would try to be a dictator.

Trump is very hard to predict because he’s a mercurial figure who says one thing on Tuesday and the opposite on Wednesday. The best thing I can say about Trump when it comes to foreign policy is that he couldn’t care less what the foreign policy establishment in Washington is saying and thinking. He’s the first president like that. He would be more experienced. He came into office in 2017 completely inexperienced, but he had four years in office and three after his presidency to learn something about foreign affairs. But my assumption is he won’t be reelected.

Hankyoreh: It seems that North Korea and China are growing closer, as well as North Korea and Russia, as demonstrated by not only the Chinese delegation attending the armistice ceremony, but the Russian defense minister as well. Russia was not a direct participant in the Korean War. There is a lot of talk about a “new” Cold War. As you know so well, the Korean War broke out at the beginning of the Cold War.

Cumings: Yes, it’s a very important development. I was surprised that the Russian defense minister showed up in Pyongyang. I wasn’t surprised by the Chinese delegation, because they signed the armistice. And because China and North Korea are much closer than they were back in 2014 or 2015, when there was a lot of difficulty in the relationship between Pyongyang and Beijing. But it’s almost a physical principle that when the U.S. is hostile to China, it’s always hostile to North Korea. This would bring China and North Korea together.

In the case of Russia, Russia has very few friends in the world because of its invasion of Ukraine. And so, they’re all over the world trying to make friends. There are rumors, I think that haven’t been proven, that North Korea is supplying weapons to Russia in this war. In any case Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran have closer relations today than they have many years and they form a kind of foursome of anti-American regimes.

I’m sure North Korea feels that it has more backing now than it did 10 years ago. And this directly affects the sanctions on it because China and Russia are not really very serious about implementing sanctions on North Korea. So it gives North Korea more breathing space. But as you said, it’s reminiscent of the Cold War. And one of the dangers of the war in Ukraine now for a year and a half is that somehow the U.S. and Russia would get into military conflict and that would be very bad. From the Korean standpoint, it suggests it’ll be a long time before positive developments happen on the Korean Peninsula between the two Koreas.

Hankyoreh: You have emphasized U.S. responsibility for the division of the Korean Peninsula. You’ve also stated that you felt a sense of responsibility as an American. Do you think there is anything the U.S. should do regarding that kind of historical and moral responsibility?

Cumings: John J. McCloy, one of the four figures in American foreign relations in August 1945, told Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel to go into an adjoining room and find a place to divide Korea. That was on August 10, 1945, 24 hours after Nagasaki had been obliterated by the second atomic bomb. The Soviets were not directly notified about this, but MacArthur included in his August 15 declaration of victory over Japan that Korea will be divided at the 38th parallel. The U.S. bears a tremendous responsibility for unilaterally dividing Korea.

In my second volume on the Korean War — it’s Chapter 33, called Who started the Korean War? — I developed three different scenarios for how it might have started, including a provocation by the South supported by the U.S., but I made no commitment to that position. And in the conclusion to that chapter, I said that asking who started the Korean War is a political question and if you keep asking it and answering it one way, you will never have reconciliation between the two Koreas because the two Koreas and the U.S. and the Soviet Union and China were all responsible for this war.

The older I get, the more I just find it unfathomable that during the occupation before the war, the U.S. rehired every Korean who worked for the Japanese, particularly in the national police and the military. And then you have anti-Japanese guerrillas running to the north — a civil war is going to break out sooner or later. And, of course, most Americans, including a lot of historians, don’t accept that and they say that North Korea was a Soviet implant and puppet. But I was able to read through a lot of captured North Korean documents relevant to the origin of the war and the North Korean regime, which took me two years. And I came to think it was a classic anti-colonial nationalist regime. And it still is. So the U.S. bears a terrible responsibility for being so stupid as to take traitors and put them in power in the late 1940s.

Americans, not knowing anything, are calling it the “Forgotten War.” It’s an unknown war because Americans even at the time were not able to know what was really happening. You had censorship in Korea under Gen. MacArthur and you had McCarthyism in the U.S., where you could lose your job if you said the wrong thing about the Korean War. It was the most repressive period in American political history. So it’s an unknown war and the more people know about it, the better the chances that reunification might someday happen.

Hankyoreh: The Origins of the Korean War has been republished in Korea in a new and complete translation. Is there anything you would like to say to the readers of this book, especially young readers?

Cumings: I was very gratified that a good Korean translation finally appeared for my two volumes. (Volume I of Cumings’book was translated into Korean in the 1980s; a new and complete translation of both volumes was published last month).  And I’m deeply indebted to the translator for his very hard work. It represents 20 years of hard labor in the archives and writing it on my part. I don’t think it’s usual that one book published in 1981 and another one published in 1990 would be translated and published in 2023. But I guess, if I can say so, it shows the importance of the questions I tried to deal with in that book.

This article originally appeared in Hankyoreh.

Is Korea heading to a political crossroads?

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The upcoming presidential elections and North Korea | By Greg Elich (Winter 2022 issue)

Presidential candidate Jae-myung Lee at a campaign stop in Gyeongsang-namdo.

South Koreans go to the polls on March 9 to elect a new president, who will assume office two months later. At a time when U.S.-North Korean relations are at an impasse, and the Biden administration is building an aggressive anti-China alliance, much may rest on the outcome.

The two candidates, who are currently running neck-and-neck in opinion polls, present a stark contrast. Jae-myung Lee of the ruling Democratic Party advocates South Korea taking the lead on inter-Korean relations, in contrast to President Jai-in Moon’s unwillingness to adopt any measure that would elicit Washington’s disapproval. “In succeeding the Jae-in Moon administration, the Jae-myung Lee government should act as a more independent and active mediator and problem solver,” Lee announced late last year. That would be a welcome change in direction if it came to fruition.

Lee is also disinclined to accede to U.S. demands to join the anti-China campaign, questioning why South Korea should be forced to choose between China, its leading trading partner, and the U.S., with whom it has a military alliance. “I think the situation is coming where we can make decisions independently, putting our national interests first. Any thinking that we have to choose between the two is a very disgraceful approach,” Lee said.

If Lee is serious about changing course, he will be steering into strong headwinds. South Korea is such a politically polarized society that Lee cannot count on broad-based domestic support. Furthermore, Lee’s party will need to win a substantial majority in the National Assembly for Lee’s administration to adopt a more independent policy. In addition, the leadership of South Korea’s security and military establishments ia unlikely to countenance a change in the relationship with Washington. The U.S., for its part, has an arsenal of economic and diplomatic weapons at its disposal to keep a wayward nation in line. Only time will tell if Lee has the inclination and determination to try to overcome such obstacles.

Lee’s conservative opponent, Seok-youl Yoon of the inaptly-named People Power Party, takes a hardline position on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK – the official name for North Korea), including talking about the option of launching a preemptive strike. Yoon also prioritizes the military alliance with the U.S. and favors joining Washington’s “global coalition” confronting China. “The U.S. is our ally,” Yoon asserts, “while China is a partner. And a partnership is based on mutual respect. China is North Korea’s key ally. Isn’t North Korea our main enemy? We cannot make an alliance with a country that is allied with our main enemy.”

It is no mystery which candidate the Biden administration would prefer to deal with. Yoon’s stated policies align perfectly with those of Washington.

President Moon missed opportunities to improve inter-Korean relations by continually deferring to the U.S. In regard to reducing U.S.-DPRK tensions, Moon advocates an end-of-war declaration. Combat in the Korean War came to a halt in 1953 with an armistice agreement, so technically speaking, a state of war still exists. Moon regards that unfinished business as a destabilizing situation that can be resolved by all parties signing an end-of-war declaration to “mark a pivotal point of departure,” which would lead to “irreversible progress in denuclearization and usher in an era of complete peace.” 

South Korean officials have been engaged in talks with their counterparts in the U.S., China, and North Korea on the subject of a peace declaration for some time now. Moon believes “in principle” that “everybody agrees to the declaration,” although he noted that the DPRK needs to see the U.S. withdraw its hostile policy. In other words, no party has explicitly rejected the proposal outright, although South Korea has yet to come to an agreement with the U.S. on its wording.

According to Moon, “If North Korea takes certain measures, the end-of-war declaration would be a political statement that would announce that the longstanding hostile relations between Pyongyang and Washington had ended.” Note that action is required from only one side, while no change in behavior is asked of the U.S.

Moon has also stated that an end-of-war declaration would be “the starting point to discuss the peace treaty.” However, a peace treaty is a nonstarter in the current U.S. political environment, as it would require approval by a two-thirds majority in the Senate and ratification by President Biden.

The protracted wrangling over the declaration’s wording suggests that American officials have taken note of Yoon’s strong showing in the South Korean opinion polls and concluded that they need only drag their feet until they will get a partner more to their liking. At the very least, it indicates that the Biden administration is intensely focused on wordsmithing to ensure that nothing in the final draft of a peace declaration could be misconstrued to suggest that anything should change.

Too much can be made of the claim that a technical state of war is automatically destabilizing. Failure to sign a peace treaty is not a unique historical phenomenon. In a more recent example, the Soviet Union and Japan never signed a peace treaty after World War II. However, a peace declaration was agreed to in 1956 as an interim measure. Therefore, technically Russia and Japan remain in a state of war yet are hardly likely to engage in combat. Talks are currently underway regarding a Russia-Japan peace treaty.

Conversely, there is nothing inherently transformative in being officially at peace with a hostile party. Cuba and Venezuela, for example, are formally at peace with the U.S. yet are subjected to unrelenting sanctions, economic blockades, and destabilization campaigns aimed at regime change.

The risk in placing so much emphasis on an end-of-war declaration alone is that Moon may inadvertently be reinforcing the already-entrenched U.S. view that it need not offer North Korea anything substantive in exchange for denuclearization.

It is difficult to imagine what mechanism could metamorphose a piece of paper acknowledging that combat ended in 1953 into Moon’s envisioned “era of complete peace.” Moreover, U.S. hostility toward the DPRK is driven by regional geopolitical objectives, which a peace declaration cannot alter.

As a purely symbolic measure, a peace declaration is not worthless, but it would need to be accompanied by a change in U.S. attitude to hold any value. Otherwise, a symbol at variance with action is drained of any meaning. Indeed, what significance would such a symbol have as the U.S. continues to wage siege warfare against North Korea in the form of sanctions designed to impose economic ruin, hardship, and hunger?

Asia specialist Tim Beal believes the number one problem with an end-of-war declaration is “that the U.S. is still waging war – sanctions, military exercises, practicing invasion, and so forth. And it gives no indication of actually wanting to stop any of these.”

The sustained effort that Moon has invested in promoting a peace declaration may have been better spent on advocating real change as a path to peace. However, it must be noted how so much of the Washington elite recoils at the prospect of granting North Korea even a symbolic diplomatic crumb. There is a deeply ingrained belief that the only acceptable formula for U.S.-DPRK negotiations is for the DPRK to surrender everything while getting nothing in return. Perhaps Moon’s devotion to a peace declaration is based partly on the realization that the U.S. is unwilling to offer North Korea anything meaningful in exchange for denuclearization, so more cannot be expected.

While South Korean officials have discussed the subject of a peace declaration with their counterparts in the north, the impetus and enthusiasm for the proposal essentially come from the South. Indeed, Moon’s narrow focus on a peace declaration resolutely ignores what North Koreans say they need.

The DPRK is under siege, and consequently, its officials are looking for something more concrete from the U.S. They certainly have not minced words on the subject. Myong Gil Kim, North Korea’s chief negotiator during talks with Trump administration officials, was quite direct: “If the U.S. believes that it can lure us to the table with secondary issues, such as an end-of-war declaration – which can instantly end up as garbage depending on the political situation – and the establishment of a liaison office, instead of presenting fundamental solutions to withdraw its hostile policy against North Korea, which interferes with our right to survival and development, there will never be any hope for a solution.”

Last September, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Thae Song Ri reiterated that position when he termed an end-of-war declaration premature. “Nothing will change as long as the political circumstances around the DPRK remain unchanged and the U.S. hostile policy is not shifted, although the termination of the war is declared hundreds of times.” Ri added, “We have already clarified our official stand that the declaration of the termination of the war is not a ‘present’ and it can become a mere scrap of paper in a moment upon changes in situations.”

Biden administration officials repeatedly announce that the U.S. has no hostile intent toward the DPRK while showering that nation with invective and strangling it economically. U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price says that “specific proposals” have been made to North Korea. Although nothing is publicly known about the nature of the proposals, the lack of response from the North Koreans would seem to reveal that the U.S. is sticking to its customary approach of offering diplomatic trinkets in exchange for demanding unilateral disarmament.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Chunying Hua advocates a more viable approach to resuming talks. “We believe under the current circumstances, the key to breaking the stalemate and restarting dialogue is taking seriously the DPRK’s legitimate concerns. The U.S. should avoid repeating empty slogans, but rather show its sincerity by presenting an appealing plan for dialogue. It is imperative to invoke the rollback terms of the Security Council’s DPRK-related resolutions as soon as possible and make necessary adjustments to relevant sanctions, especially those relating to provisions on the humanitarian and livelihood aspects.”

In October, China and Russia submitted a draft resolution at the United Nations to drop economic sanctions that target North Korea’s population, in recognition of the nation’s continued adherence to its self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and long-range ballistic missile tests. Chinese U.N. envoy Wang Qun explained, “Obviously, the crux of the deadlock in the DPRK-U.S. dialogue is that the denuclearization measures taken by the DPRK have not received due attention, and the legitimate and reasonable concerns of the DPRK have not been properly addressed.” Predictably, the U.S. side reacted with outrage, and U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, instead called upon U.N. member states to “ramp up the implementation of the sanctions.”

Rather than signal a softer attitude, on December 10, the Biden administration piled on more sanctions, targeting several individuals and North Korea’s animation firm SEK Studio. Also sanctioned was a Chinese animation company for doing business with SEK Studio. According to Myong-hyun Go, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, the Biden administration “is sending a very strong message to North Korea and the rest of the world that the U.S. government is going to really not leave any stone unturned and make sure that the North Koreans don’t get even a single cent of profit by trading with the outside world.”

The Biden administration followed that action by naming Philip Goldberg as ambassador to South Korea. His selection appears to indicate that Washington remains wedded to the punishment approach. During the Obama administration, Goldberg served as coordinator for implementing sanctions on North Korea. That position led him to travel abroad and meet with foreign political and banking officials to eliminate trade and financial operations with North Korea.

Philosophically, he aligns well with an aggressive foreign policy. As ambassador to Bolivia, he was expelled from the country for meeting with the right-wing opposition. In his nomination hearing for ambassador to Colombia at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2019, Goldberg promised to support the U.S. campaign to overthrow the government of Venezuela: “If confirmed, I will work with Colombia on efforts to restore democracy to Venezuela.” He added that “the United States government has made clear that all options remain on the table while it continues to engage on all diplomatic and economic fronts to support Interim Venezuelan President Juan Guaido and the Venezuelan people’s pursuit of freedom.” The new ambassador cannot be expected to challenge conventional thinking regarding the DPRK.

The DPRK has evidently concluded that the U.S. is unwilling to abandon its hostile policy and has recently stepped up weapons testing. Its demolition of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site and a self-imposed moratorium on long-range ballistic missile testing yielded no corresponding measure from the U.S., aside from a temporary reduction in the size of military exercises that rehearse the bombing and invasion of the DPRK and infiltration of commando teams to assassinate North Korean officials.

Meanwhile, the South Korean military is accelerating technological upgrades and has seen its budget increase by an average of 7.4 percent each year of the Moon administration. The U.S., for its part, is expanding its military presence in the Asia-Pacific, and regularly launches intercontinental ballistic missiles, most recently on two occasions last year.

The North Koreans feel compelled to modernize their military capability in response to U.S. and South Korean arms advancements. As a result, an arms race is underway, in which the targeted side’s efforts are deemed illegitimate. DPRK leader Jong Un Kim emphasizes that “recourse to arms against the fellow countrymen must not be repeated on this land.” He adds, “We are not talking about a war with someone,” but “are building up war deterrent… to prevent the war itself and to safeguard the sovereignty of our state.” And that is the crux of U.S. concern. A small targeted nation able to defend itself sets a bad precedent and limits options.

Western media and officials habitually characterize each North Korean missile test as a “threat” or “provocation,” uniquely so, in that other nations performing similar tests prompt no condemnation. India, like North Korea, is a non-member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and its launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile on October 27 last year was greeted by silence. No doubt, the Times of India’s description of the launch as “a stern signal to China” came as a welcome development in Washington. The two other nuclear powers that are non-NPT members are Israel and Pakistan, both of which have ballistic missile programs that are deemed of no concern by U.S. officials and media.

There is a double standard at play. Only North Korea is forbidden by the United Nations from testing and is punished by economic sanctions so crushing as to amount to a war on the entire population. Even military tests that are not prohibited, such as the recent cruise missile and hypersonic missile launches, are denounced. Using inflammatory language, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield recently described North Korea’s tests as “attacks” and promised to “continue to ramp up the pressure on the North Koreans.” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres rebuked the DPRK for its recent launch of a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile, charging that it not only violated U.N. sanctions but also “the DPRK’s announced moratorium.” That was an outright falsehood, as North Korea’s self-imposed moratorium on testing applies only to long-range ballistic missiles.

Why is North Korea singled out for punishment? According to Thomas-Greenfield, it is because that nation is “a serious threat to our peace and security and to the globe.” That language is echoed by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who called the DPRK “a source of danger and obviously a threat to us and our partners.” That American officials can make such pronouncements without being met by derision is a tribute to the efficacy of U.S. propaganda. Since the Korean War came to a halt nearly seven decades ago, the DPRK has been at peace. Yet, in the decades that followed the Second World War, the U.S. has bombed and invaded numerous countries, undermined and toppled foreign governments, spread its military bases across the globe to threaten other nations, and performed drone strike murders of thousands of civilians. And the U.S. is currently trying to stoke war fever against Russia. Yet, the common perception in the West turns reality on its head.

Regardless of whether or not a peaceful end to the Korean War is declared, the U.S. has broader plans for South Korea. The Biden administration’s central foreign policy objective is to build alliances with Asian nations to ensure U.S. domination over China.

South Korea’s geographical location places it on the frontline of the Biden administration’s fanatical anti-China project, and the Koreans are assigned the role of “force multiplier” in that effort. The South Koreans are not regarded as having a choice in the matter. Koreans are expected to support the U.S. confrontation with China and any military adventure in the Asia-Pacific that the U.S. may choose to undertake. According to an American military official, the Republic of Korea (ROK) will act as “a net provider of security not just on the peninsula but across the region.”

Last May, Biden and Moon issued a joint statement, which pledged that “the U.S.-ROK alliance will play an increasingly global role” and claimed that the two nations’ relationship “extends far beyond the Korean Peninsula.” Moon also promised to align his country’s policy with “the United States’ vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

In December, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met in Seoul with his South Korean counterpart, Wook Suh. Austin announced that “we discussed ways to broaden our alliance’s focus to address issues of regional concern.” Using the familiar code words for anti-China hostility, Austin stated that “we emphasize our shared commitment to the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific.” In addition, Austin reported that he and Suh “agreed to explore ways to expand and enhance regional security cooperation and capacity building.”

If an end-of-war declaration is made the vehicle for bringing peace to the peninsula, the main roadblock, as Korea specialist Simone Chun sees it, is U.S. containment policy and the practice of “pressuring allies for U.S. strategic interests.” Under the Moon administration, “South Korea’s security policy has been subordinated to the United States” and “South Korea does not have strategic insight to properly respond to the U.S. policy of containment with respect to China.”

Chun proposes supplementing an end-of-war declaration with a revival of the Sunshine Policy as offering a potentially more promising path to reducing tensions on the Korean Peninsula. The Sunshine Policy, launched during the presidential term of Dae-jung Kim and continued by his successor Moo-hyun Roh, redirected inter-Korean relations from confrontation to cooperation. However, since Roh’s term ended in 2008, no subsequent South Korean president has followed suit. In Chun’s proposal, South Korea does not need to play a passive role and defer to U.S. intransigence. Instead, it can initiate its own program.

It cannot be overlooked that South Korean progressives and U.S. imperialism have divergent goals. Their class and national interests are at opposite poles. If positive change comes, it will be driven by Koreans. As Tim Beal points out, “Peace undercuts the rationale for a U.S. forward position in East Asia. It undercuts the rationale for all those bases, the bases in South Korea, the bases in Japan, and so forth. And it undercuts the rationale for their utilization of [South Korean] military power.” The problem is “that peace in Korea would hamper the containment of China. That’s how they look at it.”

A lot may ride on the next presidential election in South Korea. A conservative victory would automatically give the Biden administration everything it wants. Yoon has explicitly stated his intention to ally closely with U.S. militarism. A win by Jae-myung Lee offers more hope.

Lee promises to chart a more independent path than Moon. It remains to be seen if he can follow through, given the certainty of fierce opposition by Washington. Progressives in South Korea face a twofold struggle in the months ahead: Pressing their government to improve inter-Korean relations; and avoiding being dragooned into the U.S. anti-China military machine. At the heart of both issues is resistance to U.S. encroachment upon South Korean sovereignty. It will not be an easy struggle, but it is a necessary one.

This article originally appeared in Counterpunch.

Copyright ©2024 Korean Quarterly. All rights reserved.

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