Abstract
Two nuclear crises recently haunted the Korean peninsula, one in 1993/4, the other in 2002/3. In each case the events were strikingly similar: North Korea made public its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons and withdrew from the Nonproliferation Treaty. Then the situation rapidly deteriorated until the peninsular was literally on the verge of war. The dangers of North Korea’s actions, often interpreted as nuclear brinkmanship, are evident and much discussed, but not so the underlying patterns that have shaped the conflict in the first place. This article sheds light on some of them. It examines the role of the United States in the crisis, arguing that Washington’s inability to see North Korea as anything but a threatening ‘rogue state’ seriously hinders both an adequate understanding and possible resolution of the conflict. Particularly significant is the current policy of pre-emptive strikes against rogue states, for it reinforces half a century of American nuclear threats towards North Korea. The problematic role of these threats has been largely obscured, not least because the highly technical discourse of security analysis has managed to present the strategic situation on the peninsula in a manner that attributes responsibility for the crisis solely to North Korea’s actions, even if the situation is in reality far more complex and interactive.
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Country or Region: United States
Zhang, Baohui
Abstract
This article examines China’s emerging nuclear capability and its strategic consequences. China will be able to deploy, for the first time, a truly secure second-strike capability in the next decade. This emerging Chinese capability will critically affect the future relationship between China and the United States. The article suggests that the two countries should engage in strategic dialogues to discuss the proper role of nuclear deterrence in their bilateral relationship. This will help prevent a nuclear arms race that will inevitably worsen the security dilemma between the two most important countries of the twenty-first century.
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Harrison, Selig S
Summary
Nearly half a century after the fighting stopped, the 1953 Armistice has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War. While Russia and China withdrew the last of their forces in 1958, the United States maintains 37,000 troops in South Korea and is pledged to defend it with nuclear weapons. In Korean Endgame, Selig Harrison mounts the first authoritative challenge to this long-standing U.S. policy.
Harrison shows why North Korea is not–as many policymakers expect–about to collapse. And he explains why existing U.S. policies hamper North-South reconciliation and reunification. Assessing North Korean capabilities and the motivations that have led to its forward deployments, he spells out the arms control concessions by North Korea, South Korea, and the United States necessary to ease the dangers of confrontation, centering on reciprocal U.S. force redeployments and U.S. withdrawals in return for North Korean pullbacks from the thirty-eighth parallel.
Similarly, he proposes specific trade-offs to forestall the North’s development of nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems, calling for the withdrawal of the U.S. nuclear umbrella in conjunction with agreements to denuclearize Korea embracing China, Russia, and Japan. The long-term goal of U.S. policy, he argues, should be the full disengagement of U.S. combat forces from Korea as part of regional agreements insulating the peninsula from all foreign conventional and nuclear forces.
A veteran journalist with decades of extensive firsthand knowledge of North Korea and long-standing contacts with leaders in Washington, Seoul, and Pyongyang, Harrison is perfectly placed to make these arguments. Throughout, he supports his analysis with revealing accounts of conversations with North Korean, South Korean, and U.S. leaders over thirty-five years. Combining probing scholarship with a seasoned reporter’s on-the-ground experience and insights, he has given us the definitive book on U.S. policy in Korea–past, present, and future.
Chung, Jae Ho
Summary
China and South Korea have come a long way since they were adversaries. The arc of their relationship since the late 1970s is an excellent model of East-West cooperation and, at the same time, highlights the growing impact of China’s “rise” over its regional neighbors, including America’s close allies.
South Korea-China relations have rarely been studied as an independent theme. The accumulation of more than fifteen years of research, Between Ally and Partner reconstructs a comprehensive portrait of Sino-Korean rapprochement and examines the strategic dilemma that the rise of China has posed for South Korea and its alliance with the United States. Jae Ho Chung makes use of declassified government archives, internal reports, and opinion surveys and conducts personal interviews with Korean, Chinese, and American officials. He tackles three questions: Why did South Korea and China reconcile before the end of the cold war? How did rapprochement lay the groundwork for diplomatic normalization? And what will the intersection of security concerns and economic necessity with China mean for South Korea’s relationship with its close ally, the United States?
The implications of Sino-Korean relations go far beyond the Korean Peninsula. South Korea was caught largely unprepared, both strategically and psychologically, by China’s rise, and the dilemma that South Korea now faces has crucial ramifications for many countries in Asia, where attempts to counterbalance China have been rare. Thoroughly investigated and clearly presented, this book answers critical questions concerning what kept these two countries talking and how enmity was transformed into a zeal for partnership.
Feffer, John
Summary
US relations with North and South Korea have been characterized by profound asymmetries of power and perception which in recent years have led to increased tensions among the three countries.
Bringing together twelve prominent experts on US-Korean and US-Pacific relations, this book explores the many dimensions of current and future US foreign policy. Charting new developments in North and South Korea, the contributors examine US-Korean relations through such prisms as nationalism, the media, regional relations and human rights issues. In relating the downward spiral in US relations with the Korean peninsula, the book provides an analysis that runs counter to conventional interpretations, and offers clear and balanced policy recommendations for remedying the crises.
The Future of US-Korean Relations is deeply incisive and broadly relevant as an ideal resource for students, teachers and policy professionals interested in security studies, East Asian politics and US foreign policy.
Cha, Victor D
Summary
Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) have been two of the most critical pillars of peace, stability, and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region for the past thirty years. At the same time, their relationship has fluctuated markedly and unpredictably. Despite the existence of a common ally in the United States and common security threats from the former Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, bilateral relations between Japan and South Korea have been persistently marred by friction.
In the first in-depth study of this puzzling relationship in over fifteen years, the author compares the commonly accepted explanation for this relationship—historical enmity—with one that focuses on policies of the United States as the key driver of Japan-ROK relations. He finds that while history and emotion certainly affect the ways in which Japanese and Koreans regard each other, cooperation and dissension in the relationship are better understood through what he calls a “quasi-alliance” model: two states that remain unallied but have a third party as a common ally.
This model finds that the “normal” state of Japan-ROK relations is characterized by friction that stems not only from history, but also from fundamental asymmetries in Japanese and Korean expectations of support from each other. The author shows, however, that in periods when the American defense commitment to the region is weak, Japan-ROK relations exhibit significantly less contention over bilateral issues. Without the prop of U.S. assistance, the two countries are seemingly willing to overlook the usual causes of friction and to adopt a more pragmatic approach. The author discusses the effects of democratization and the post-Cold War era on the triangular relationship, and addresses the prospects of a united Korea and its future relations with Japan, the United States, and China.
The book covers the period from 1965 to 1998 and draws on recently declassified U.S. documents, internal Korean government documents, and interviews with former policy makers in the United States, Japan, and Korea.
Nam, Chang-hee
Abstract
Relocating the forward-deployed U.S. forces in Korea south of the Han River is part of the Pentagon’s Global Defense Posture Review, a process that stems from America’s military transformation. This unprecedented move is headed in a direction that simultaneously challenges the half-century-old alliance and promotes a new partnership between the U.S. and South Korea.
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Huntley, Wade L.
Abstract
Since the collapse of the U.S.-North Korea Agreed Framework in 2002, the Bush administration has failed to restrain North Korea’s nuclear weapons ambitions, principally because of the constraints of highly idealized convictions. Resolution of the Korean nuclear crisis now depends on U.S. initiative beyond the boundaries of these predispositions and beyond the terms of the nuclear crisis itself.
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Ziegler, Charles E.
Abstract
This paper examines U.S. engagement in Central Asia over the past two decades, with specific reference to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. While alarmist voices occasionally warn of the threat to American interests from China and Russia through the SCO, the organization’s influence appears limited. Washington has engaged it only sporadically, preferring to conduct relations bilaterally with the Central Asian states.
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Sasikumar, Karthika, and Gilles Verniers
Abstract
The U.S.-India civil nuclear energy agreement triggered a contentious debate in India from 2005 to 2008. Regional political actors played crucial and unanticipated roles in the debate. We present explanations for the positions adopted by the main actors and the level of contention. We find that parties’ positions were driven not by ideology but by the compulsions of coalition politics.
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Kim, H.-W., and W.K. Paik
Abstract
The post-Cold War US-South Korea alliance has been publicly pronounced as having become less cohesive over time. How can we prove this change of the alliance over time? This paper attempts to empirically test this change of the US-South Korea alliance after the end of the Cold War, using four significant operational indicators: homogeneity in goals, threat perception, strategic compatibility and command structure. After looking at how these four operational indicators have changed over time, the authors verify in more concrete terms the changes of the alliance cohesion in the post-Cold War period. Adapted from the source document.
Kux, Dennis
Summary
Dennis Kux’s book possesses a wealth of new information, based partly on fresh research in published and archival sources, but based even more impressively on the more than 100 personal interviews he conducted with former diplomats and defense officials in both the United States and Pakistan.”–Robert J. McMahon, University of Florida</P><P>”Kux’s study is, to my knowledge, the first full-dress, comprehensive, and authoritative study of U.S.-Pakistan relations. Focused primarily on formal diplomacy between these two countries, it systematically chronicles the major events, deftly handles the primary issues, and sympathetically considers the key political and diplomatic figures on both sides.”–Robert Wirsing, University of South Carolina</P><P>U.S.-Pakistan relations have been extraordinarily volatile, largely a function of the twists and turns of the Cold War. An intimate partnership prevailed in the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan years, and friction during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter presidencies. Since the Cold War ended, the partnership has shriveled. The blunt talking to delivered by President Clinton to Pakistan’s military dictator during Clinton’s March 25, 2000, stopover in Pakistan highlighted U.S.-Pakistani differences. But the Clinton visit also underscored important U.S. interests in Pakistan.
Haqqani, Husain
Summary
The relationship between America and Pakistan is based on mutual incomprehension and always has been. Pakistan—to American eyes—has gone from being a quirky irrelevance, to a stabilizing friend, to an essential military ally, to a seedbed of terror. America—to Pakistani eyes—has been a guarantee of security, a coldly distant scold, an enthusiastic military enabler, and is now a threat to national security and a source of humiliation.
The countries are not merely at odds. Each believes it can play the other—with sometimes absurd, sometimes tragic, results. The conventional narrative about the war in Afghanistan, for instance, has revolved around the Soviet invasion in 1979. But President Jimmy Carter signed the first authorization to help the Pakistani-backed mujahedeen covertly on July 3—almost six months before the Soviets invaded. Americans were told, and like to believe, that what followed was Charlie Wilson’s war of Afghani liberation, with which they remain embroiled to this day. It was not. It was General Zia-ul-Haq’s vicious regional power play.
Husain Haqqani has a unique insight into Pakistan, his homeland, and America, where he was ambassador and is now a professor at Boston University. His life has mapped the relationship of the two countries and he has found himself often close to the heart of it, sometimes in very confrontational circumstances, and this has allowed him to write the story of a misbegotten diplomatic love affair, here memorably laid bare.
Plaw, Avery, and Matthew S. Fricker
Abstract
This article examines the strategic wisdom of the US Predator drone campaign in Pakistan, particularly in light of the dramatic expansion in the number of strikes that has occurred under the Obama administration. First, it examines whether there is a compelling rationale for any drone strikes in Pakistan by evaluating the justification advanced by US authorities and the three main criticisms that have been leveled against the campaign. With the help of an original database of drone strikes and their effects compiled by the authors of the article, it shows that the criticisms lack merit and that some strikes may be justified in principle. Second, it turns to the reasons explaining the dramatic increase in strikes over the past 2 years. On examination, it finds that the arguments supporting the expansion of the campaign are forceful but not necessarily decisive. In the third section it considers some objections to an expanded campaign. Finally, in the closing section, it weighs these considerations against the points favoring the expansion of the drone strikes. The article ends with the conclusion that on balance it would be prudent to shift back towards a more narrowly focused campaign concentrating on al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban and only leaders of the Pakistani Taliban.
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Abbas, Hassan
Summary
This book examines the rise of religious extremism in Pakistan, and analyzes its connections to Pakistan Army’s policies and the fluctuating U.S.-Pakistan relations. It includes profiles of leading Pakistani Jihadi groups with details of their origins, development, and capabilities based on interviews with Pakistani intelligence officials, and operators of the militant groups. The book contains new historical materials on Operation Gibraltar (1965 War with India), conspiracy behind General Zia-ul-Haqs plane crash in 1988, a botched military coup by fundamentalists in army in 1993-4 and lastly about how General Musharraf handled the volatile situation after the 9/11 attacks. Besides General Musharrafs detailed profile, the book evaluates the India-Pakistan relations vis-à-vis the Kashmir conflict, and Dr. A Q Khans nuclear proliferation crisis. The book offers predictions for Pakistan’s domestic and regional prospects.
