As a return visitor to the beautiful, lively and fascinating city of Seoul, I am beginning to learn something about the way South Korean people think about their future and their complex relationships with both neighbours and allies.
North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) is a menacing, brooding presence. The DMZ border is just 50 kilometres from greater Seoul’s metropolis of 26 million residents. During the Korean War the city was almost totally destroyed after being twice captured by North Korean and Chinese troops and twice liberated by UN/US/South Korean forces. The legacy of that frozen war, last fought 71 years ago, is ever-present. North Korea now routinely launches ballistic missiles over the Sea of Japan. Their latest generation of weapons is almost certainly capable of projecting the threat of nuclear devastation to all parts of the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. Last month North Korean leader Kim Jong-un publicly toured the DPRK’s highly enriched uranium (HEU) facility to show off his capacity to increase production of nuclear warheads. This guy means business and he wants the world to know it.
Away from the military posturing there is live debate in the South about the future of Korea as a unified country. Who in Australia knew that Article 3 of the South Korean Constitution stipulates that the “territory of the Republic of Korea (ROK) shall consist of the Korean peninsula and its adjacent islands”. No prize for guessing how that ambition is viewed in the North’s capital, Pyongyang. Last week a senior adviser to former President Moon Jae-in sparked fresh controversy by publicly advocating that South Korea should focus on peacefully coexisting with the North as two separate states. That call, consistent with a 2018 agreement between the two Koreas, was immediately slapped down by incumbent ROK President Yoon Suk Yeol. Mr Yoon claimed “these people are calling for abandoning unification and choosing peace, eliminating the Ministry of Unification and deleting provisions on South Korea’s territory and peaceful unification from the Constitution”. Some denizens of Seoul are more sanguine. They say: “let’s have two states and be done with it. Then we might be able to visit each other”.
Meanwhile, back in the USA, our own fearless leader Anthony Albanese met with his Quad buddies in Wilmington, Delaware, hometown of outgoing US President Joe Biden. Highlighting the priority item on their agenda, the leaders of India, Japan, Australia and the US concluded their meeting with the high-sounding ‘Wilmington Declaration’. While no Korean was present to participate, the four leaders condemned North Korea’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons and its repeated ballistic missile launches, and reaffirmed their commitment to the “complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula”.
Thinking people in South Korea are now asking questions. Should we still try to reverse history and push for the unattainable – a reunified Korea? Should we also stop believing in the tooth fairy – and with it the denuclearisation of the peninsula? In what universe, they ask, is North Korea likely to hand over its nuclear weapons to render itself defenceless against its enemies? All this happened in the same week when the USS Vermont, a Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine, arrived to take up station at a naval base in Busan, South Korea. As far as political ironies go, the week in Korea was jam-packed.
On this last issue, there is a view gaining currency in Seoul that the ROK needs to counter the burgeoning military might of the DPRK by developing its own domestic nuclear weapons. The presence of nuclear powered and (presumably) nuclear-armed US attack submarines in Korean waters is clearly meant to signal that Uncle Sam has the DPRK in check. But many see that the US military presence contradicts the absurd Quad demand that the peninsula become a nuclear weapons free zone.
More to the point, this last week Song Seung-jong, a professor of military studies and Head of the Center for Security Strategy at the Korea Research Institute for National Strategy, noted that Pyongyang has perceived the massive impact of Russia’s nuclear threat in the Ukraine war. He highlighted the obvious: that nuclear arms cast an ominous shadow on the future of countries without them. The possession of nuclear weapons poses a real threat to any enemy. He concludes:
South Korea faces the dilemma of how to counter nuclear weapons without having them. The time has come to devise an effective way to deal with the deepening threat. If the South responds to a nuclear attack from the North, it’s too late.
Clearly experts such as Song and others in the ROK military establishment don’t see the US as a long-term guarantor of their national security. War in the Middle East, Central Europe and, of course, the messy domestic politics of the US election, have created huge uncertainty in South Korean foreign policy and defence circles.
At a mundane level, life in the South is regularly interrupted by the descent of hundreds of ‘trash balloons’ launched by Pyongyang to deposit rubbish into the streets of Seoul. Last week Incheon International Airport, Seoul’s massive air terminal, was temporarily closed when one of the trash balloons crashed onto a runway. That bull’s eye in the heart of the capitalist South brought the North’s simmering grievances with the ROK into millions of homes – delivering yet another insult from bogeyman Kim Jong-un. Seoul has now threatened to take retaliatory military action over the trash balloon launches. In a sign of ongoing jitters, the ROK government has proclaimed a ‘temporary’ national holiday on 1 October designated as ‘Armed Forces Day’. It is promoted to the people as a day to ‘raise national security awareness and increase troop morale’. With hot wars raging in the Middle East and Central Europe, the escalating cycle of threat and counter-threat continues almost unnoticed on the Korean peninsula. While we bluster about Kim Jong-un’s belligerence, we ignore the military pressures building in the South.
Much has been written in these columns in recent months calling out the madness of a direct military confrontation between the US and China. Sitting squarely in the middle lane, surrounded by huge naval bases and the deadly nuclear arsenals of other nations, South Korea is at a crossroads. It can choose the status quo in seeking ongoing protection from America, or it can develop its own domestic nuclear weapons systems – and embrace the two-state Korean destiny. Other than war, the only other choice is largely out of Korean hands – but not beyond enkindling.
Perhaps, just perhaps, a strategic realignment – a détente between the US and China – where both agree to recognise the other’s interests and alliances in the Asia-Pacific – is an answer. Without the raison d’être for proxy power plays behind their borders, all Korean lives might take a different turn. Such a scenario would be a godsend on the Korean Peninsula where the first casualty of peace could well be an end to the Korean War.
Kym Davey
Kym Davey is a human rights advocate and former Commonwealth and State public servant. He is a member of Labor Against War.