North Korea’s (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — DPRK)
continuing efforts to maintain political and military pressure on
the United States is difficult for Washington to understand. It
seems so simple in American terms: Pyongyang needs only to reduce
its military power, primarily in the field of nuclear weapon
development and missile delivery systems, and investment and aid
will flow into the North. The problem with this thesis is that
the DPRK leadership needs confrontation with South Korea
(Republic of Korea — ROK) and the U.S. to maintain control of
their country.
For sixty years North Korea has held itself in a state of
war, physically and legally. No peace treaty was ever signed
after the original Korean War armistice of 1953 and Pyongyang has
never allowed the world to forget that fact. That’s Pyongyang’s
ultimate justification for the torpedoing in March of the ROK
patrol warship, Cheonan. The DPRK Navy had been waiting
for a chance to retaliate for an embarrassing confrontation with
South Korean naval forces in November 2009, in which a North
Korean armed patrol vessel was badly mauled in a firefight with
an ROK naval vessel in disputed waters off the western end of
South Korea near the ROK-held island of Daecheong.
If Pyongyang had wanted to create an incident to provoke a
war they would have followed up with further military action
after the latest torpedoing incident. Instead they reacted
comparatively mildly by breaking economic ties and denying
commercial airline overflights. At the same time the Kaesong
joint industrial park project that accounts for more than half of
the trade between the two Koreas was left open. Some South Korean
workers were expelled, however, which will
cause local difficulty — but that’s the
extent of it.
Another possible reason for the sinking of the South Korean
warship — for which Pyongyang denies any responsibility in spite
of detailed analyses by international teams — is the desire on
the part of Kim Jong-il to assert his family’s continued
commitment to the military ethos of their leadership. The timing
would appear to be linked to the evolving succession of Kim
Jong-il’s third son, Kim Jong-eun.
The Western world may have moved beyond the concept of
military power as a guiding principle of internal political
authority, but the revolutionary theme of the deified Great
Leader Kim Il-sung was based firmly on the concept of
Korean resistance to all invaders. To be eligible to lead in the
shadow of the still dominant example of the nation’s founder, the
power to “resist” must be regularly exhibited. This is the tenet
Kim Jong-il has followed and the one that he seeks to inculcate
in his own son and heir.
This doctrine is the essence of the contemporary North
Korean political philosophy known as juche. Sovereignty,
resistance, and autonomy are the pillars of the self-reliance and
self-determination on which the ideology of juche rests.
Kim Il-sung firmly believed in this principle
and since his death has become for his countrymen the embodiment
of its spirit. As North Koreans are regimented to attest, the
Great Leader lives on through these beliefs.
Along with a quasi-religious commitment to the rectitude of
their philosophy goes an extremely well disciplined ability to
carry on their war in what occidental minds would consider a
non-physical sense. While the United States struggles to iron out
terms of agreement to build a peaceful relationship, the North
Koreans work at creating obstacles at each step — even when
appearing to agree.
The North Koreans use the American efforts to seek common
ground with the DPRK as simply a playing field for a game of
their own choosing. In this process the argument can be
reinforced or diverted by both intellectual and physical action.
Exploding an underground nuclear device on last year’s Memorial
Day weekend punctuated the so-called negotiation on the North’s
nuclear weapon development.
The new Obama government was surprised and shocked. The
South Koreans explained the ploy to Washington and countered with
their own attack six months later on a North Korean patrol
vessel. Washington finds the negotiating process endlessly
frustrating — as the North Korean counterparts intend. Even the
effort to pull together a new round of six-party talks is replete
with obstacles. Secretary of State Clinton brought a 400-page
analysis to meetings with the Chinese to prove the sinking of the
ROK vessel was done by a DPRK submarine. Of course, Chinese
intelligence officers stationed in Pyongyang already knew
that.
Pyongyang just says it’s all lies while the Americans
continue to believe that the two sides actually are negotiating
toward some mutually acceptable end. President Obama greeted the
news of the torpedoing of the Cheonan by what he
considers a forceful response when he characterized the military
operation as an “act of aggression …one more instance of North
Korea’s unacceptable behavior and defiance of international
law.”
Meanwhile a leaked United Nations report states Pyongyang
is using front companies to export nuclear and missile technology
to Iran, Syria, and Burma. After all this time Washington is
still asking the same question: “Why are the North Koreans doing
this?” And Pyongyang just carries on its war.
