North Korea, in its latest escalation of rhetoric against its southern neighbour and the United States, said yesterday that it has entered a “state of war” with South Korea.
This is a dangerous escalation of an already precarious situation
On Friday, North Korea, which is believed to possess nuclear weapons, put its missile units on standby to attack US military bases in South Korea and the Pacific, saying this was done after the United States flew two B-2 stealth bombers over the Korean peninsula.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un remarked that “the time has come to settle accounts with the US imperialists in view of the prevailing situation,” according to KCNA, the official North Korea news agency.
This is a dangerous escalation of an already precarious situation and the international community is fast running out of options to deal with North Korea. Russia has warned of the situation in North Korea slipping out of control, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying the state of affairs could slip “towards the spiral of a vicious circle”.
Tensions on the Korean peninsula have been rising fast since last December when North Korea fired a long-range rocket in defiance of a UN resolution passed in 2009 which banned Pyongyang from ballistic missile tests. Then last month North Korea conducted its third underground nuclear test (after tests in 2006 and 2009) in breach of UN sanctions and if full defiance of its ally China, which warned it not to go ahead with such a test.
Earlier this month the UN approved fresh sanctions on Pyongyang, and North Korea responded by saying it has the right to a “pre-emptive nuclear strike” on the US. The US and South Korea then began their annual joint military exercises and North Korea declared it had scrapped the 1950-1953 Korean War armistice, the truce that technically prevents North Korea and the US, along with its ally South Korea, resuming the war, as no peace treaty exists.
Ten days ago, in a sign of support for South Korea, the US flew two B-52 nuclear-capable bombers over the Korean peninsula. Television stations and banks in South Korea were then hit by a cyber attack, the origin of which remains unknown, but the indications are that it originated from North Korea.
On Wednesday, North Korea cut its military hotline with the US, South Korea and the UN, meaning there is now no official direct link between the two Koreas, and on Thursday, the US dispatched two B-2 stealth bombers over South Korea.
The planes flew from the US and back and were designed to show America’s ability to conduct long-range, precision strikes “quickly and at will”, the US military said in a statement.
US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel told the media on Thursday: “The North Koreans have to understand that what they’re doing is very dangerous. We must make clear that these provocations by the North are taken by us very seriously and we’ll respond to that.”
How seriously should the North Korea threat be taken? Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the non-proliferation and disarmament programme at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said recently: “North Korea has a formidable arsenal, with the world’s fourth-largest army, probably the third-largest stockpile of chemical weapons, possibly biological weapons, and an array of ballistic missiles with which it can project power far from its shores.
“But those missiles cannot reach the continental United States, and the intermediate-range missiles that might be able to reach Alaska have not been tested.”
North Korean missiles, however, can strike targets in Japan and South Korea, where 28,500 US troops are deployed. It is also widely believed that North Korea does have a small stockpile of nuclear weapons and missiles capable of hitting Hawaii and the US territory of Guam.
There are, of course, no easy options in dealing with North Korea as it is not a normal state. A country that refers to Kim Il-sung, who has been dead for 20 years, (the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, today’s leader) as its ‘Eternal President’ cannot be called normal.
It is a dynastic tyranny founded on a personality cult which super-secretive and is difficult to analyse and deal with.
North Korea is also littered with gulag camps where hundreds of thousands of political prisoners languish in appalling conditions and many thousands die every year through torture and starvation.
If there is one country where some type of intervention on humanitarian grounds would be justified, it is North Korea, ideally with a United Nations mandate.
It is very doubtful that any sort of reasonable deal can be ever reached with North Korea. Unfortunately, the country has a long history of lying to the international community, taking advantage of the concessions given to it and playing for time.
The only viable option today would seem to be containment, and convincing Pyongyang that it would suffer drastically should it threaten its neighbours and other members of the international community.
North Korea has made it a habit of bluffing and of threatening turmoil in a dynamic economic region of the world, and consequently getting concessions in return for toning down its rhetoric. Kim Jong-un wants to show his military that, like his father (Kim Jong-il) and grandfather, he too can force concessions from the United States.
US President Bill Clinton, for example, had cancelled the US-South Korean military exercises in order to appease North Korea, but that did not lead to any long-term change in Pyongyang’s behaviour.
China, of course, has a key role to play in exerting pressure on North Korea to act responsibly.
All indications point to the belief that China is highly embarrassed by the irrational behaviour of its long-time ally. The 2010 US diplomatic cable leaks from Wikileaks, for example, showed that China was ready to accept a unified Korea under Seoul’s control and that it believed Pyongyang was behaving like a “spoiled child” to get Washington’s attention in April 2009 by carrying out missile tests.
China needs to be urged by the international community to play its part in North Korea. A miscalculation by Pyongyang in this present game of bluff could lead to disastrous consequences; we need to avoid arriving at such a stage, so Beijing needs to act fast.
The US and EU (including Malta, which has close ties to China) must put pressure on Beijing to get its act together and live up to its international expectations.