#^d 2018-06-17 #^h Korea on My Mind

The evening after the short and sweet Singapore summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, I watched the reactions from late show hosts Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Jimmy Kimmel. One expects them to take some liberties with the facts, but since Trump's election in 2016 they've generally tried to do so in ways that help illuminate the world they are satirizing. However, they botched this big story almost completely Tuesday night. And Colbert was so bad Wednesday I wound up walking out of the room. Thanks to DVR, we've watched Colbert and Meyers almost nightly since the election, and as I've noted, I've often taken heart in their daily reminder that there are many people -- some with public platforms -- that can't stand Trump and the cruel, vicious, and avaricious regime he heads. But the only way their humor works is when it's rooted in a deep and critical understanding and and a sense of empathy that goes beyond mere partisan advantage. They blew the Singapore summit because they don't know or understand the history of how we got here, and because they don't appreciate the costs and risks of perpetuating the state of belligerency that's prevailed in Korea for 68 years now.

Meyers at least conceded that it's better that Trump and Kim are talking than shooting, but he invariably followed that concession with a "but," like it was something his lawyer forced him to disclaim. All three repeatedly described Kim as "murderous dictator" (sometimes just "brutal dictator"). Granted, a couple of times they built jokes implying that Trump, too, is (or wants to be) a dictator. But they wouldn't dare characterize Trump as murderous, even though as president he's rung up by far the larger body count. And while people think it's ironic that Kim is fat while millions of North Koreans starve, no one bothered to mention how US and UN sanctions impose hardships on the North Korean people (without, obviously, cramping the style of regime leaders like Kim).

It is easy for many Americans to fall into the rut of hurling crude slurs at North Korea and ad hominem attacks on Kim. Such were a staple of Cold War propaganda, going back to the "yellow peril" fears of the 1940s -- originally Japan, but readily remapped by racist minds to China, Korea, Vietnam. In the anti-communist mind we are free, and they are enslaved, ruled by brutal dictators in the name of atheistic, collectivist ideology. The Cold War mindset thawed a bit after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, but when North Korea (and China, Vietnam, and Cuba -- coincidentally the only Communist states the US had actually fought hot wars and imposed long-term embargos against) persisted, the old tropes were available for recycling. And no nation has been treated more harshly by the US than North Korea.

Some relevant history: Organized states in Korea date back to Goguryeo in 37 BCE, with various kingdoms coming and going, broken up by periods of foreign (mostly Chinese) domination. Korea had become a borderland repeatedly attacked by foreign powers, like Japan in 1592-98, the Manchus in 1627 and 1636. After the Manchus established the Qing Dynasty in China, Korea became a vassal. As China weakened in the 19th century, Britain, France, Russia, and Japan ventured into Korea. The US also got into the action, sending gunboats (ostensibly to "open trade") to Korea, notably conflicts in 1853, 1866, and 1871 -- the latter killing 243 Koreans, one of those incidents that they remember but we don't. Japan fought a war with China in 1894-95. One result was the short-lived Korean Empire, annexed by Japan in 1910, and occupied until the Empire was defeated in World War II.

American gunboats sailed into Tokyo Bay to force Japan to open itself to foreign trade in 1853. This resulted in a revolution in Japan that transformed the nation into an imperial state (the Meiji Restoration), as the Japanese scrambled to adopt western technology and empire-building. Japan fought a war against China in 1894-95, capturing Taiwan (Formosa), breaking Korea off, and establishing a toehold on the Chinese mainland. In 1905 Japan defeated Russia, grabbing some Russian territory and concessions in Manchuria. In 1910 Japan annexed Korea. During WWI Japan declared war on Germany, capturing a number of German islands in the west Pacific. In 1929, Japan invaded Manchuria and set up a puppet kingdom there. In 1936, Japan expanded its war against China, occupying major cities and much of the coastline. In 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Act, allying itself with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, but in April 1941 Japan signed a Neutrality Pact with the Soviet Union, sparing Russia the risk of having to fight a two-front war against Germany and Japan, while allowing Japan to direct its imperial aims south. In December 1941, Japan attacked the US Navy in Pearl Harbor, as part of a major offensive in which they quickly overrun Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Thus the US entered World War II.

In 1945, with Germany defeated, Truman begged the Soviet Union to join in the war against Japan. Japanese forces had "fought to the death" against American invaders, especially on Okinawa, and Americans were fearful that they would prove even more fatalistic when, in late 1945, the US could finally mount an invasion of Japan itself. However, Japanese resolve collapsed in August 1945 after the Soviet Union entered the war, driving through Manchuria, and the US dropped its first atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sudden victory gave the US more leverage viz. its allies in Asia than it had in Europe, where Stalin was able to insist on a partition of Germany and Austria (but not Italy, which like Japan was under exclusively American control). The Japanese themselves were desperate to avoid any form of Russian occupation, but the US had no troops in Korea, so offering the split the country at the 38th Meridian was more of a Russian concession than an American one.

Both the US and the USSR installed congenial dictators over their respective partitions. Both had spent the war in exile, garnering favors from their respective hosts: Syngman Rhee was the toast of cocktail parties in New York and Washington, and Kim Il Sung commanded a small guerrilla unit biding its time in Siberia. Once in power, both waged brutal crackdowns on those they deemed "subversives" while vowing to reunite Korea under their domination. History tells us that the North invaded the South on June 25, 1950, but that act was at least in part precipitated by massive arrests in the South. Kim's forces nearly overran the entire peninsula before the US was able to muster a counteroffensive, which in turn by October nearly reached Korea's northern border. Then on October 25 a large number of Chinese "volunteers" entered Korea, bringing the war to a stalemate formalized in the 1953 Armistice line.

By the time Eisenhower replaced Truman and signed the Armistice, over 36,000 US soldiers had been killed, some 183,000 Chinese, and pproximately 3 million Koreans -- more than 10% of the Peninsula's total population, higher in the North, where the US dropped more tons of bombs than it had dropped on Japan during WWII. Although the front had stabilized in early 1951, the war ground on for two more years. Even in signing the Armistice, neither side was willing to admit that its aims had failed. The US retained massive bases in the South and nearby regions. Both sides engaged in provocative behavior and extravagantly belligerent rhetoric. North Korea made enormous, self-hampering investments in defense, maintaining a huge army, digging bunkers deep underground, developing massive artillery, rocketry, and ultimately nuclear warheads. All along the US refused to end the formal state of war and normalize relations, even to the extent it normally accorded other Communist states.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, and after China introduced a degree of capitalism that attracted western interests, North Korea became even more isolated. Meanwhile, South Korea overthrew their US-backed military dictatorship, and developed a vibrant export-led economy, becoming one of the wealthiest nations in Asia while the North stagnated in isolation, its orthodox communist party evolving into a strange quasi-religious cult around the "dear leader." Or so it seemed, because the extreme isolation made it almost impossible for Americans (or anyone) to understand what life was like there -- of course, that didn't stop our so-called experts from playing up their "human rights violations" and decrying their sanctions-imposed shortcomings.

North Korea's economy rapidly deteriorated after the Soviet Union ended its subsidies in 1991, with China only grudgingly offering a trade relationship. Kim Il Sung's health deteriorated, and he died in 1994, replaced by his son Kim Jong-il. North Korea has long been haunted by its lack of petroleum and coal resources, so started to look at nuclear power, which was its right as a member of the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty). The US, recognizing the potential use of any nuclear power technology for developing warheads, raised a huge stink and tightened its restrictions on North Korea even further. This came to a head in 1994, when Jimmy Carter trekked to Pyongyang and negotiated the "Agreed Framework" between the US and North Korea, but Clinton's residual cold warriors sandbagged the deal, and GW Bush blew it up completely, ominously grouping North Korea into his "Axis of Evil" along with two countries it had no relations with -- two countries which had fought a decade-long war against each other, Iran and Iraq. Bush invaded and desroyed Iraq, while his lieutenants joked about taking on Iran next ("real men go to Tehran"). North Korea responded to the threat by withdrawing from the NPT and accelerating their nuclear weapons and missile work, testing a bomb in 2006. That may have dampened Bush's ardor to attack, but Iraq was already turning out to be more than Bush's army could handle.

Still, the "weapons of mass destruction" pitch Bush had used to sell his invasion of Iraq was easily retooled for Iran and North Korea, with harsh sanctions the preferred stick for coercion, but no enticing carrot -- "normalization," maybe, but most hard-liners wouldn't accept anything less than regime change. Obama did sign an agreement which allowed them to continue low-grade enrichment while ending any possible advance toward nuclear weapons, but the deal fell far short of normal diplomatic relations, allowing US sanctions not tied to Iran's "nuclear program" to continue -- and Trump, bowing to pressure from Israel and Saudi Arabia, reneged from even that modest deal. (One hesitates to refer to Israel and Saudi Arabia as America's allies, given how Trump has subordinated America's interests to their parochial whims. But clearly neither country takes Iran's "nuclear threat" seriously enough to give up the immediate value their leaders find in isolating Iran.)

Whereas the nuclear programs Iraq, Iran, and Libya supposedly posed were never serious, North Korea does have bombs (including hydrogen-boosted) plus they have missiles capable of delivering them to the continental America. After Bush provoked North Korea to accelerate their program, Obama largly ignored them. Trump, on the other hand, panicked, mocking "little Rocket Man" and threatening "fire and fury like the world's never seen" if Kim didn't surrender. As near as I can tell, four things changed his course and attitude:

  1. The Defense Department refused to offer a military option to end the crisis: it was clear to them, as it has been for years, that there is no way the US can pre-emptively attack and defeat North Korea at an acceptable cost.
  2. South Korea elected Moon Jae-in as president, who is much more open to normalizing relations with North Korea than recent South Korean leaders.
  3. Kim Jong-un sought a direct meeting with Trump, and arbitrarily made a number of concessions ahead of the summit, most importantly ending the recent series of nuclear and missile tests.
  4. Mike Pompeo, Trump's CIA Directory and now Secretary of State, traveled twice to Pyongyang to act as the main intermediary between Kim and Trump (thus far making up for Trump's pick of ultra-hawkish John Bolton as National Security Director).

I don't care to speculate on what will happen next, but there's no good reason why the state of hostility shouldn't end, including the sanctions that have imposed such fear and hardship on the Korean people. Both Korea should dial back their militaries, with the US withdrawing its forces from South Korea. Trade and travel should be eased, and diplomatic relations established. I doubt that North Korea will make any significant changes to its politico-economic system, but that shouldn't be a problem for the US: while many Americans claim to be sensitive about North Korean "human rights violations," the US government (especially under Trump) has been remarkably unbothered when its ostensible allies are concerned (e.g., Israel, Saudi Arabia, China, the Philippines). Trump has promised that if Kim follows his lead, North Korea will become prosperous, but there is zero evidence that the prescriptions known as "the Washington consensus" actually raise living standards. More likely, Kim will look at other models, like the mix of a closed political system and private incentives that China has used to generate persistent double-digit growth rates. As a leftist, I may not approve, but as an American I can hardly object.

What concerns me more is how people ostensibly on the left/democratic end of the American political spectrum react to Trump's summit and to the possible opening up of North Korea. The reaction so far has been very mixed, with much of it -- as with the late-night comics I started with -- downright atrocious. This matters because it's critical that Democrats take smarter positions on world affairs, especially on matters of war and peace. While most Democrats (and really most Americans) have grown weary of the perpetual war machine, Democratic politicians have reflexively bought into the world-hegemonic mindset, styling themselves as the true believers in Americanism -- the civic religion that thinks American leadership will save the world by conquering it. (Republicans, on the other hand, cynically expect power to cower the world, reaping profits. Neither approach has worked lately, partly because condescension is no more appealing than arrogance.)

Oddly enough, Trump is on a mini-roll. While there is much to disagree with, Democrats need to talk intelligently about these issues, rather than just fall back on familiar tropes to score cheap points. Consider:

I haven't had time or stomach to track down many of the stupid things Democratic pundits and politicos have said about Trump and North Korea. (I have seen a few wretched examples on Twitter, and my wife has been fuming about many more, so I've been aware of more than I've read.) I've been using Vox as my first source on most things political, so the first post-summit piece I read was Zack Beauchamp/Jennifer Williams: 4 winners and 4 losers from the Trump-Kim summit. They saw Kim as a clear winner, describing him as "a brutal dictator who starves and imprisons his own citizens." His triumph? "And he just got the president of the United States to fly halway around the world to meet, shake his hand, and cencel military exercises with his greatest enemy -- all without giving up anything major in return." How quickly the authors forgot that North Korea had already released three American prisoners (search for "hostages" or you'll miss the story), halted all nuclear and missile tests, and destroyed his nuclear test site; also that the US and South Korea had called off their scheduled "war games" as a pre-summit gesture. For months now we've been hearing that Kim's real goal was to get world legitimacy by being photographed with Trump. And here they're still clinging to this line a mere week after Steph Curry and LeBron James went out of their way to make sure they wouldn't get a White House invite from Trump. (Granted, Kim may be more hard up for attention than they are, but on the other hand, the US hasn't been organizing "war games" to terrorize the NBA.

Worse still, the authors listed South Korea as the big loser in the summit, because they lost out on participating in those "war games," therefore undermining their confidence that the US would defend them from an attack from the North. Moreover, they claimed that South Korea wasn't even consulted before Trump sold them out -- another case of the US double-crossing its faithful allies. In point of fact, South Korea had previously agreed to canceling the "war games," and after the fact reassured Trump of their agreement. But the most important fact forgotten here is that South Korea has by far the most to lose in a war between the US and North Korea, and therefore the most to gain by agreements for peace. Except maybe for the "suffering North Koreans," also counted among the summit's losers, because nothing concrete was agreed to relieve their suffering at the summit -- as if the only way out of their conundrum would be an American "humanitarian war." Even if "hundreds of thousands of Koreans have died in these gulags over the past several decades," a renewed war would surely kill more than the three million killed with relatively primitive weapons 65 years ago.

After thinking about it a couple more days, Vox revised its winner-loser calculations, concluding The big winner of the Trump-Kim summit? China. Again, their calculus was based exclusively on geopolitical strategic concerns: if the US withdraws troops from South Korea, that would make it easier for the Chinese military to flex its muscles in the region. Of course, no consideration was given to other reasons why China might benefit from avoiding a new war in Korea: most obviously the threats of stray radiation and massive refugees.


Several links worth reading on the Singapore summit:

Also on the G7, see George Monbiot: Donald Trump was right. The rest of the G7 were wrong. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Trump's opposition to NAFTA and other trade deal is right, because I doubt that his reasoning on the subject. On the other hand, sometimes you have to credit unlikely allies for doing the right thing, even if for the wrong reasons.

By the way, I haven't run across nearly as many dumb Dem-leaning articles on the summit as I expected, probably because many of the writers so-inclined have moved onto safer moral high ground, attacking Trump for the new policy of separating children from parents at the border. That has become by far the big story of the past week.