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General News    H3'ed 5/21/18

Tomgram: John Feffer, Korea's Two "Impossibles"

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And yet, don't fool yourself (even if most of Washington does): the upcoming Trump-Kim summit, if it happens, will represent an extraordinarily important step forward, whether it actually produces an agreement of substance or not. It may not end the longest ongoing conflict in U.S. history, but that's really not the point. The summit's importance lies largely in its symbolic encouragement of another process entirely, one already underway between the two Koreas. U.S. observers remain focused on nuclear weapons, but nukes aren't actually the key issue here. In fact, for all the talk about Donald Trump getting a Nobel Prize, to put events in perspective you need to remember that the American president is, at best, a third wheel in what's developing.

The leaders of the two Koreas have effectively manipulated him into supporting a genuinely hopeful, potentially history-changing process of reconciliation on their peninsula. It's been a brilliant tactic and if U.S. observers of Korea could put aside their kneejerk skepticism, as well as their America First biases, they would be applauding the best chance in decades for Koreans themselves to defuse the most dangerous situation in Asia.

Playing the President

In keeping with his particular brand of narcissism, Donald Trump is convinced that he alone is responsible for bringing about change on the Korean peninsula. He believes that his threats against the North, his push for tougher sanctions, and his pressure on China to tighten the screws on its erstwhile ally were the key factors in Kim Jong-un's decision at the beginning of 2018 to reach out to his southern neighbor and extend an olive branch to Washington.

In truth, the initial impetus for the changes in Korea had little to do with President Trump.

After his country conducted its sixth nuclear test in September 2017 and its first ICBM test that November, the North Korean leader must have come to believe that his nuclear weapons program was the sufficiently solid deterrent and valuable bargaining chip he had been seeking. By then, too, he had consolidated his political control in Pyongyang by purging the party, the military, and even his own family, leaving him confident that he could negotiate agreements outside the country without worrying about a palace coup back home. Finally, the North Korean economy was actually managing modest growth, despite the fierce American sanctions campaign against it. This was in part because so many countries were willing to look the other way in the face of widespread violations of the global sanctions regime.

Undoubtedly, Kim was aware of warning signs as well: a dangerous economic dependence on China, a lack of capital for investment, and a declining growth rate. When it came to all three, the logical place to turn was South Korea. Since taking office in March 2017, South Korean President Moon Jae-in had pushed hard for a new engagement policy with the North.

For many months, Pyongyang did not respond, so Moon mended fences where he could. He launched a "New Northern Policy," focusing on fostering further cooperation with Russia. That November, he reached a compromise with China, promising not to expand a new U.S. missile defense system placed in South Korea earlier in the year in exchange for Beijing lifting restrictions on trade and investment.

In a New Year's speech in January 2018, however, Kim Jong-un suddenly and very publicly reversed his position. Moon was already well primed -- some might say desperate -- to take advantage of such a gesture. As a result, in the full glare of international media attention, the two Koreas suddenly launched a policy of cooperation at the 2018 Winter Olympics being held at the time in the south. Then, at the end of April, Kim and Moon actually met in the first inter-Korean summit to take place on South Korean soil.

This was, admittedly, not the first time the two Koreas had attempted a de'tente, but previous efforts had been stymied, at least in part, by American opposition. Congressional hostility toward North Korea during the latter years of the Clinton era and George W. Bush's inclusion of North Korea in his ominous "axis of evil" in 2002 put a distinct damper on the possibility of inter-Korean cooperation.

This time, however, the two leaders adopted a new strategy for roping the United States into the process. Instead of appealing to the Korea policy community in Washington -- an unimaginative gaggle of Cassandras -- each of them decided to "turn" the U.S. president.

Initially, both were undoubtedly as bemused by Donald Trump's erratic foreign policy tweets as the rest of the world. Still, Kim and his officials reached out to Republican-linked analysts in Washington and soon grasped that the new president valued personal relationships, discounted the advice of policy professionals, dismissed the importance of human rights, and measured his successes largely by the failures of his predecessors, especially Barack Obama.

Keep in mind as well that, for all the hostility Trump had directed toward Pyongyang during the 2016 presidential campaign, he had also signaled -- though at the time it was treated as a throwaway line -- that he'd be pleased to meet Kim Jong-un and serve him "a hamburger on a conference table." As president, in May 2017, months before he started threatening to deliver "fire and fury like the world has never seen" to the North, he even called Kim a "smart cookie" and reiterated his willingness to sit down with him. In both instances, he received mockery, not support, from America's Korea watchers who considered him "naà ¯ve" (which was true but beside the point).

Most critically, the North Koreans evidently realized that they could appeal to Trump's desire to destroy the legacy of Barack Obama. The president had fervently promised to unravel anything and everything his predecessor had ever done, from health care to climate change. But on the Korean peninsula, Obama had never achieved a thing. His policy of "strategic patience" had amounted to little more than eight years of hoping that North Korea would relocate to another planet. In such a situation, the North's appalling human rights record, its spotty negotiating history, and its very real nuclear weapons program mattered little in Trump's quest to once again one-up Obama.

South Korea faced a similar set of challenges. In the fall of 2017, Trump accused Moon Jae-in of the "appeasement" of North Korea, though he provided no specifics. Normally, such a charge would have been poison in Washington. Moon could certainly have upped the ante by retaliating in kind. Instead, he cannily held his tongue -- and when the tone suddenly shifted in inter-Korean relations in early 2018, the South Korean president pursued a psychologically even smarter tactic: he began heaping compliments on President Trump for making it all happen.

True, Moon's over-the-top praise flew in the face of what really lay behind the transformation in relations, but he, too, had been well briefed on the president's personality and predilections. He, too, grasped that the American narcissist-in-chief would incline toward praise like a plant toward the sun. When asked if he should get a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, Moon immediately insisted that it was Trump, and Trump alone, who deserved such an honor. (Only later did Trump's base begin chanting "Nobel! Nobel! Nobel!")

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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