The third summit between the leaders of South and North Korea and the prospect of a second next month between Presidents Trump and Kim Jong-un has many well-meaning people in Seoul — and some in Washington — yearning for a permanent end to the state of war on the Peninsula. In the face of resistance to this, they wonder, “How can anyone be opposed to peace?”
The answer is that hope is racing far ahead of reality. If left unchecked — and indeed, if the desire for peace is prematurely memorialized in a “peace declaration,” as proposed last week by the South Korean Foreign Minister — the actual prospects for peace will shrink. The US and its allies will be left more vulnerable, not less — notwithstanding her suggestion that such a declaration be made in exchange for North Korea dismantling its principal nuclear facility at Yongbyon.
Let’s take a step back and look at exactly what America’s goal is in the diplomatic processes set in motion by President Trump’s historic meeting with Kim Jong-un in June of this year. It is not a resolution of the state of war in Korea. That condition and the 28,500 American servicemen and women who guarantee the armistice there are the result of the North’s hostility to the South’s way of life and the critical ally that helps protect it — the US.
That hostility remains — notwithstanding the handshakes and the smiles in Pyongyang recently, or in Singapore this past June. The raison d’etre of North Korea is the unification of the Korean Peninsula — on its terms. Pursuit of nuclear weapons is an essential part of the effort to bring this about.
It is a pretty simple formula. With nuclear weapons capable of reaching the US mainland, Pyongyang can deter the US from coming to the aid of South Korea in a conflict. The mere existence of such capability is intended to make South Koreans ask themselves, “Would America risk Los Angeles or Chicago to defend Seoul?”
There are two possible American responses to this question.
The first abandons South Korea and tries to take the US out of harm’s way. This in turn would open the way for Kim Jong-un to attempt reunification by force or intimidation. Beyond the devastating impact this would have on life in South Korea, such a course of action would take an enormous toll on the credibility of American security commitments across the board, including most notably, those to Taiwan. It would leave South Korea to the tender mercies of a proven pathological dictator and Japan susceptible to nuclear blackmail.
The second solution stays on the front lines with our allies and mitigates the risk to the homeland by making clear the use of nuclear weapons by North Korea would result in the utter destruction of its regime. It is not always a pretty approach — remember Trump’s vow to destroy North Korea at the United Nations last year — but it keeps the peace. In the meantime, the world brings maximum pressure to bear on North Korea with the aim of convincing it to relinquish its nuclear weapons.
This is the only way to sustain the peace and security broadly and over the long term. To its credit, the Trump administration gets this. This is why it has made denuclearization of North Korea the clear goal of its diplomatic opening to Pyongyang.
What both Washington and Seoul, however, must understand is that a “peace declaration” is simply a back door to the first scenario and all the costs it entails. A document that declares the Korean War over will create an irresistible case for withdrawal of American forces. After all, if the war is over, the American public will ask, “Why should the US continue to station troops there? For that matter, what is the use of the US-Korea alliance?” Without any conditions to eliminate the massive conventional threat North Korea poses to the South, war on the peninsula would be more likely.
At the same time, such “progress” would not remove the nuclear threat to the United States. North Korea would continue to possess — and if it chose to do so, proliferate — nuclear weapons and it will have given dictatorships around the world a blueprint for imposing their wills on Washington. Neither would a “peace declaration” preclude the possibility of the US returning to the peninsula once war commences — as it did in 1950. No, a “peace declaration” can only come at the end of the process, when North Korea is completely, verifiably, irreversibly rid of its nuclear weapons, and its conventional threat to South Korea is reduced. Dismantling the Yongbyon facility is far from enough.
No one in the US wants war. But as history has shown, signing pieces of paper and making solemn declarations do not prevent it — especially when they leave the potential enemy in possession of its arsenal. War is avoided and freedom is secured by staying strong even in the face of hope. One day, a permanent peace will come to the Korean Peninsula, but only when the real threats from North Korea are finally eliminated.
Walter Lohman is director of the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs