While some South Koreans query the official version regarding the Cheonan, this time there was near-unanimity. Even the left-wing Hankyoreh Shinmun was harshly critical of Northern aggression. The longer-term political impact remains to be seen. Though President Lee is taking most flak for now, incidents like this do not help the centre-left opposition Democratic Party, which wants to return to the former ‘sunshine’ policy of engaging the North.
With reports that the radar and some howitzers on Yeonpyeong had not worked, the defence minister Kim Tae-yong, who had offered his resignation in May over the Cheonan, suddenly found it accepted on November 25. Replacing him was a mess. Reports by the semi-official Yonhap newsagency initially indicated that President Lee had appointed his top security adviser, Lee Hee-won. But in fact the new defence minister is Kim Kwan-jin, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If personnel and communications in Seoul are such a shambles, one must hope their defences are in better shape.
America sends gunboats
In a show of solidarity and force, the aircraft carrier USS George Washington and accompanying vessels sailed in for joint exercises with ROK forces. Some feared this would ratchet up tensions rather than ease them; yet to do nothing would suggest weakness. Prudently, these war games are being held well south of the disputed sea border.
Pyongyang’s predictable rhetorical riposte to these moves could be summarised as ‘Bring it on!’ The North’s military had declared that ‘the Korean People’s Army will deal without hesitation the second and third strong physical retaliatory blow if the South Korean puppet warmongers commit another reckless military provocation out of all reason.’ There were also reports that the North had readied surface-to-surface missile batteries on its west coast.
China calms the waters
By contrast, China’s response this time was more muted than after the Cheonan. Then, its fierce opposition to US-ROK naval manoeuvres in the Yellow Sea, supposedly too close to its own coast for comfort, caused the allies rather ignominiously to retreat to waters on the other side of the peninsula. No such deference was on the cards a second time. Beijing’s own response showed elements of disarray. Foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, abruptly cancelled an already planned trip to Seoul.
But days later, State Councillor Dai Bingguo, who outranks Yang Jiechi, flew to Seoul and met Lee Myung-bak. In a chilly if restrained tone, the Blue House reported that Lee ‘asked China to play a role to match its new status’, and urged Beijing to ‘act in a fairer and more responsible way in dealing with South-North Korea relations and contribute to peace on the Korean Peninsula.’
Ultimately hopes were dashed when China produced a dead rabbit from the hat: merely proposing an emergency session of the Six Party Talks (6PT). South Korea and its allies were underwhelmed. They want and need more, though what exactly – in the realms of the feasible – is unclear.
Meanwhile China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported that a top DPRK official, Choe Tae-bok, Party secretary and chairman of the Supreme People’s Assembly, has headed to Beijing for a five-day visit.
Escalation, with no provocation
North Korea claimed to be reacting to the South’s having first fired live artillery shells into ‘Northern’ waters, and said it had warned Seoul to desist before shooting back. But this is entirely specious.
The background here is that the North has never accepted the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de facto marine border set by the United Nations Command after the Korean War. Instead it claims a line of its own, extending the land-based Military Demarcation Line westwards. This puts Yeonpyeong and other islands – including Baengnyeong, off which the Cheonan sank – in Northern waters.
Both Koreas hold regular military drills. In this case the South and the US were engaged in their regular Hoguk joint exercise, held every year. The North always complains about such manoeuvres claiming they are a prelude to invasion. For the analyst, the key issue is whether either side ups the ante by doing something out of the ordinary. There is no evidence that the ROK-US side did that this time, nor did Pyongyang accuse them of this. The allies fired inside South Korean waters, southwest of Yeonpyeong on the opposite side from the North Korean coast. The North did not even claim that any of its ships were a target, merely that Yeonpyeong’s coastal waters were its own.
Mixed motives
This attack is thus a dramatic and deliberate escalation by North Korea. There is speculation on Kim Jong-il’s motives, and the likely balance between domestic and external goals. The former might include boosting the prestige of Kim’s third son and successor Kim Jong-eun among a military who may well remain sceptical of this untried youth, despite his implausible promotion in September to the rank of a four-star general.
Yet in foreign policy terms it is hard to see what Pyongyang hopes to gain. On that front it had already achieved far more, less aggressively and more subtly, with a quite different story.
A worrying glimpse
Dr Siegfried Hecker, a leading US physicist, was recently taken to North Korea’s main nuclear site at Yongbyon. The good news is that several facilities linked to past plutonium-based activity, hitherto the main concern, are no longer in use. The bad news was what has replaced this. With a show of reluctance, but on orders from the top in Pyongyang, local scientists hurried Hecker and his team through an ultra-modern plant for enriching uranium, with up to 2,000 centrifuges operating. This hitherto unsuspected site is brand-new, built to world-class standards in barely 18 months since IAEA inspectors were kicked out of Yongbyon. Despite claims that this is to provide fuel for a new light water reactor, the clear signal intended is that North Korea is much further down a second route to nuclear weapons – via highly enriched uranium – than anyone had imagined.
No longer the same horse
Dr Hecker’s report put the cat among Washington’s pigeons. President Obama hastily dispatched his special adviser on North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, for consultations in Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing. On its own, this new revelation would surely have pressured all three allies to rethink their reluctance to return to the six party talks absent a change of heart by Pyongyang. The US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, has said that America will not buy the same horse twice. In that sense Kim Jong-il was showing off a fresh thoroughbred. This is potentially a game-changer.
By contrast, the attack on Yeonpyeong makes resumption of dialogue more difficult. Robert Madsen of MIT suggests that the shelling enabled North Korea to swiftly change the agenda, from the nuclear issue in particular to tensions on the peninsula more generally. This buys it more time to press on with enriching uranium; rather than being summoned urgently to fresh talks and told to stop.
From another angle, North Korea’s philosophy of juche is often translated as self-reliance, but that is misleading: the DPRK has always needed, demanded and taken other people’s money. Its abiding aim is to do this yet at the same time remain unbeholden to anyone. Pyongyang is adept at finding and exploiting whatever wiggle room it can.
Its provocations are thus carefully calculated and calibrated. Even as Kim Jong-il draws ever closer to China, he needs to signal that despite a still delicate and incomplete succession, nobody messes with the DPRK. The fallout from the Cheonan – or rather the lack of any – may have been read in Pyongyang as a licence to provoke further. Now as then, the gamble is that South Koreans have no stomach for a fight and Lee Myung-bak dare not upset financial markets, much less risk a robust retaliation that might rain down artillery fire and missiles on Seoul itself. In a word, the KPA shelled Yeonpyeong because they knew they could get away with it.
They must be careful not to prod China too far, but neither the Cheonan nor Yeonpyeong seems to have done that. Cornered and out of road by any normal standards, the Kims will keep trying to push the envelope as worst they can.
Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds University, and a freelance consultant, writer and broadcaster on Korean affairs.
A longer version of this article first appeared here, at NewNations.com, whose permission is gratefully acknowledged.