In the aftermath of the Cheonan incident, the U.S. and China verbally attacked each other.

When Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that “China says sometimes yes and sometimes no” relating to the necessity for U.S.-China cooperation in Asia, a Chinese general rebutted by saying that the U.S. was hypocritical in criticizing North Korea in the Cheonan incident but not Israel for the latter’s commando raid on a Gaza flotilla.

After the G8 Summit, President Obama said that there is “a difference between restraint and willful blindness,” a reference to China’s attitude toward North Korea’s military provocation. In response to this criticism, a Chinese official newspaper (the Global Times) asserted that “Obama is blind to the great risks posed to the Korean Peninsula by Washington’s confrontational approach. … Reassuring North Korea would be much better than putting pressure on it.”

The latest developments in the relations among the U.S., China and South and North Korea reflect the dynamics of the four-power relationship in the Korean Peninsula, which emerged after North Korea’s nuclear weapons program was exposed to the outside world.

This four-power relationship is characterized by the following patterns: First, the more conflictive South-North Korean relations become, the closer both U.S.-South Korean relations and Chinese-North Korean relations become, and the more dependent South and North Korea become on their respective allies. Second, the more conciliatory South and North Korea become, the less dependent they become on their respective partners.

One caveat here is that in relations with North Korea, China has more leverage in the economic field, but less leverage in the security field, because North Korea has developed nuclear capabilities. On the other hand, in relations with South Korea, the U.S. has more leverage in the military field, but less leverage in the economic field.

In a word, North Korea, with weapons of mass destruction, can afford to act more independently than South Korea without them. This is the reason China emphasizes reassurance rather than pressure.

During the Kim Dae-jung and Rho Moo-hyun administrations, South Korea maintained rapprochement under the Sunshine Policy; this made it possible for South and North Korea to pursue relatively independent policies from their respective partners. Therefore, it is not surprising that North Korea’s development of nuclear capabilities and South Korea’s demand for the transfer of war-time operational control and pursuit of self-sufficient military power accelerated during this period.

Now, under the Lee Myung-bak administration, South Korea pursues a more rigid policy toward North Korea and consequently inter-Korean relations have been aggravated. Tension in the Korean Peninsula has in turn made the two Koreas more dependent on their respective allies.

In South Korea and even in the U.S., there has been a fierce debate on whether the sunshine policy of the Kim and Rho administrations or the denuclearization-opening-3,000 policy of the Lee administration is responsible for the increasing tension on the Korean Peninsula and the nuclear stalemate. The conservatives support the first view and the progressives the second. Both views are very simplistic.

In order to find the answer to the question, the factors that determine the pattern of the four-power relationship need to be examined. First, the Sunshine Policy is based on the premise that the engagement policy can gradually open up North Korean society and finally transform the North Korean political system. In contrast, Lee’s three-stage approach demands that North Korea demonstrate its trustworthiness by opening its society and abandoning its nuclear program. This is based on the conviction that if not, trust between the two Koreas cannot be built.

Both conservatives and progressives agree that distrust is the root cause of the tension, but they disagree on the means to build trust. Deep distrust between the two Koreas has been built over a long period of time through the spiral of a stimulus-response process between the two sides. In the process, the North Korean political system has developed into an extremely closed and autistic totalitarian autocracy, despite the collapse of the communist bloc and partially because of it.

The hereditary leadership of North Korea believes that the best way to preserve its political system is to close itself from the outside world and possess WMDs. In this sense, the Chinese newspaper’s comment that North Korea has “anxieties and nervousness toward the outside world” is a correct observation.

In a situation where North Korea is losing self-confidence and accommodating South Korea’s engagement policy to an extremely limited extent, while South Korea is becoming more self-confident and becoming more and more impatient about North Korea’s rigid behavior, the engagement is not likely to succeed in inducing North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program and open up its society. Nor is the containment policy likely to be successful. A better approach is an eclectic one concentrating on a non-military containment, while employing “smart diplomacy” through which South Korea cooperates closely with the U.S. and utilizing the U.N. and other international forums.

In the present situation, both the U.S. and China are more sensitive about the status quo than before. This implies that they prefer the preservation of the status quo to a coercive measure toward North Korea. One difference is that China can live with a nuclear North Korea but the U.S. and South Korea can’t.

In this regard, the China-North Korea relationship is similar to the U.S.-Israel relationship: It is a guardian-minor relationship. Just as the U.S. sides with Israel in the Arab-Israel conflict, so does China with North Korea in the Korean conflict. In this situation, the best option for the U.S. is that it negotiates directly with North Korea.

Park Sang-seek

Park Sang-seek is a professor at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University. -- Ed.

코리아헤럴드/2010년7월6일