By Peter Apps
As U.S. and British forces began their intervention against the Houthis in Yemen last week, North Korea unexpectedly shut down a series of propaganda websites and radio stations pushing narratives of peaceful “reunification” with South Korea.
Amid the focus on Gaza, Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan’s election last weekend, the move drew little international attention. For those watching events in Pyongyang more closely, however, it signalled that leader Kim Jong Un might be about to usher in a more dangerous era on a peninsula that has remained technically at war since 1950.
On Tuesday, Kim proved those suspicions to be correct. In a speech to parliament, he suggested the constitution be changed to designate South Korea “primary foe”, accusing Seoul of plans to collapse and absorb the North Korean regime and threatening to overwhelm the South instead.
“We don’t want war, but we have no intention of avoiding it,” the North Korean news agency quoted him as saying.
While peaceful unification was never seen as particularly likely – it is hard to imagine what settlement might satisfy both sides – that language was immediately described as among the most aggressive since the 1950-53 Korean War ended with a truce, not a peace treaty.
North Korea has long been seen by many in the West as the most dangerous rogue state in the world, with a working atomic bomb first tested in 2006 and increasingly powerful ballistic missiles that can reach U.S. and other allied bases in Japan and Guam.
Pyongyang has also long been working on the capability to hit Hawaii and the continental United States, although whether it now can, and how accurately, is largely unknown.
What is much clearer is that North Korea is now much less isolated than it was in the 2010s, when U.S. officials believed they could pressure Kim and those around him through China.
Following the COVID pandemic and worsening relations over Taiwan, however, the U.S. relationship with China is extremely tense. The priority for each side is now deterring the other from militarily intervening in Taiwan. There are plenty in Washington, both in and outside government, warning that China may have a vested interest in dividing U.S. forces with a heightened Korean threat.
In September, China’s Communist Party-run Global Times warned that increased collaboration between the United States, Japan and South Korea was prompting China, Russia and North Korea to take an increasingly joint approach to foreign policy.
What that means remains uncertain, but there is no doubt the Ukraine war has increased collaboration between Moscow and Pyongyang. Kim visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Far East in September, and North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui began a visit to Moscow on Monday, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov suggesting Putin might visit North Korea in coming months.
While the exact nature of the rhetoric was somewhat different, Kim’s warning that North Korea might look to subjugate the South had some clear similarities to Putin’s warnings from mid-2021 painting Ukraine as a rogue state that had forfeited the right to exist. With hindsight, Putin’s comments were a deliberate steppingstone on the road to the February 2022 invasion.
RAISING SOUTH KOREAN NERVES
In the case of Kim’s words this week, they also appeared a deliberate attempt to signal that should Donald Trump return to the White House following the November elections, North Korea has no intention of resuming the kind of negotiations seen during his first term. Instead, Pyongyang appears to be signalling an unambiguous path to confrontation.
North Korea-focused website 38 North – usually regarded as a reliable if somewhat hawkish tracker of events in one of the world’s most secretive nations – describes the current moment as the most dangerous since the start of the Korean War. That is probably a mild overstatement – the first months of the war nearly saw South Korea swept from existence, while two years later the United States was seriously considering the use of atomic bombs.
That this is the most dangerous moment in recent history, however, appears to be widely accepted in South Korea, which has pledged to respond “multiple times stronger” to any attack. The South has been conducting naval drills this week with the United States and Japan, and has been quietly anticipating escalation since the North quit a bilateral military process in November aimed at avoiding accidental conflict.
As late as the middle of last year, South Korea was positioning itself as a major weapons supplier to other nations, striking a major deal with Poland that included a direct loan and, some government and industry officials said on condition of anonymity, supplying arms directly to Taiwan. Some U.S. artillery shells kept in South Korea were also transferred back to the United States, allowing the U.S. to send some of its own shells directly to Ukraine.
A South Korea that fears an existential military threat in coming years, of course, may well feel reluctant to allow weapons to leave its territory. But it is also likely to do everything it can to deepen relations with the United States and other potential allies, including India, currently awkwardly balancing its own rivalry with China and friendship with the United States with its wish to keep healthy relations with Russia.
COMPLICATING U.S. CALCULUS
During the first years of the Trump presidency, the Pentagon and White House judged Kim’s increasingly aggressive rhetoric as the greatest single threat the United States faced. That was followed by an unexpected period of rapprochement, including two direct meetings between the leaders.
The second of those, in Hanoi in 2017, however, was clearly viewed by Pyongyang as a disappointment.
If Washington does conclude there is a genuine and rising risk of conflict on the peninsula, the Pentagon will face a series of questions – including whether to withdraw the families and other dependants of U.S. troops from South Korea, as well as where they might be sent.
Given the geographic closeness of South Korea and Taiwan, the United States is able to position some forces in ways that could be used in either possible conflict.
Any actual outbreak of hostilities, however, would unquestionably complicate the U.S. calculus. Many in Washington regard the confrontation over Taiwan as critical to the evolution the U.S.-China rivalry. Under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the United States has moved from its previous policy of “strategic ambiguity” to heavily signalling its willingness to militarily defend Taiwan.
By that measure, the Korean peninsula confrontation might be seen as more of a sideshow. But with well over 20,000 U.S. troops in South Korea, and North Korea’s well-documented military capability to hit U.S. bases across the region, any real or threatened conflict on the peninsula will inherently inhibit U.S. options to assist Taiwan or any other allies, including NATO states in Europe.
After the Gaza war began in October, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin quipped that the United States had the ability “to walk and chew gum at the same time” as it faced simultaneous crises in Europe and the Middle East. The world has only become more complex since then.
* Peter Apps is a Reuters columnist writing on defence and security issues. He joined Reuters in 2003, reporting from southern Africa and Sri Lanka and on global defence issues. He is also the founder of a think-tank, the Project for Study of the 21st Century, and, since 2016, has been a Labour Party activist and British Army reservist. His first book – “Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO” – is out next month.
(Reuters)