Battlegrounds
Page 36
Chapter 11
The Definition of Insanity
If the American imperialists provoke us a bit, we will not hesitate to slap them with a preemptive nuclear strike. The United States must choose! It’s up to you whether the nation called the United States exists on this planet or not.
—NORTH KOREAN PROPAGANDA VIDEO, LAST CHANCE, 2016
FORT LESLEY J. McNair, a quiet place on the south side of the busy U.S. capital, lies at the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers. It is home to the National Defense University, including the National War College and a range of military education and research activities. While I was away in South Asia in April 2017, my wife, Katie, with the help of our daughters, moved into one of the World War I–era general officer quarters on the banks of the Washington Channel, which flows into and out of the Tidal Basin. The homes have views of the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument. Sunsets behind Hains Point, a peninsula between the channel and the Potomac River, are spectacular. Our home was the perfect setting to host administration colleagues and foreign counterparts. Because conversations there were relaxed, they tended to be more creative and productive than those in the West Wing. Katie and our enlisted aide, Sgt. First Class Juan Sanchez, always made our guests feel welcome.
Our first guest was my South Korean counterpart, Ambassador Chung Eui-yong. Ambassador Chung and his assistant, Park Jang-ho, joined Matt Pottinger and me in June. The timing was only weeks after President Moon Jae-in of South Korea’s left-wing Minjoo (Democratic) Party won a special election, brought forward nine months early by the downfall of President Park Geun-hye and ending nine years of conservative Liberty Party rule. Our relationship would be important. The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) was one of the most pressing national security challenges. Chung and I both felt a sense of urgency due to that country’s nuclear and missile programs. We needed to ensure that the relationship between the one-month-old South Korean administration and the four-month-old Trump administration got off to a good start.
The growing threats from North Korea had become palpable, but they were not new. As we faced those threats, it would be necessary for the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) to be aligned. Over the years, the approaches that our two nations took toward North Korea, however, had all too often been divergent.
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CHUNG KNEW the history of U.S.-ROK relations well. After his election to the National Assembly, Chung worked on the U.S.-ROK trade agreement and observed interactions between U.S. president George W. Bush and South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun. The two presidents were close; Bush would speak at Roh’s funeral after the latter’s tragic suicide in 2009. But the two presidents’ conflicting approaches to North Korea created daylight between the allies, daylight that Pyongyang was all too happy to exploit.
The stakes were high in 2002. During a visit to Pyongyang by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly, a North Korean official did not deny that the North was secretly working to produce highly enriched uranium as a new source of fuel for nuclear weapons, despite the 1994 Agreed Framework, the treaty under which North Korea was supposed to freeze its nuclear weapons program and welcome international inspectors into its facilities. In return, North Korea would get energy aid from the United States, including shipments of oil and the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors. But implementation of a weak agreement that had not been approved by the U.S. Senate was problematic from the outset.1
In response to the disclosure of the North’s uranium-enrichment program, Bush discontinued aid to the country he had described as part of an “axis of evil.” At the same time, the South Korean government under Roh pursued Roh’s version of a “Sunshine Policy” that sought reconciliation through peaceful cooperation and opening up to the North. So, when, in 2003, the Bush administration pursued the Six-Party Talks (which included the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas) to achieve the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the economic leverage was toothless due to Seoul’s assistance to Pyongyang. Economic opening was supposed to induce North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, but why would Pyongyang give them up when the Sunshine Policy was delivering economic benefits for free?2
The Sunshine Policy maintained its allure, even though what appeared to be early successes were manufactured. In 2000, Roh’s predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, a politician who had made an unlikely comeback after being condemned to death for his role in the antigovernment Gwangju Uprising of twenty years earlier, received the Nobel Peace Prize for visiting Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang and “paving the way for a brighter future for all Koreans and other peace-loving peoples of the world.” In pursuit of the historic summit, however, Kim Dae-jung’s administration had secretly paid the dictator $500 million in cash.3 After the payoff was exposed, Kim’s opponents quipped that it was the most expensive Nobel Prize in history. Just a few weeks after the summit, North and South Korean athletes marched jointly in the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia. Some commentators got caught up in the emotion and predicted imminent unification. But as with Kim Dae-jung’s summit, there was more to the story. North Korea had demanded and secured secret payments from Seoul.4 North Korea also demanded that athletes from the South not outnumber those from the North. As a result, many South Korean athletes had to sit out the ceremony. It would not be the last time that a sporting/cultural event would raise hopes for sudden change in the North-South relationship and the achievement of an enduring peace on the peninsula. Inter-Korean business projects and exchanges also followed the summit, including the Mount Kumgang Tourist Region, the Kaesong Industrial Zone (KIZ), and Kaesong city tours. Those projects proved lucrative for cash-starved Pyongyang, but did not lead to the anticipated opening or to gradual reform in the North. The programs, especially the KIZ, did allow limited interaction between South and North Koreans, interaction that challenged the North’s propaganda that the people of South Korea were suffering from poverty under a miserably incompetent government. Economic projects allowed South Korean companies to employ cheap North Korean labor while providing the North with much-needed foreign currency as DPRK workers’ salaries went directly to the North Korean regime.5
In 2007, despite the incompatible policies of South Korea and the United States, a prolonged stalemate in the Six-Party Talks ended, and the parties signed a tentative disarmament agreement. In June 2008, North Korea destroyed cooling towers at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center and even allowed foreign journalists and diplomats to witness the demolition. In response, the United States removed North Korea from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list and returned $25 million to Pyongyang that the United States had convinced Macao authorities to freeze in an account that North Korea used for money laundering. The agreement, as with the 1994 Agreed Framework, however, created only an illusion of progress. Four months later, North Korea reneged on verification measures and expelled IAEA inspectors from Yongbyon grounds.6 The Six-Party Talks died and never revived.
After 2008, South Korea’s Sunshine Policy disappeared behind a storm of North Korean aggression. As he replaced Roh, President Lee Myung-bak and his conservative administration believed that a decade of massive aid had neither improved the lives of destitute North Koreans nor induced any change in Pyongyang’s reckless behavior. By then, the North had abandoned even the appearance of cooperation and had resumed provocations, including a long-range missile test in April 2009 and its second underground nuclear test on May 25, U.S. Memorial Day.7 Amid the tests, the Kim regime took two U.S. journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, hostage after they crossed into North Korea without visas. Even though they worked for former vice president Al Gore’s Current TV, a North Korean kangaroo court sentenced them to twelve years of hard labor. Despite the release of the journalist-hostages after President Bill Clinton visited Pyongyang in August, provocations continued. In March 2010, a North Korean midget subma
rine sank the South Korean naval vessel ROKS Cheonan, killing forty-six sailors. Eight months later, the Korean People’s Army fired 170 artillery shells onto South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island, killing four people and injuring nineteen.8 Later that year, the regime revealed to visiting Stanford University metallurgist Siegfried Hecker the apparently fully operational uranium enrichment facility at Yongbyon. North Korean leaders had vehemently denied the facility’s existence for nearly a decade.9 Behind the series of well-timed provocations lay North Korea’s effort to bolster the military qualifications of successor-in-waiting Kim Jong-un to consolidate power and initiate negotiations from a position of strength.10
Yet Washington remained weak in its response by continuing to engage the regime for potential talks, under the misguided assumption that reconciliatory diplomacy could generate a fundamental shift in Pyongyang’s policy. After the sinking of the Cheonan, former president Jimmy Carter visited Pyongyang, where he called for a new dialogue; he returned to the United States with a detained American. Two months later, North Korea carried out the artillery barrage against Yeonpyeong Island. Still, Carter maintained in an op-ed that the attacks were meant to “remind the world that they deserve respect in negotiations.”11 The former president warned the Obama administration that without direct talks, “North Koreans [would] take whatever actions they consider necessary to defend themselves.”12
The Obama administration judged the status quo as preferable to actions that might escalate to military conflict. As he hosted ROK president Lee in Washington during a state visit in October 2011, President Obama declared that “If the North abandons its quest for nuclear weapons and moves toward denuclearization, it will enjoy greater security and opportunity for its people. That’s the choice that North Korea faces.” The Obama administration hoped that a policy of “strategic patience” might devalue the North’s provocations as the United States ignored rather than responded to Pyongyang’s efforts to get attention and extort concessions. The administration assumed that the Kim regime was, in the words of the North Korea expert Victor Cha, an impossible state that would ultimately collapse due to its brutality, corruption, and dysfunction.13 Besides, the ailing dictator Kim Jong-il would soon be replaced by a relatively unknown twenty-seven-year-old who seemed an unlikely dictator.
As Chung and I spoke over dinner at my home six years later, it was clear that Obama’s strategy of strategic patience, like Roh’s Sunshine Policy, had failed. In their first and only meeting, President Barack Obama told President-elect Donald Trump that the DPRK had become his most pressing problem.14 Kim Jong-un, who had taken on the moniker of the Great Successor, had consolidated power in brutal fashion, executing anyone deemed a potential challenger to his authority. One might even say that Kim Jong-un was pursuing his version of a policy of strategic impatience. The year 2016 marked the fifth year of the “Great Successor’s” rule, and he did not like being ignored. He accelerated the North’s nuclear and missile programs; both were progressing faster than most anticipated. Optimism that the North Korean regime could not be sustained by its third-generation dictator faded. The United States and South Korea were at a crossroads of rethinking their North Korea policies.
Chung and I agreed that, as we implemented a new strategy, the United States and South Korea needed to avoid working at cross-purposes. I suggested that we pledge to reject two flawed assumptions that undercut previous policies toward North Korea: first, the Sunshine Policy’s notion that an opening up to North Korea would change the nature of the regime; and second, the fundamental premise of the strategic patience policy, that the regime was unsustainable and on the brink of collapse or, at least, that it would collapse before the emergence of a nuclear-armed North Korea—something that presented an unacceptable risk to the United States and its allies.
Matt Pottinger and I summarized the strategy that he had started working on prior to the inauguration. The United States would work with others to apply unwavering, integrated, and multinational pressure on the Kim regime. We thought that the alignment of South Korean, U.S., and Japanese policies toward North Korea was the starting point for garnering broad international support for denuclearization. We needed a realistic strategy designed to convince Pyongyang that its nuclear and missile programs were a danger rather than an asset to the Kim regime.
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CHUNG AND I agreed that aligning our efforts would be easier said than done. The Moon government was entering office at a tumultuous time. In 2016, a political scandal broke in Seoul that ultimately led to the impeachment, removal, prosecution, and imprisonment of Moon’s predecessor, President Park Geun-hye.15 As the first liberal president in a decade, many believed that Moon, who had served as Roh’s chief of staff, would resurrect the Sunshine Policy, which the South Korean press could not resist labeling a “Moonshine Policy” toward the North. I was frank with Chung that moonshine and what we were calling “maximum pressure” would not mix well.
I told Ambassador Chung that misalignment in our approaches could generate a perfect storm. Like warm air from a low-pressure system hitting the cool air from a high-pressure system, the deep skepticism of overseas military commitments among Trump-supporting “economic nationalists” could collide with the wariness toward dependence on America among Moon-supporting leftists. That collision might not only undermine the approach to North Korea, but also do irreparable damage to the alliance. Some Trump supporters were isolationists. Some of Moon’s supporters were sympathetic to New Left interpretations of history that blamed U.S. “capitalist imperialism” for problems on the Korean Peninsula and beyond. Although the Korean Peninsula lies at the far reaches of American power, it is central to debates over America’s role in the world.
We had about thirty thousand troops stationed in South Korea, and Chung knew that Trump was not the first U.S. president to question the need for U.S. forces there. While campaigning for president in 1976, the year that two American soldiers were axed to death by North Korean soldiers in the demilitarized zone for attempting to cut down a poplar tree, candidate Jimmy Carter often stated his desire to bring American troops home.16 Carter was frustrated with the corruption and human rights abuses of the general turned politician Park Chung-hee, who served five consecutive terms as president until he was assassinated by his intelligence chief in 1979. South Korea subsequently strengthened its democratic institutions and experienced extraordinary economic success during the two Park administrations and the thirty-four years that separated them. Yet that success provided some U.S. skeptics with a new rationale for American withdrawal: South Korea was rich and strong enough to defend itself. The argument that U.S. forces are vital for preventing another major conflict that could be even more destructive than the Korean War of 1950–1953 leaves these skeptics unconvinced, in part because it is impossible to prove a negative. History, however, can give warning in the form of potential consequences.
As I got to know Ambassador Chung and to learn about his background, I became aware that he was four years old when North Korea invaded. He lived in Seoul, the South’s capital city that changed hands four times during the war. His earliest memories included entire city blocks in rubble; his mother forcing him and his siblings to wear makeshift helmets she sewed out of seat cushions, to protect them from shrapnel; and his home full of patients screaming in pain as they waited for his father, a doctor, to treat their wounds. He remembers macabre scenes while playing on streets surrounded by partially covered corpses. And he remembers great hardships; he walked more than two hundred kilometers in freezing cold weather to escape the Chinese army’s assault on the capital in 1951. He remembers attending his first day of school in a “classroom” with no walls or ceiling; its only structure was a makeshift chalkboard. Ambassador Chung was aware that my father, Herbert McMaster, served as an infantryman in the Korean War, and he often expressed his gratitude for not only my father’s service but also the service and sacrifice of so many others. The Korean War cost the lives of close to 37,000
Americans, 200,000 South Korean and UN soldiers, 400,000 North Korean soldiers, 600,000 Chinese troops, and a million and a half civilians. All told, approximately 3 million people died as a direct result of a war, after which neither side could claim victory. Statistics can be numbing, but Chung understood the war through distant memories of horrors that we were determined to prevent from happening again. Chung and I agreed that it was cheaper to prevent a war than to fight one. We also agreed that the Korean War had been preventable.
At the end of World War II, Korea was freed from Japanese control by the Allies. President Harry Truman sent American soldiers to Korea to prevent the Soviets from occupying its entirety, and the United States and the Soviet Union would each occupy half of the peninsula over the next few years. When the formal UN-endorsed trusteeships over the two Koreas expired in 1948, the two superpowers failed to agree on how a united Korean state would be governed. After a general election in the South, Syngman Rhee, who held a doctorate in politics from Princeton University, took over from the U.S. military government. Meanwhile, the Soviets established the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK) and chose as its leader Kim Il-sung, an ambitious young Communist guerrilla leader who had impressed his Soviet patrons while serving in the Soviet Army in the Far East.17 From the start, the ideologically incompatible two Koreas were each trying to undermine the other’s government, each wanting reunification under its control.18
Despite the obvious prospects for war on the peninsula, the first secretary of the new U.S. Department of Defense, James Forrestal, was skeptical about maintaining U.S. forces there. He saw the deployment as an unnecessary “drain on Army resources,” describing duty there as “a source of unceasing complaint from parents of the enlisted men who were unhappy, dissatisfied, and bored.”19 Stalin, emboldened by the drawdown of American forces, gave Kim Il-sung the green light to prepare for a large-scale invasion of South Korea.20 The war began at four o’clock on the morning of June 25, 1950, as six North Korean infantry divisions reinforced with tanks poured across the Thirty-Eighth Parallel.