North Korea will have the bomb unless the west changes tactics

On the diplomatic, soft side of the strategy, much more imagination, creativity and actions are needed. South Korea should learn and copy the best practices from the more than 50 years of East-West confrontation in Europe, Germany’s Ostpolitik and the experience of the Eastern European freedom movements. We need a balanced mix of soft and hard instruments of peace-making for North Korea, of power and reconciliation, which must be enhanced simultaneously as two columns of a singular strategic approach: Korea 3.0.

One option as an incentive for North Korea to reform could be a USD 600 million per year North Korean Development Fund, with USD 50 million paid out each month. This could help to support farmers and small businesses with direct loans that could not be cashed by the regime. China could control and report upon its use. If Pyongyang leaves the negotiation table, no cash will be transferred. The Chinese President has asked the shrill dictator why he cannot feed a mere 23 million people when the People’s Republic of China manages to feed more than a billion. That offended him. China is uneasy about the instability on its borders and has an interest in reforming North Korea, as was done in the PRC or Vietnam in evolving into capitalist states.

The PRC should establish a Chinese Special Economic Zone in the north of the country and employ specialists for agriculture and industrial reform.

China should promote a China-Korea railway system. This would connect its large Eastern provinces with several hundred million people through the North and into South Korea.

A tax-free zone seaport in Korea could be built to connect the under-developed Chinese regions in the Northeast to the sea, best financed by investors from China and South Korea. North Korea should get the option to participate.

On the essential and equally important hard power side of such a fresh double-strategy for Korea, several activities are essential:

The U.S. must neither reduce nor soften, but rather enhance its commitment to the defense of South Korea. Washington now spends USD 1.1 billion per year, plus personnel costs.

South Korea should increase its defense budget from its traditional three to four percent of GDP for the next five years to come. It should integrate its missile defense into the U.S. system and not develop its own now, as there must be strong cooperation in times of war. South Korea must be open to integrate even the formerly hostile Japan into its missile defense. South Korea must increase its support for political activities in the North and human rights organizations. It could start a leadership and mentoring program for talented people from the North as well. It should lift the old restrictions on information flow from the North, as in the digital age this is no longer a threat; Germany never banned propaganda from the communist East. The German way of “Wandel durch Annäherung” (change through rapprochement) should be copied and adopted by the Seoul administration now.

It is a shame for Japan not to have come to real reconciliation with the Korean victims of its brutal colonial rule between 1910 and 1945, even after 68 long years. Thus, there are no military ties between Seoul and Tokyo yet. Newly-elected (and more nationalistic) Korean President Park Geun-hye declined to meet newly-elected (and also more nationalistic) Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the ASEAN Summit in Bali in early October 2013. During his political campaign last year, Abe even proposed revising two official Japanese apologies for Japan’s cruelties to the occupied nations, including the enslaved “comfort women” used by the Japanese Forces. In the Hiroshima museum, his country still portrays itself more as a victim, not as an aggressor that was stopped by U.S. forces. Even worse: South Korea and Japan argue about which country owns the small Liancourt Islands (Korean: Dokto, or Tokto- Japanse: Takeshima) half-way between the two states, with rich fishing grounds and natural gas resources.

To balance a rising China and to effectively deter the bomb in North Korea, an alignment of military strategies and tools as well as diplomatic strategies are needed and a condition sine qua non for Tokyo. Japan must now, under Abe’s leadership, take over more military burdens to secure its national interests against North Korea and China. It is in the national interest of Japan to acquire South Korea as a closer ally. Tokyo must now learn from the reconciliation policy of Germany with Poland and France. As an important gesture of reconciliation, Japan should not continue to claim the disputed islands any longer. Japan’s Prime Minister Abe wants to integrate his self-defense forces into an alliance, but needs a solid political reconciliatory approach and a political basis with Korea, as German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer did so effectively with Charles de Gaulle and France in the 1950s, followed by Willy Brandt’s successful Ostpolitik with Poland in the 1970s and the integration of Poland into the EU with the fierce support by Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the 1990s. The Japanese Emperor himself has to officially apologize, also in the name of wartime – Emperor Hirohito and visit Korea – just as Adenauer, Brandt and Kohl did with former archenemies France and Poland. The time for Japan is now and nothing less is needed after merely lukewarm approaches in the past and missed opportunities.

Any successful containment doctrine must clearly draw a long-term and realistic clear red line for North Korea. This is the essential element of a credible deterrence and containment policy. The Korean War started in 1950 with the misperception of the communists that Washington did not value the South as a core US interest. Those mistakes of “Provocative Weakness” (Fritz Kraemer) must be avoided and not repeated again now.

Behind Seoul’s closed doors, senior officials complain about the U.S.  having drawn several red lines for the North in the past, which were crossed without any real punishment from Washington. America has lost credibility, even more with the recent no-show of President Barack Obama at the ASEAN summit due to the fiscal cliff crisis at home. One lesson learned from the nuclear confrontation in Europe is: there must be clear leadership by the U.S. or South Korea and Japan will appease.