 Professor Christoph Bluth | Image: Daily NK |
Inter-Korean relations today betray a very evident lack of “Trustpolitik.”
The headline North Korea policy of the incumbent administration of President
Park Geun Hye has achieved little to date, and questions linger over whether it
is even possible. All the while, North Korea continues to grow and improve its
nuclear capacity.
On June 1st, Daily NK met British expert Professor
Christoph Bluth of the University of Bradford to talk more about the ongoing
clash between notions of “Trustpolitik” and on-the-ground reality on the Korean Peninsula.
With a
history dating back to PhD research into Soviet strategic arms policy in the
1980s, Prof. Bluth is well placed to comment on the latest inter-Korean conflict.
It is hard to overcome the feeling that President Park’s Trustpolitik is just not specific enough to achieve concrete results.
On the liberal side, there is recognition
that expectations of engagement have to be limited for the time being, and that we can’t expect rapid progress. It’s unclear what exactly engagement is meant to achieve. On the conservative side, meanwhile, Lee Myung Bak’s policy produced even worse results than Roh Moo Hyun’s. You have to find ways to
re-engage with North Korea.
Kim Dae Jung was very sound on this. He separated
economics from military and security, because he knew that economic engagement has its
own logic. It has nothing to do with security: it provides you with a means of interacting with North Korea, and [avoids] pushing North Korea into the
arms of China, which is not in the long term interest of South Korea. Doing so was a big
mistake by Lee, and Park Geun Hye is trying to find a way to correct that.
But the difficulty is that “Trustpolitik” is not coherent. It doesn’t really offer any new ways of
interacting with North Korea; it is simply saying that we want to engage. North Korea is not the kind of partner
that we can develop trust with, though. It’s just not possible, because they cannot be
trusted, and while we know what they want, what they want is unacceptable to us.
People have looked at trying to build systems of collective security or other collective arrangements, but these fail because North Korea never internalizes the norms involved. As soon as they decide that membership of any
organization constrains its options, they
just abandon it. One of the keys to institutionalism is that states
begin to believe in the institutions involved, but that never happens with North Korea. They
see institutions as political instruments that may be useful for certain periods of time.
So “Trustpolitik” is intellectually
implausible. However, on the other hand everybody understands
that there is no alternative to some form of engagement.
Engagement with North Korea can mitigate tensions, and you simply have to look at it from the
long term perspective. North Korea is going to change from the bottom not the top.
I think Park has been unlucky, though, because she assumed power at the height of Kim Jong Eun’s struggle to establish himself as leader of North Korea.
In that sense, is President Barack Obama’s policy of strategic
patience right?
Yes and no. As far as crisis is concerned,
yes. But you don’t want to get to the point where North Korea acquires a credible
strike capability against the continental U.S. That would change the strategic
equation. Although it is going to be extremely hard to get North
Korea to abandon its nuclear programs entirely, I think it is possible to limit them.
North Korea is not likely to strike the continental U.S., though.
It’s not about the military
reality but the political reality. They don’t currently have ICBM capabilities, and at the moment the cost of extending the nuclear deterrent to South Korea and Japan is limited. However, if North Korea were to acquire a demonstrated or proven
capacity to attack the continental U.S., that would change the potential costs of
nuclear deterrent provision.
Moreover, it may also encourage the U.S. to be much
more proactive militarily against North Korea. If the Americans had any concern that North Korea
might actually strike, they would come down on North Korea with preemptive
strikes. So this is very dangerous game.
Also, if, as a result
of North Korean capabilities, South Korea and Japan became less
secure in their belief in the American deterrent, they would feel more
political pressure to develop their own deterrents, and that would again risk very serious consequences.
Park Geun Hye is trying to very hard to control relations with North Korea. It is not possible to engage in any major new initiatives in any case, as the political climate is too hostile. Obviously she is under a lot of pressure at home because of North Korea’s behavior, and that’s
very difficult to manage. It seems to me that she’s been very
careful; however, one South Korean official did say that North Korea is not really a
country and it will come to an end soon. That was a slip. It’s good to know
that this is what they think, but it means the mechanism of control
failed.
Overall, South Korea doesn’t appear to have much room to maneuver.
This is a strategic game being played on many different levels. Most of the things
that happen have to do with the internal dynamics of the regime. North Korea is a failed country whose regime has to invent more and more new ways of maintaining
itself. The other level is the inter-Korean level, and I think a lot of it comes down to geopolitics; the U.S. and South Korea and China have to
find agreement on the future of Korea.
Although the Obama administration is trying quite hard, they haven’t really managed to convince the Chinese that on some of
these geopolitical issues, they really should view them in a
different way
