Japan caught in US-Korea nuclear net

The deal struck in Beijing this week, which is supposed to end up in the denuclearisation of North Korea, is no cause for celebration. To the contrary, it is likely to detract from Australia’s security.

That’s because this deal is likely to erode Japan’s willingness to rely on the US for its nuclear security, and thus strengthen the hand of those in Tokyo who say that Japan needs its own nuclear deterrent. The US-Japan alliance, which reassures Tokyo while cocooning Japanese power, has underpinned wider regional security for 50 years, and thus the stability on which our security and prosperity depends.

In the short term, the deal struck in Beijing will play into the hands of China, North Korea’s great power protector. But China should not celebrate too soon. China, by isolating Japan, may reap what it sows if Japan gets nuclear weapons.

China is far from an impartial broker in these talks, as so many people seem to think. Operating on the basis of realpolitik, China seeks to regain its rightful status as hegemon of the Korean peninsula. And even though relations between Beijing and Pyongyang have their nuances, North Korea serves China’s interests simply by continuing to exist. North Korea’s constant provocation serves, for example, as a strategic distraction for the US.

Thus in the talks in Beijing, China has been sought to accommodate North Korea’s interests, and help the US to leave the Korean peninsula. Part of this strategy is to isolate Japan. The Bush administration has been vulnerable to this Chinese ploy because it is bent on getting a result, any result, that will allow the Republicans to remove North Korea from the agenda in the 2008 presidential elections.

Yet the North Korean nuclear threat to Japan has grown steadily on Bush’s watch. Last year, Pyongyang ramped up its dangerous missile and nuclear brinkmanship, with missile tests in July and its first nuclear test in October. But in response to ever greater North Korean provocation, the Bush administration has been doing exactly what it castigated the Clinton administration for doing: rewarding bad behaviour.

Why? Because the Bush administration is so weakened by the consequences of a botched occupation of Iraq — the issue most responsible for its losing control of both houses of Congress in last year’s mid-term elections — that it has retreated from its previous positions on North Korea.

For example, Washington no longer insists on North Korea’s complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation. Nowhere in the agreement signed in Beijing is there any reference to North Korea’s illegal highly enriched uranium program, which came to light in 2002.

To the contrary, North Korea remains in denial that it even has such a program.

Washington also conceded North Korea’s demand for bilateral talks. That allows North Korea to claim that both sides are responsible for current tensions and thus the crisis can be resolved only if both sides make concessions. Direct US-North Korea talks have been held in Berlin and other venues, with Japan excluded.

Now there is talk in Washington of restored diplomatic relations between North Korea and the US, and even of a peace treaty to end the Korean War (which terminated in an armistice in 1953). That presumably would see remaining US troops, including air and maritime forces, removed from the Korean peninsula.

Such a deal would serve China’s interests admirably, and also allow Bush to claim he can produce a peace deal that would finally end the Korean War, and salvage something of the reputation that he once hoped to achieve in foreign policy.
But any such deal would further undermine Japanese confidence in the US nuclear umbrella. The interest in which the US entered the Korean War in 1950 was, after all, the strategic security of Japan.

Worse, the US and China have joined forces to shove this dubious deal with North Korea down Japan’s throat, and expect Japan to help pay for it. The Japanese are baulking, saying that the abductee issue has been sidelined. (That is the question of Japanese kidnapped by North Korea in the 1970s and ’80s to be trained as spies. Japan believes that some of them are still alive in North Korea.) Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in fact rode to power on this issue last year.

Abe is now using the abductee issue as political cover at home in order to resist US-China pressure on Japan. But it is obvious that Japan is alarmed by the reappearance in Washington of the Japan passing of the Clinton years, where the US and China struck deals at Japan’s expense. Moreover, from Japan’s point of view, things are likely to get worse whoever takes power in Washington after the 2008 election.

And what of South Korea? No one in Seoul now thinks that the US will be willing to sacrifice Los Angeles to save Seoul. And in Washington, it’s hard to find anyone who thinks South Korea is worth one additional US life.

President Roh Moo-hyun is endlessly willing to appease the North. But Roh is a lame duck, with the conservatives widely expected to return to power in Seoul at the end of the year. They are likely to want their own nuclear weapons to deter the North, and a nuclear South Korea will almost certainly lead to a nuclear Japan. None of these developments is inevitable. But neither can they be ruled out. Let’s not forget that a bad deal is always worse than no deal at all.

Robyn Lim is professor of international relations at Nanzan University and visiting fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. From 1988 to 1994 she worked at the Office of National Assessments in Canberra, where her last job was as acting head of intelligence.