Tensions Simmer Despite High-Level Diplomacy
By Tim Shorrock
WASHINGTON, May 21 — With the leaders of South Korea and Japan paying back-to-back visits to Washington to meet with U.S. President George W Bush, tensions continue to mount on the Korean peninsula over North Korea's nuclear weapons programmes and the U.S. refusal to sign a non-aggression treaty with Pyongyang.
In the United States, hawkish elements led by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are becoming more public about the need for regime change in North Korea and the possibility of a military strike if the multilateral talks that began in April in Beijing fail to reach an agreement.
North Korea's admission that it has several bombs, its veiled threats to export missiles and nuclear weapons and its apparent involvement in selling drugs and counterfeit money to other Asian nations has also alarmed many U.S. analysts who are in favour of direct talks.
Earlier in May, members of a task force assembled by the Council on Foreign Relations issued a report saying that if negotiations fail, the United States might have to resort to economic sanctions, a naval blockade or even air strikes.
In Japan, the possibility of a nuclear-armed North Korea has emboldened conservatives who have been pushing for years for a stronger military.
In mid-May, Japan's lower house passed the first law authorising Japan's Self-Defence Forces to respond to attacks from abroad. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party is pushing for tougher policies that could include sanctions and building a missile defence shield.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visits Bush with those issues high on their agenda.
Meanwhile, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun returned to Seoul after his trip to Washington in mid-May with little to show from his meeting with Bush. Roh stuck to his formula to maintain economic cooperation and Bush refused to take military options off the table.
But even South Korea is getting wary. Prime Minister Goh Kun told his North Korean counterpart on May 19 that inter-Korean exchanges "will be hurt if the North Korean nuclear issue deteriorates".
But amidst the gloom, there is growing interest among some analysts that the solution to ending the nuclear standoff and bringing North Korea into the global community may lie in increasing economic and social integration in North-east Asia.
They believe that a multilateral attempt by the three countries surrounding Korea — Japan, Russia and China — to harness energy, transportation and construction projects to create an integrated economic zone could lead to long-term peace and prevent a disastrous, destructive war in Korea.
"If North Korea gets a big carrot, North Korea will change," said Tamotsu Nakano, a former official with the U.N. Industrial Development Organisation and chief researcher at KRI International in Tokyo, a consulting firm that has studied the concept in detail. "This region could change from a black hole to a last frontier."
Nakano, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, laid out his proposal at a Washington forum sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in mid-May. He believes the region could begin by tapping the huge reservoirs of natural gas in the Russian Far East — which has over 20 percent of the world's reserves - and export it by pipeline to China and through North Korea into South Korea.
That would accomplish two things, he said: lessening China's dependence on coal, which supplies 40 percent of its fuel needs, and bringing badly needed economic development to North Korea through the pipeline.
"North Korea really likes this kind of project," he said. "If we lay a natural gas pipeline through the Korean peninsula, North Korea could really get some concrete confidence-building measures."
Nakano sees many other possibilities of regional linkage, including telecommunications, electric power grids and tourism development.
One problem for North-east Asia, Nakano argued, is the lack of coordination between Russia and its communist neighbours on one hand, and the United States, Japan and South Korea on the other.
The first group of countries has supported the Tumen River economic zone in the region where Russia, China and North Korea meet, while the latter have been the moving force behind the Korea Energy Development Organisation (KEDO), which was set up in the 1990s to build the light-water reactors designed to resolve the first nuclear crisis with North Korea.
That project is now virtually dead, and the Tumen River project has received little interest from foreign investors.
"So the Cold War structure is still remaining in Asia," said Nakano. "We must integrate these different types of projects" by combining KEDO-like projects in North Korea with energy, transport and other projects linking the five countries in North-east Asia plus the United States.
To do so, Nakano said the countries in North-east Asia would have to start a new international organisation similar to Japan's proposals a decade ago for a regional Asian bank - a plan that was shot down by the U.S. administration of President Bill Clinton.
He estimated the costs of his proposals at around 10 billion U.S. dollars a year for the next 10 to 20 years. That would spark rapid economic development and "make North Korea able to become a member of international society", he said.
"Ten billion dollars is very high, but compared to the war engagement policy of the Bush administration and the reconstruction job in Iraq of 20 billion dollars, that's a reasonable sum to pay for a peaceful resolution of the crisis, he said. "It's much better to start preventive diplomacy and cooperative security."
In Washington, the idea of integrating North Korea into the Asian economy through a pipeline has been promoted by Selig Harrison, a specialist on North Korea and the author of the recent book, 'Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement'.
In an intriguing development on May 19, the North Korean government signed a memorandum of understanding with Asia Brown Boveri of Switzerland to modernise its electric power network.
While such projects may indicate that North Korea is interested in engagement with other countries, they also underscore that North-east Asia's economic ties are much stronger with countries outside of the region.
Tsuneo Akaha, a professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, said that economically, "Japan and China and South Korea are integrated outside their region far greater than inside."
He argued that international relations in that corner of Asia are "driven by states, not markets". He added: "Until this dynamic changes, developing a market-based, private-sector oriented institution of a multilateral nature will be extremely difficult." (Inter Press Service)
