by Wayne Brown(Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the 27th in his new series on the Obama era.)
Crying wolf
The phrase ‘crying wolf’ implies fecklessness. It means someone has raised a false alarm so often, there’s no need to take him seriously next time he does. Many people forget that the point of that little fable is that one day there really was a wolf.
Among world leaders, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il is clearly the champion wolf crier – albeit with himself cast in the role of the wolf. Time and again over the past 15 years, the aging, and now ill dictator has threatened catastropbic consequences for any nation engaging in acts – diplomatic, economic or military – the North Korean regime sees as hostile to it.
The conventional wisdom is that this regular baring of teeth has been Kim’s way of trying (1) to bargain threats for cash, and (2) warding off the malevolent attention of the United States while he hurries to construct nuclear weapons and the missiles capable of delivering them.
The jury is still out on (1), but the conventional wisdom with regard to (2) is probably right. GW Bush’s 2002 declaration, out of the blue, of the existence of an “axis of evil” (Iraq, Iran and North Korea) may have been the brainchild of Cheney and his neo-cons, already laying the groundwork for a US invasion of oil-rich Iraq (to be followed by an encore against oil-rich Iran). But it could hardly have been more counterproductive. For, once Bush gave flesh to his euphonious words by invading Iraq, where else could Iran and North Korea repose their hope of safety except in acquiring a nuclear deterrent as fast as possible?
Last week North Korea detonated a nuclear bomb – small by today’s standards, but still equal in destructive power to the American bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also tested five short-range missiles, capable of hitting South Korea and its historic foe, Japan.
Meantime, the South Korean government had changed. The laid-back President Roh Moo Hyun, who’d sought greater economic and diplomatic ties to the North, had been replaced by the much more prickly Lee Myung Bak. Last week, in response to the North’s nuclear-related tests, South Korea signed on to a US-led programme which Lee’s predecessor had judged “too provocative”: the so-called Proliferation Security Initiative, involving locating and boarding ships heading to or from North Korea and seizing nuclear-related equipment and materials.
Whereupon Kim promptly bared his teeth once more. North Korea would respond to any boarding of its ships with “prompt and strong military strikes,” he warned. He also proclaimed the nullification of the 1953 Armistice Agreement (a truce rather than a formal end to the Korean War) which had kept a tense peace between the North and South for 56 years.
Not to be stared down, South Korea’s Lee declared that his military would “deal sternly with any provocation by North Korea, based on a strong South Korea-US defence coalition.” In other words, he was threatening Kim with an American military response (the US has 30,000 soldiers based in South Korea). Lee also announced that South Korea was dispatching a warship to the suddenly fraught waters.
The question is: When both sides start crying wolf, what’re the odds that a real wolf may have begun emerging from the tall tale into the tall grass of the DMZ?
And the other question is of course, what can the Obama administration do?
The short answer is, nothing. Except as a punitive retaliatory strike, a US military attack on North Korea is off the table; as in Iran, the US doesn’t know where most of the North’s widely dispersed nuclear facilities are. Also, attacked by the US, North Korea would almost certainly respond by raining missiles on Seoul, just 30 miles to the south. Hundreds of thousands of South Koreans would die.
Moreover, the US, which fatally miscalculated China’s response once, would have to be very sure that China would stand by passively in the event of such an attack, something that seems highly unlikely. China has been the main supplier and guarantor of North Korea for 55 years, and while its leadership is often irritated by Kim’s bellicosity, it far more deeply fears North Korea falling into chaos and millions of North Korean refugees fleeing across the Chinese border. China also dislikes the thought of a democratic Korea on its border.
Besides, there’s not even consensus among US North Korea-watchers about what Kim Jong Il ‘wants.’ Some think (perhaps narcissistically) that he’s trying to get the new US president’s attention. Others think he’s trying to elicit his suffering citizenry’s nationalistic pride – or at least quiescence – with bombs instead of bread. Yet others think he’s currying favour with his hawkish generals to win their support for his transfer of power to his youngest son in due course.
Some even think Kim was advertising. Impoverished North Korea has sold nuclear technology to Iran and Syria in the past, and there’re fears that last week’s dramatic demonstrations were really a salesman’s pitch to potential purchasers: Look what we can offer you now! The Obama administration’s greatest fear is that among those purchasers will be al Qaeda or some other terrorist group.
Its subsidiary fear is that a nuclear-armed North Korea would provoke Japan to go nuclear itself – something it could do in a matter of months. Japan has been an US ally since World War II, but the last thing America wants now is for the world’s second-biggest economy to become a nuclear-armed power; that would radically change their relationship. (Would FDR have dared to choke off Japan’s access to oil in 1941 (as punishment for Japan’s invasion of China) if both Washington and Tokyo had had nuclear weapons? And, if he had, would Japan would have acquiesced in being energy-starved into powerlessness rather than let loose its nuclear arsenal, and not only at Pearl Harbor?) In fact, as with so many of the intractable international situations President Obama has inherited, there’s nothing really that he can do.
And yet he has to do something. (Iran is watching!) The world is going to hear a lot more about ‘sanctions’ against North Korea in the coming weeks (the same ‘sanctions’ that have failed so dismally against Castro’s Cuba, say, for 47 years).
Unless, of course, North and South Korea create a real wolf between them before then.
