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Repositioning and trimming our troops in South Korea is a signal that we are preparing seriously to deal with the danger posed by North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Il.

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The current government in Seoul is the most anti-American in the short history of the Republic of Korea. It is a left-wing administration that has fanned public sentiment against U.S. troops. Yet suddenly this government issued statements making it clear it wanted to keep the U.S. garrison in place more than the Americans themselves did.

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Moving U.S. troops away from the DMZ tripwire, and out of the reach of North Korea’s artillery and tactical missiles, is a sensible move if hostilities might be on the way.

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In the carrots-and-sticks approach we have taken toward North Korea, the sticks are strategic bombers, such as the ones the Pentagon moved to Guam in the weeks before the Iraq war in spring 2003. . . . By contrast, our nearly 37,000 soldiers in South Korea–and the alliance that keeps them there–are purely defensive. . . . Yet the presence of these U.S. Army brigades allows the North to hold us hostage, because the North would likely respond to any U.S. air strikes by firing thousands of missiles at our bases in the South. Simply put, therefore, our troop presence in South Korea no longer deters the North. It deters us. (emphasis in original).

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Besides, the South Koreans are now grown-ups fully capable of taking care of themselves. . . . Today, the situation is completely different [than it was during the Cold War]. [South Korea] has the industrial, technological, and demographic basis to field a military that would rip North Korea’s million-man paper tiger to shreds. It’s time we let the South Koreans defend themselves.

Author Daniel Kennelly is managing editor of The American Interest.

Excepts from Gordon Cucullu:
A Stiff Test for America

It would be entirely in keeping with North Korea’s character to sell weapons of mass destruction to non-governmental terror organizations. Hard cash, not morality or legitimacy, carries the day in Pyongyang.

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With this new development, why focus on just another stop-gap measure against North Korean scheming? Could the United States join with its regional partners to get rid of an atrocious dictator and his nuclear threats once and for all? Lifting the pall of a nuclear war, while liberating the oppressed North Korean people and reuniting the Korean peninsula under a democratic government and a free-market economy is a worthy goal. But is it realistic?

Because of the Souh’s craven politics, Kim Jong Il in the North has been under little pressure to reform or abide by his nuclear weapons agreements. . . . South Korean politicians have moved toward a bizarre neutral stance that presumes to mediate between Pyongyang and Washington, declaring both sides must make “concessions. The North Koreans have thus made progress toward their longstanding objective of splitting South Korea from the U.S. To their shame, many South Koreans have responded positively to blatant North Korean appeals to “Han” ethnic chauvinism. The South Korean public needs to be made aware of the consequences of their surrender.

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What may end up convincing China is the possibility of a nuclear Japan.

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By far the gravest risk to China of a miscalculation in North Korea is the specter of millions . . . of North Koreans fleeing across their border to escape a collapsing Kim Jong Il regime. . . . There is a model we can learn from. Thailand went through a similar but smaller crisis following the fall of Vietnam and the takeover by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. . . . The solution that worked in Thailand was a string of tightly supervised and controlled U.N. camps. Establishment of a similar safety zone where abused North Koreans could revover their mental and physical health, and participate in education and job training programs to bring them into the twenty-first century, would allow the dictatorship of Kim Jong Il to collapse without creating a humanitarian and political crisis.

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Is China up for this level of responsibilty? Many observers say no. This could be a test of China’s new strength and maturity as an international power.

Gordon Cucullu is the author of Separated at Birth, which I reviewed here, if you’re interested. In his book, he discusses the refugee camp idea is much greater detail, along with his decades of experience with Korea during his time in the Special Forces and in the corporate world. Gordon is also a fellow made member of the North Korean Freedom Coalition, complete with diamond pinkie ring.

Excerpts from Victor Davis Hanson: No Easy Choices

More likely the ascendant Chinese are amused by the sheer blood sport of seeing their crazed vassal tie an exasperated America in knots. Is North Korea really out of control, and thus a threat to the breakneck development of China, or is it a useful surrogate to remind the Japanese and South Koreans who really holds the leash of this rabid dog?

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South Korea suffers increasingly the postmodern maladies of the affluent–and cynical–West. Its citizens want pan-Korean solidarity, but not to the point of losing the one-sided benefits of their American alliance. University students demonstrate for Americans to get out of Seoul. But they don’t really want us to leave the Demilitarized Zone. We are supposed to say on the DMZ and endure the increasingly cheap and bothersome anti-Americanism of the “friends” we protect. We could leave in a huff, but we might then watch a successful democracy be blackmailed or shelled, sacrificing a half-century of achievement that cost billions of dollars and thousands of American lives.

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There are no good choices now–just the hard lesson not to allow a maniacal regime to acquire nuclear weapons in the first place.

Author and historian Victor Davis Hanson is a regular contributor to The National Review and blogs here.

Update:

Read Norbert Vollertsen’s article, “A Depraved Society We Can’t Ignore,” here.

Ambassador Lilley begins with a discussion of China’s long history of involvement in and influence over Korean affairs, leading up to China’s decision to send a team to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, establish diplomatic relations with the South in 1992, and “deftly manage” the entry of both Koreas into the United Nations.

China now seeks to increase its influence on the Korean peninsula and gradually reduce the U.S. military presence there. But North Korea’s adventurism with weapons of mass destruction adds a volatile element. China depends on America as an important commercial partner, while also facing the U.S. as a strategic competitor over issues like Taiwan. China sees North Korea as a buffer, and as a useful distraction that keeps U.S. military power preoccupied.

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The South Koreans understand that a strong U.S. military presence in their region is necessary as a credible deterrent. They also welcome the economic stability created by the American umbrella. They share the U.S. objective of North Korean reform, but they care less than we do about monitoring it.

Both the Chinese and the South Koreans want to manage North Korea their way, not ours. Our expectations for their help in any collective talks aimed at influencing North Korea, therefore, must remain modest.

Not exactly incendiary stuff–and that’s actually as extreme as it gets–but when I ran into Ambassador Lilley two days ago, he told me that the South Koreans were not happy, to put it mildly. The most provocative language in the entire piece is its title.

James Lilley served at United States Ambassador to both South Korea and China.

If South Korea was not happy with Ambassador Lilley, “royally pissed” might be a better way to describe their reaction to Nicholas Eberstadt’s piece. It may not have helped that the Chosun Ilbo misquoted him. First, some of Eberstadt’s key grafs:

The North Korean government did not join the world’s nuclear club suddenly, on a whim. This was the predictable culmination of decades of steady, deliberate effort in a multifaceted program of for building weapons of mass destruction–not only nuclear weapons but also chemical and biological munitions and ballistic missiles.

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Yet after more than four years in office, the Bush administration still seems to lack an effective strategy for dealing with North Korea. Thus far, it has merely confronted Pyongyang with an attitude. And the problem continues to grow worse. . . . How have the U.S. and its allies responded? With six-party talks that merely resulted in calls for further rounds of talk. This reactive American approach may be leading Pyongyang to conclude that it can deter and manipulate the U.S. with nuclear threats. . . . To date, the United States, its Asian allies, and the rest of the world community have demonstrated to Kim Jong Il that he need fear no appreciable penalties for creating an atomic arsenal of his own.

Eberstadt goes on to list a long history of North Korean provocations that incurred no significant punitive response, noting Seoul’s “timid mutterings” and stating that “Beijing and Moscow paid Pyongyang to merely show up.

Until last year, many Western observers and policymakers seemed to feel that international trafficking in nuclear materials was the one red line North Korea would not dare violate. Now it appears that that line has also been crossed. The U.S. government has announced that North Korea provided Pakistan and perhaps even Libya with processed uranium after 9/11–possibly as recently as 2003.

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Far from deferring or mitigating the peril of conflict, such Western fecklessness toward North Korea [as Colin’s Powell’s statement that “˜we don’t have any red lines’] only magnifies the scale of the expected disaster. For more than a decade, a combination of talk and bribery has been tried to no effect. We all know how the Clinton administration’s mid-1990s attempts to buy cooperation turned out: Pyongyang took the money and plowed it into new covert nuclear programs. The Bush administration’s passive-aggressive approach has hardly generated better results.

Among Eberstadt’s specific recommendations:

Define “success” and “failure” for North Korea negotiations. . . . The administration must not be shy about declaring the process a failure if in fact it is. Rewarding Pyongyang for merely showing up at the talks should not count as a good result.

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Work around the pro-appeasement crowd in the South Korean government. . . . The core of this new [Roh/Uri] government has proven implacably anti-American and reflexively in favor of appeasing Pyongyang.

Eberstadt calls its base “a coterie of leftist academics and activists. Nothing libellous there. He also calls for greater pressure on China, recommending that we convey some pointed threats, but not specifying what they should be. Finally, Eberstadt says that the United States must be ready for what he calls “extra-diplomatic action,” including “hard-line sanctions and military options.

Political economist Nicholas Eberstadt is author of “The End of North Korea” and is an AEI fellow. I read it, and I recommend it notwithstanding the fact that things haven’t exactly worked out that way yet. Read a review here.

In the wake of this issue, the Korea Foundation, which the Chosun Ilbo calls “a body under the Foreign Ministry,” cut off all funds to that (clench teeth now) neocon think-tank called The American Enterprise Institute.

Ruling party officials dislike the direction of AEI activity. They seem particular [sic] allergic to senior fellow Nicholas Eberstadt, who told the Seoul Shinmun in November that Cheong Wa Dae and the Korean National Security Council viewed U.S. President Bush’s reelection as an emergency, adding he could name those who were praying for Bush’s defeat.

Cheong Wa Dae expressed displeasure at the time saying the statement was groundless, and the ruling party demanded an end to funding of the AEI.

In the recent edition of American Enterprise, Eberstadt said the core of the Korean government had demonstrated it was unforgivably anti-American and called Seoul a “runaway” U.S. ally. On June 6, he attacked President Roh Moo-hyun and his predecessor Kim Dae-jung, saying Korea’s last two presidents, two self-proclaimed fighters for human rights, ignored the plight of North Korean refugees.

Sorry, but this is flatly false. Eberstadt never used the words “runaway” or “unforgiveably. It would be fair, however, to quote Eberstadt as accusing Roh and Kim of ignoring the plight of North Korean refugees, however, because Roh and Kim have ignored the plight of North Korean refugees (one Anti-Unification Ministry official infamously compared human rights for the North Korean people to “pearls for a pig.”). It’s also fair to say that the TAE issue’s authors have a “hostile policy” toward the current South Korean government, which is itself a substantial obstruction to forcing North Korea to improve human rights conditions and relent on its nuclear ambitions.

It is also inaccurate to suggest that AEI is uniformly a neocon outfit: Ambassador Lilley is certainly no neocon, and it’s a small minority of conservatives of any variety who support bribing the North Koreans again without demanding some verifiable concessions, at least on nukes. The most “paleo” of conservatives, evangelical Christians, are a substantial–if not the largest–part of the human rights constituency; then again, this whole “paleo”/”neo” thing was always lost on me. Finally, a narrow majority of the Jewish supporters of the human rights constituency are liberals (Stephen Solarz, Tom Lantos, Joe Lieberman).

That said, I’m somewhat mystified that the South Korean government gave AEI money for this long. If they were expecting something in exchange for their money, they should be on the phone with Customer Service.

My reaction? As I said, I’m renewing my AEI membership. Join here if you’re similarly inclined. The magazine alone is worth the money.

(Back to OneFreeKorea)

• Interview with Freedom House’s North Korea program manager, Prof. Jae Ku about his life, his influences, and FH’s July 19th conference on North Korea.
• The L.A. Times exposes the desperation and misery of life in Chongjin, North Korea.
• Runaway inflation in North Korea has spurred a black market in dollars.
• Fisking Hillary Clinton’s plan for North Korea.
• Kang Chol-Hwan, the North Korean gulag survivor who met President Bush, is coming out with a new edition to his book. The new introduction is here.
• OneFreeKorea debates WSJ op-ed author Won Joon Choe over the future of the U.S.-Korea alliance and anti-Americanism, which is still in style in South Korea.
• How the “Nelson Report” exposes the bias of some journalists to avoid the topic of human rights in North Korea, and why its author may have violated federal law.
• Articles on refugees and human rights by Jasper Becker and Nicholas Eberstadt.
• The celibate life in the North Korean army.
• What is the ADVANCE Democracy Act, and why should you care?
• More troubling reports that North Korea is cooperating with Iran on nukes.
• Ordinary North Koreans find their voices as reporters, and maybe even as bloggers at this site.
• Please Join us for a demonstration for human rights for North Koreans, August 20th, at the Chinese Embassy in Washington.