Battlegrounds

by H. R. McMaster

  President Moon’s party had its own reservations about THAAD. China had already punished South Korea economically for the missile system, including with financial sanctions, restrictions on South Korean corporations in China, and a sharp reduction in tourism. During his campaign, Moon said that THAAD required more study as well as parliamentary approval. He had also expressed disappointment over a preelection early-morning emplacement of two rockets and radar on the former golf course designated as the site for THAAD as well as the expedited arrival of the remaining four missiles in South Korea. Moon felt that the rushed deployment was to get the missiles in place without his new government’s consent. Some South Korean critics fell for the baseless claim of the Chinese Communist Party leadership that THAAD would conduct radar surveillance deep into Chinese territory and shoot down Chinese rather than North Korean missiles. The THAAD deployment was especially contentious among South Koreans skeptical of the U.S. military presence, who, despite the North’s provocations, tended to blame America for everything, including China’s punitive economic actions against the South for hosting the missile system.37

  President Trump and other American leaders were likely to view any South Korean hesitation to deploy THAAD as a sign of weakness in deference to China as well as a sign of ingratitude for U.S. assistance, even as the threat from North Korea grew. Issues with THAAD were being conflated with the perception that the United States–Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) was a bad deal for the United States. Prior to the South Korean presidential election, President Trump had threatened to pull out of KORUS and force South Korea to pay for THAAD.

  Chung brought to our dinner a proposal to delay the deployment of the remaining missiles and other components in the THAAD battery, to allow for more analysis of the issue, parliamentary approval, and the completion of an environmental study. He drew on a napkin the portion of the converted golf course in which the initial two missiles were deployed as the others were readied for emplacement. I told Chung that his proposal could lead to disaster. President Trump, a real estate developer, would likely have a visceral reaction to even the suggestion of an environmental study. He would also see it for what it was: a delaying tactic or, even worse, an effort to bargain away an alliance capability to placate China. The delay of the THAAD deployment would also allow alliance skeptics on the right in the United States to portray the Moon government as ungrateful and strengthen those in the United States who questioned not only the THAAD deployment, but also KORUS and even the presence of U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula. I told him that I was not an alarmist, but that the delay of THAAD could be the first step toward the rending of the alliance that had prevented war for more than six decades.

  I slid the napkin toward myself and drew the remaining four missiles into the smaller area with the other two. I asked Chung why all the missiles could not go into the smaller space to prevent further delay. The environmental study could then be done deliberately, after which the missiles could be spread out over the larger space. After Chung said that he would try to make it work, I passed the napkin to Pottinger and told Chung that if he and President Moon made the THAAD deployment happen quickly, we would frame the napkin for posterity.

  Pottinger and I thought that the dinner with Chung was successful. Not only did we begin to develop what would become a strong friendship, but we also resolved that we would not approach the North Korea problem consistent with the definition of insanity mentioned previously: doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. We resolved to stay aligned as we endeavored to break the historical pattern of North Korean provocation, extortion, and negotiation that had worked so well for the Kim family dictators in the past. And we resolved not to take our alliance for granted.

  * * *

  IN THE summer of 2017, I thought that we were off to a good start in replacing the strategy of strategic patience with a strategy of maximum pressure. President Trump had approved the maximum pressure strategy in March. All in attendance at that National Security Council meeting had agreed that we should assume that the North Korean regime was likely neither to collapse nor to reform. We resolved not to repeat the failed pattern of past efforts and emphasized the importance of getting other nations to make that same resolution.

  Coordination with South Korea was going well, and the potential dangers to our relationship were receding. At the end of June, President Moon visited Washington. He and President Trump agreed on the strategy of maximum pressure to achieve the denuclearization of North Korea. But we were under no illusions that this would be easy to achieve. We were testing a thesis that the United States and other nations could force Kim Jong-un to envision a future in which he continued to rule in an increasingly prosperous North, and thus conclude that he and his regime were safer without nuclear weapons than they were with them.

  After his visit to Washington, President Moon reversed his earlier decision to wait for an environmental assessment and approved the plan drawn on the napkin at my house. I gladly received President Trump’s ire for South Korea’s not paying for a missile system our army owned and our soldiers operated. Meanwhile, U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, and I made the case that renegotiating KORUS was better for the American people than withdrawing from the deal, both from an economic and a national security perspective.

  But as maximum pressure increased, so did North Korea’s attempts to force a return to the failed cycle of the past. The DPRK would conduct seventeen missile tests throughout 2017, including the test of an intercontinental ballistic missile on July 4, America’s Independence Day. These tests helped solidify support for our strategy as the best alternative to what would be a dangerous and costly military confrontation or premature negotiations that would lock in the status quo as the new normal while North Korea continued to mature its nuclear program. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, masterfully negotiated four new UN Security Council resolutions that helped place significant economic pressure on North Korea. The administration worked with Congress to impose additional sanctions. The Department of State, the Department of Treasury, and the Department of Justice redoubled efforts to enforce those sanctions and disrupt North Korea’s organized crime and cybercrime activities.

  Because of our flawed assumptions and misaligned policies, the North Korean regime had never felt diplomatic, economic, financial, or military pressure sufficient to convince its leaders that denuclearization was in their interests. On the contrary, the cycle of North Korean provocation, feigned conciliation, negotiation, extortion, concession, promulgation of a weak agreement, and the inevitable violation of that agreement actually encouraged the North’s aggression. As pressure mounted in 2017 and as nations around the world, including China, began to enforce sanctions, North Korea redoubled its efforts to get back to the negotiating table. On September 3, over Labor Day weekend in the United States, North Korea conducted a nuclear test that it again claimed to be a hydrogen bomb. The blast was estimated to have destructive power equivalent to 140 kilotons of TNT, ten times as powerful as Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.38

  We had work to do. Implementation would depend on maintaining unity of effort internally and with multinational partners. But despite promising, unified early efforts, it proved difficult to keep everyone committed. Some officials who helped develop the campaign of maximum pressure started using the term peaceful pressure instead. It was easy to lapse into strategic narcissism and, in particular, to do what one might prefer to do rather than what the situation demanded. Pottinger, the NSC staff, and I worked hard to prevent divergent and inconsistent approaches to North Korea across our departments and agencies. At one point, in October 2017, as the State Department reverted to form by seeking several channels of communication with Pyongyang despite the president’s guidance to let Pyongyang first feel the consequences of its actions, the president tweeted to Secretary of Sta
te Rex Tillerson that he was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.”39

  As we prepared for President Trump’s first State of the Union address, one of three moving speeches in which he criticized North Korean human rights violations, we were reminded of the importance of our work on the North Korea challenge. I hosted the family of Otto Warmbier in my office with Pottinger and our director for Korea, Allison Hooker, before they met President Trump in the Oval Office. Otto had been a student at the University of Virginia when, on his way to study abroad in Asia, he joined a tour to North Korea. The regime’s thugs arrested him and charged him with crimes against the state for allegedly trying to steal a propaganda poster. He was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. He was tortured nearly to death and repatriated to the United States just before he died. Meeting Otto’s parents, Fred and Cindy, and his brother, Austin, and sister, Greta, as well as North Korean escapees, prior to the State of the Union address strengthened my belief in the importance of placing the nature of the Kim regime, its warped ideology, and its profound inhumanity at the foundation of our strategy. It was unfortunate that after the Singapore Summit in 2018, President Trump ceased criticism of North Korean human rights, downplayed Kim Jong-un’s knowledge of Otto’s treatment, and described Kim as “honorable” and a person who “loves his people.”

  Chapter 12

  Making Him Safer Without Them

  Although Chairman Kim Jong-un has good personal feelings about President Trump, they are, in the true sense of the word, “personal” . . . There will never be such negotiations as that in Vietnam, in which we proposed exchanging a core nuclear facility of the country for the lift of some UN sanctions in a bid to lessen the sufferings of the peaceable people even a bit.

  —KIM JONG-UN’S SPOKESPERSON, KIM KYE-GWAN, JANUARY 11, 20201

  IN MID-MARCH 2018, I hosted Ambassador Chung and Japanese national security advisor Yachi Shotaro in San Francisco, the city that has served as America’s gateway to the Indo-Pacific region since the mid-nineteenth century. It was our third and final trilateral meeting in less than a year. The city and the particular venue for our meetings, the Marines’ Memorial Club Hotel, near Union Square, were well suited to our purpose. Since the height of the California gold rush, San Francisco has been home to vibrant Indo-Pacific expatriate communities, including Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian, and Korean immigrants. Since the 1990s, the booming Silicon Valley economy attracted a new wave of highly educated expatriates from the region, who helped make the city a global hub of technological and commercial innovation. The artifacts on display within the Marines’ Memorial Club Hotel commemorated the role of the United States in determining the historical trajectory of the Indo-Pacific in the twentieth century. Founded in 1946 as a living memorial for U.S. servicemen and women, the hotel featured many images of combat in the Pacific during World War II, from Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945; and those of the Korean War, from North Korea’s invasion of the South on June 25, 1950, to the signing of the armistice on July 27, 1953. These images were reminders of the costs and horrors of war. They were also reminders of the achievements of an emerging superpower, a former enemy, and a nation victimized by that former enemy in the wake of those wars in building a better future.

  During our first meeting at the White House in March 2017, Yachi had expressed concerns over what an “America First” foreign policy would mean for the Japanese-U.S. relationship. I assured him that although President Trump would insist on reciprocity, especially in the areas of trade, market access, and defense burden sharing, all in the administration understood that a strong United States–Japan alliance was essential to realizing the vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” Yachi and I became close friends. I was grateful for the opportunity to work with one of Japan’s most experienced and respected diplomats. The growing threat to Japan from North Korea’s missiles and nuclear program was his top priority.

  Yachi, born one year before the end of World War II, was a true believer in a strong U.S.-Japanese alliance. He was an infant when six million Japanese soldiers and civilians returned home to find their country ravaged by a sustained bombing campaign that culminated in America’s use of the most destructive weapon in human history to end the costliest war in human history. Yachi grew up at a time when the Japanese people wondered how their country, the size of the state of Montana and with a population of over one hundred million people yet few natural resources, could ever recover from the devastation. But the day after Japan’s surrender in 1945, America extended the hand of friendship to it, and the Japanese people proved to be resilient and determined to rebuild and reshape their nation. By Yachi’s eighth birthday, when the Allied occupation ended, the Japanese economy had almost recovered to prewar levels of production. It was only the beginning of an astonishing success story.2 It was also the beginning of what would become a strong, enduring alliance between Japan and the United States. Although the alliance was strained at times, such as in 1960, during the demonstrations against the renewal of the U.S.-Japanese Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security (or Anpo, as it is abbreviated in Japanese), the relationship between the former foes not only benefited their citizens, but also contributed to a remarkable economic expansion that lifted tens of millions out of poverty in East Asia. Abe Shinzo, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister (and the grandson of a prime minister and son of a foreign minister) described the Japan–United States alliance as one that has given the world hope. He asked rhetorically, “What should we call this, if not a miracle of history? Enemies that had fought each other so fiercely have become friends bonded in spirit.”3

  I intended our meetings in San Francisco to serve as an implicit homage to what is known as the San Francisco System of U.S. alliances in East Asia. After World War II, that hub-and-spoke system of bilateral alliances included a range of political, economic, and military commitments with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia.4 U.S. officials appreciated the mutually beneficial nature of those alliances, labeling Japan the “cornerstone” and South Korea the “linchpin” for security and prosperity in Northeast Asia. Relations between the cornerstone and the linchpin remained tense, however, and Prime Minister Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishi inflamed those tensions when, in the late 1950s, as prime minister, he promoted postwar nationalist revisionism with acts such as dedicating a monument to Gen. Hideki Tojo and six other military leaders convicted and sentenced to death by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.

  Like Yachi, Chung had witnessed extraordinary changes as South Korea emerged from the decades of war and brutal occupation. Against all odds—destroyed infrastructure, a denuded countryside, illiteracy, and corrupt governance—the South Korean people created a thriving democracy and the fifth-largest economy in Asia. Between 1960 and 2020, the South Korean economy increased by a factor of 350, life expectancy rose from fifty-four to eighty-two years and the country saw the most dramatic rise in standard of living in modern history.5

  The Korean miracle, however, ended at the armistice line that divided North and South. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, only forty miles north of Seoul’s bustling streets, fewer than half of North Korea’s population have access to electricity, and residential plumbing remains a luxury exclusive to the upper class.6 Among children under the age of five, nearly 30 percent suffer stunted growth due to malnutrition.7 Meanwhile the North Korean regime distributes goods to the privileged few based on perceived loyalty. Those who demonstrate the highest loyalty live in relative comfort in Pyongyang, while others are condemned to lives of destitution and even starvation. The regime continues to prioritize its military, weapons programs, and even the building of monuments to the Kim family dictators over the welfare of its people.

  The South Korean and Japanese people, despite their tremendous success and their common commitment to
democratic governance and rule of law, are divided by difficult historical memories that create tensions in their relationship. Those tensions sometimes crept into the tenor of the discussions between two men who began their lives in the midst of devastating wars. I was determined to encourage a positive relationship between our allies and between Chung and Yachi. Tensions between Seoul and Tokyo would only benefit common adversaries. Beijing spoke of the U.S. alliance system in Asia as an irrelevant relic of the Cold War. The corollary to the Chinese narrative was that South Korea and Japan should resign themselves to China’s growing power.8 A rift between South Korea and Japan could allow China to drive a wedge between the United States and both allies and allow Beijing to pose as beneficent mediator even as it pursued primacy in Northeast Asia. Lack of unity among our three nations would also diminish both Beijing’s incentive to support denuclearization and Pyongyang’s fears that its nuclear and missile programs were driving the three nations together.

  The images and artifacts in the Marines’ Memorial Club Hotel underscored the importance of remembering our history. I hoped that these artifacts might allow us to reflect on our achievements and the shared values fundamental to those achievements. Moving beyond a painful past was necessary to overcome challenges of the present and build a better future.

  * * *

  MATT POTTINGER and I met separately with Chung and Yachi on Saturday afternoon. NSC director for Korea, Allison Hooker, joined us for the South Korea meeting, and our NSC director for Japan, Eric Johnson, attended the Japan meeting. Pottinger and I then joined Chung and Yachi and their “plus ones” for dinner together at the Leatherneck Steakhouse, on the hotel’s top floor. The spectacular view of the San Francisco skyline, along with good steaks and California pinot noir, helped dissipate some of the tension between Chung and Yachi that had accumulated since the last meeting. South Korea’s renewed calls for atonement and compensation for the Japanese occupation’s crimes from 1910 to 1945, including its use of Korean “comfort women” as wartime sex slaves and forced labor in Japanese industries, had elicited a defensive response from Japanese leaders, who felt that they had atoned already for the crimes of previous generations. Matt could always be counted on for a humorous story to break the ice, and the dinner allowed us to catch up on each other’s families and build strong personal relationships important to the work we had before us. Chung and Yachi were statesmen. They respected each other and were able to transcend the latest tumult in the South Korea–Japan relationship. We held our trilateral meeting the next morning, after which I would depart so Chung and Yachi could have time together without me.