The Korean Peace

Originally published Korea Times Nov. 15, 2009.

The recent rumors of a 'grand bargain' between Pyongyang and its adversaries over the North's nuclear program can only be an encouraging sign. Any step away from nuclear holocaust is a step in the right direction. However, even if such a deal wins approval from all three capitals, there is still no way to be sure that it will really stick. Most past agreements with the North have encountered a rocky, "two steps forward and one step back" implementation process. What will make this one any different?

The reason that so many agreements with the North have foundered is because there has been a state of war on the Korean peninsula since 1950. Seoul and Washington cannot provide food aid to a country with which they are technically at war. They cannot build nuclear reactors for a nation with which they are at war. In short, they cannot accomplish any substantive, enforceable agreement with North Korea because the only agreement possible among warring powers is a peace treaty. Normalization is the condition of the possibility for peace.

Talk of normalization is, of course, enormously controversial among South Koreans, particularly among the older generation, and for good reason. The price to be paid for a peace treaty is the ratification of Korea's division, an official recognition of the fact that a single people has been made two through the interference of outside powers. The closest analogy for an American, perhaps, would be to imagine California sundered from the body of his republic by China or Russia. It would be a tragedy.

Yet surely the greater tragedy would be to continue a war that no longer serves any purpose, a war that once claimed tens of thousands of Korean and American casualties, and could easily do so again. Much of the blame for the situation naturally lies with the North, the ruthless totalitarian dictatorship that insists on maintaining a clearly moribund system at the cost of thousands of its citizens' lives. However, the US has had diplomatic relations with worse regimes, and has supported worse.

If communism is obsolete, it necessarily follows that anticommunism is also obsolete. Pyongyang must realize that surrender is an option, and that this surrender need not be unconditional so long as the 1953 armistice holds, but at the same time Washington must make defeat worth its enemy's while. We have used the stick for sixty years. It hasn't worked. Let's try the carrot.

Now is the perfect time. Whereas before about 1980, the primary obstacle to normalization was opposition from the right-wing regime in Seoul, after Reagan's election Washington became the roadblock. While newly democratic South Korea reached out to the North under Kim Dae-Jung's sophisticated Sunshine Policy, batting down its provocations while offering face-saving compromises, America's rightward lurch made any dramatic moves toward peace unimaginable even during the pragmatic Clinton years. Now that the American public has returned to sanity after eight years of cowboy diplomacy, President Obama must seize this opportunity to permanently foreclose the possibility of a civilizational crisis on the Korean peninsula.

The democratic allies have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Would Seoul and Washington be giving the North exactly what it wants by extending recognition? Certainly. What we would insist on in return would be the immediate dismantling of North Korea's nuclear program, as well as its chemical and biological stockpiles, and a bilateral drawdown of conventional forces. Trade and assistance to the North could thereafter be progressively broadened as Pyongyang curtails its human rights abuses.

No thought is more delightful, to Koreans and Americans both, than that of one Korean nation from the Yalu River to Jeju Island, peacefully reunified under a democratic government. I hope to witness that day in my lifetime. For the time being, however, we must play the hand that history has dealt us. This is perhaps the crowning irony for a country whose modern history is replete with the bitterest of ironies -- Korea cannot hope to one day make itself whole without first recognizing its division.