by Kim Ghattas
If the green signs were meant to encourage motorists to let the clueless foreigners through, they failed. As soon as we departed from the hotel, the back of the long motorcade was separated from officials at the front by a swarm of cars that jutted in between our buses. Our bus drivers were not embassy employees, and despite the police escort, they did not feel empowered to drive through red lights.
The State Department media handlers on our buses were frantically e-mailing their colleagues in the cars up ahead to inform them that the press was trailing behind. Without the journalists, there would be no photos of the event. News eventually reached Fred, in the secretary’s car, and the front of the motorcade slowed down to a snail’s pace on the highway while the rest of us caught up.
Bernadette Meehan was the line officer with us on her first advance trip. She had moved back to Washington recently from Dubai. During the long car ride, her mind raced with the same thoughts that troubled all her colleagues. Did she have the number of the site officer at the next stop saved in her phone? Did she have a set of earpieces with her for the secretary for the translation at the press conference later? Did she remember to tell the secretary that Gates was getting into her car when they reached the DMZ? Did she check that the toilet was clean and the door unlocked at the Freedom House building? Did she tell the site officer at the observation post to make sure they took off the lens caps before handing the binoculars to the two secretaries? Did she have her briefing paper for the next event? She thought of everything, again and again, nine hundred times. All night, she had tossed and turned going through every minute of the day. Every mundane detail mattered. It could be tomorrow’s headline or front-page picture. The power was in the details, and she was in charge of them
The visit to the border with North Korea had been conceived as a message, a photo opportunity to project American power in Asia but also to poke North Korea in the eye. Behind the strutting was some frustration. For more than a year now, the Obama administration had tried to get Pyongyang to sit down again for talks about giving up its nuclear program. There had been many rounds of negotiations before 2009, but the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, was recalcitrant and wary of giving up leverage. Without nukes, he was nothing, just another dictator with a famished people on a territory of no consequence. If he was to give them up, he wanted something big in return, like eternal American friendship. He demanded attention with erratic behavior like firing missiles or sinking South Korean ships.
The DMZ is a two-mile-wide buffer zone through which runs the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), one of the last two remaining Cold War–era dividing lines splitting a country into north and south. The other is the Green Line that divides the island of Cyprus. There are many other tense borders between countries around the world, between Lebanon and Israel, or Pakistan and India. At the Wagah crossing, Pakistani and Indian officers mount an elaborate daily drama, standing eyeball to eyeball, in colorful costumes, as they shut the border crossing between the two countries at dusk, to the sound of horns, while villagers and tourists on both sides cheer and clap wildly.
But the MDL had separated one people into two countries for so long that they had become two people—the north was poor, ravaged by famine. Scientists found that North Koreans had become a few inches shorter than their cousins to the south. South Korea, meanwhile, had prospered into the world’s fourteenth-largest economy, its well-fed people growing taller by a few inches. Seen from the sky at night, North Korea was a dark spot with one speck of light, Pyongyang. On Google maps, the North was one large, unknown patch of white while the South was bright and covered in a yellowish-orange grid of highways and roads.
Like at Wagah, North and South Korean soldiers came face-to-face, in one location along the 160-mile line splitting their country—the Joint Security Area (JSA) in the abandoned village of Panmunjom. Also known as the Truce Village, it was a circular enclave that straddled the demarcation line, and we were heading there with Clinton and Gates. Despite the lush greenery on both sides, the area felt barren and desolate, bristling with hostility. Signs warned about land mines. The drizzle added a feeling of despair.
While we waited below in the “village,” the limousine carrying Clinton and Gates drove up the hill to Observation Post Ouellette, a small outpost with a watchtower, overlooking the northern side of the DMZ. In the front seat, Fred’s eyes scanned his surroundings carefully. The American and South Korean soldiers from the UN mission were on full alert, but he had ultimate responsibility for his package. North Korean soldiers from the Korean People’s Army were easily provoked, and the Joint Security Area had been the scene of several violent incidents over the years, including the gruesome “axe murder” incident in 1976, when North Korean soldiers seized axes being used by a UN team to prune a tree and killed two American soldiers. Since then, the demarcation line was enforced within the JSA, which had been a neutral zone until then; South and North Koreans now had to stick to their side of the area. There had been no violence since the 1980s, but the North was unpredictable and on edge following the condemnation it had faced after the Cheonan sinking.
Holding a large black umbrella, Clinton walked up the steps to the observation post, ringed by low walls covered in camouflage netting. Gates followed, and the two of them shook hands with the soldiers manning the post. Fred stopped halfway up the stairs, staying out of the range of the camera lenses. The drizzle stopped briefly, the umbrellas were put away, the two secretaries were handed binoculars, and perfect pictures were produced: America’s war and peace envoys, wearing a matching red tie and a red coral necklace, respectively, standing at the frontier of liberty, peering into the distance, with the American, UN, and Republic of Korea (ROK) flags fluttering on tall poles behind them.
In the Truce Village below, a cluster of rectangular blue one-story huts with windows straddled the demarcation line. ROK soldiers from the Joint Security Area stood guard, positioned at the southern corners of the buildings, half their bodies hidden by the stark structures. The stance was meant to give the North a smaller area to target and allow the soldiers to signal to the South if needed. A modified tae kwon do stance, known as ROK-ready position, it signaled readiness to fight or to take cover if needed. The soldiers maintained it as long as there were visitors in the JSA, including inside the buildings.
Gates, Clinton, and their South Korean counterparts were escorted into one of the blue huts: the Military Armistice Commission building, where talks take place between North and South around a green-felt-covered conference table. One door opened onto the South, the other onto the North.
Inside, a soldier also stood in an ROK-ready position, with his back against the blue door that opened onto the other side—the “Paradise for People.” Why would any North Korean want to leave paradise for the South? But if they did, they’d have to walk over his dead body. The soldier kept his fists clenched and his reflective sunglasses on, even indoors, no winks or smiles, no humanity. To the North Koreans, he looked cold and ruthless; he was the enemy incarnate. It was almost comical, except that people were dying on both sides of the demarcation line, which, in this building, ran through a table.
Peering through the window, an unusually tall North Korean soldier stood outside, likely wondering what the commotion was all about. This was a popular tourist destination, like Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall. But tourists did not come with bulletproof cars or a retinue of bodyguards as this group did. North Koreans posted here were elite soldiers, and this soldier would have been briefed by his superiors when they picked up indications that a high-profile visit was being prepared. I couldn’t help wondering whether he recognized Hillary. Had he seen pictures of her? What did he know about the outside world? What did he wish for?
Fed a steady diet of propaganda about America’s evil designs on his country, the soldier may have simply wanted to make sure no one crossed into his territory. For a few minutes, he was unsuccessful. Clinton and Gates had stepped to the North’s side of the blue roo
m. They were in North Korea. They did not look back at the soldier, though Gates, a slightly mischievous smile on his face, seemed to have trouble resisting doing just that.
We drove back into Seoul, for a visit to the twenty-thousand-square-foot War Memorial of Korea, part war museum, part history lesson, about the many wars that have shaped Korea over the centuries until the Korean War of the 1950s. The conflict killed hundreds of thousands: almost 40,000 American soldiers were killed in action or missing, the South Koreans lost at least 45,000 soldiers, and several thousand from allied countries died, too. Over 700,000 Chinese and North Koreans died.
The soldiers who had died fighting for South Korea, against the advance of Communism, were remembered in a way reminiscent of the sober Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington. In a long outdoor gallery, tall black panels set against stone walls were engraved with the names of all the soldiers who had died, with a mention of the country or the American state.
As soon as we arrived, Clinton, Gates, and their entourage took a pause in a room inside the museum. They were going to pay a choreographically complex homage around the large memorial, and though they’d received a printed briefing from their teams—in Hillary’s case, her usual truncated briefing checklist—Bernadette was going to walk them through it one final time.
Clinton outranked Gates in the cabinet, but the secretary of defense was very easygoing and followed Clinton’s schedule and preferences without complaint. Hillary could power through the day and munch on an apple or a sandwich in the car until there was a break in the schedule for a meal or until she was done for the day: she didn’t need to eat at a set time. But Gates had one demand: he needed to stop for twenty minutes for lunch. Two packed lunches had been arranged: a burger and fries for him, a chicken sandwich for Clinton. Bernadette had gobbled down a packet of trail mix, and now the two secretaries ate while listening to her instructions about stages, bells ringing, and rope lines.
Outside, the traveling press corps was also being briefed about the event, the photographer and cameraman so they knew how the subject of their pictures was going to move and the rest of us so that we could make sure to stay out of the shot.
Perfect pictures of Clinton and Gates at the DMZ and at the memorial ran on the front pages of South Korea’s morning papers. The United States had just slapped more sanctions on North Korea. The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington was docked in the southern port of Busan. In just a few days, 8,000 American and South Korean troops would come together for a large military training exercise, Invincible Spirit, with a U.S. Navy carrier as well as the South Korean air force and submarines. That was on top of the 28,500 American troops already stationed in South Korea.
The South Koreans would sleep better tonight. Their big, powerful friend was there, its reassuring presence and soothing words giving them strength in the face of their belligerent northern cousins and their Chinese protector. It looked like it was all just a show, but there was an imperceptible yet definite shift under way in the region.
* * *
From Afghanistan and Pakistan to South Korea, we were now moving on to Vietnam. Our trip was a tour of America’s wars, past and present. The Obama administration saw America’s future very much tied to the Pacific area. For Clinton, there were also lessons to be drawn from the past.
“We saw South Korea struggle to become a functioning democracy—huge amounts of instability, coups, corruption, scandal, you name it,” Clinton said.
“I think it’s good to remind ourselves that the United States has stood with countries that went through a lot of ups and downs for a lot longer than eight years, and it is important to recognize what’s at stake … in Afghanistan. This is a country that we left before, much to our dismay, and we can’t do it again.”
Hillary had a keen eye and memory for detail, but she always tried to look at the bigger picture. Success can be elusive for decades, but eventually, with careful work, she believed things would fall into place. A country once as hostile to the United States as it could have been, Vietnam now welcomed Clinton to celebrate fifteen years of friendship with the United States. The past seemed to weigh much less on Southeast Asia than it did on Pakistan or the Middle East.
* * *
Clinton was also in Vietnam for another serving of alphabet soup. ASEAN and TAC were back. As promised in February 2009, she had signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and attended several Asian summits already; goodwill toward the United States was on the rise in a region where symbolic gestures meant a lot. Almost simultaneously, countries were also coming closer to the United States because a giant was awakening in their region.
For decades, China has sparred with neighbors around the South China Sea over the Spratly and Paracel island chains. Chinese forces seized the western Paracels from Vietnam in 1974 and sank three Vietnamese naval vessels in a sea battle in 1988. China had recently announced plans to develop the islands for tourism. Vietnam was furious because it had never recognized China’s control over the Paracels. The South China Sea provided rich fishing grounds and was believed to have large oil and natural gas reserves. Busy sea-lanes were also a crucial conduit for resources feeding China’s economy. In March, the Chinese government had told American officials at the White House to stay out of the South China Sea. They would solve any dispute with individual countries. At the S&ED in May, Hillary had heard the same message. The Chinese were elevating the South China Sea to a key national interest, at the same level as Taiwan and Tibet, and they were starting to serve notice to other countries to back off.
Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and others were looking for help and for strength in numbers, and the United States saw an opportunity to push back against China. Hillary, Kurt, and Jake worked with all the Asian representatives to choreograph carefully their approach to the Chinese during one of the meetings. The Asian countries would speak first. Clinton would go last. One after the other, the Asian ministers voiced their anger and concern about China’s aggressive behavior on the high seas. The Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi was taken aback. As the session progressed, he got angrier. By the time Clinton spoke, he was furious. When it was his turn to speak, Yang Jiechi was still fuming at the temerity of the small countries that had brought up the South China Sea, twelve in all. “China is a big country and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact,” said Yang, staring at his counterparts.
Chinese maps dating to before the Communist revolution appeared to place most of the South China Sea under Chinese sovereignty, and China was ready to reclaim its territory. Over the last couple of years, China’s swagger had grown. Beijing may not have wanted to be a superpower, but it was becoming more assertive. After initially fawning over the new American president and working to make the transition of ties successful, the Chinese government had sized up the Obama administration, its conciliatory tone, its attempts to reach out to foes, Hillary’s apparent soft-pedaling on human rights, and, most of all, the financial crisis of 2008. Weighing all of this, it concluded it could push America around. There had been much debate among ruling officials in Beijing about American decline and many of them believed it was indeed happening. The coordinated move during a diplomatic meeting behind closed doors took the Chinese by surprise.
“The United States, like every nation, has a national interest in freedom of navigation, open access to Asia’s maritime commons, and respect for international law in the South China Sea,” Clinton said a bit later during a press conference at the end of the summit. She was only getting started.
“The United States supports a collaborative diplomatic process for all claimants to resolve the various territorial disputes without coercion,” she went on. “We encourage the parties to reach agreement on a full code of conduct. The U.S. is prepared to facilitate initiatives and confidence building measures consistent with the [2002 joint China-ASEAN] declaration.”
The United States? Facilitate initiatives? The Chinese were livid. No
t only was the United States carrying out naval exercises with South Korea in China’s own backyard, but now America was wading into an Asian family dispute. Washington was supposed to be retreating from the world, not sailing into the Pacific. Something had gone terribly wrong.
Suddenly, China the rising Asian giant looked very lonely. Though it shared borders with fourteen countries, when it looked around, China saw no real allies, no one it really shared values with, no one it could count on. China was standing in a crowded room and was utterly lonely. Over the last century, China had been at war with India, Russia, and Japan. None of these countries really liked or trusted each other. Sure, Pakistan was a friend, but it was a heap of problems. And North Korea and Burma were in a whole different category.
China’s ruling Communist Party was obsessed first and foremost with its own survival. Its leaders needed to keep 1.3 billion people fed, housed, and happy enough so that they wouldn’t threaten the stability of the regime. Nationalism was frequently used to dismiss criticism of the current system as part of a historic conspiracy by foreigners to denigrate China. The bellicose behavior on the South China Sea fed into that narrative, helping the party’s quest to look powerful and to stay in power. Chinese officials seemed unwilling or unable to make conciliatory gestures toward their neighbors to calm their fears. Suddenly, America seemed a much more appealing superpower to China’s neighbors, and China lost an opportunity to take the lead in the region. Instead of becoming an Asian giant that could challenge Western hegemony, China remained a scary ogre.