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When Kim Jong-un was appointed to senior posts in the political and military sectors in 2010 – becoming the successor to his father, Kim Jong-il – it quickly became clear that relations with South Korea would sour. North Korean gestures of peace in August of 2009 – such as the sending of delegations to attend the funeral of the South’s former president, Kim Dae-jung – may have stymied the bleeding a bit, but ultimately it proved insufficient.
The announcement of a so-called hydrogen bomb test in 2016 may have caused an uproar, but the international community quickly flocked to an attitude reminiscent of that displayed by the West in regards to Islam – “let’s avoid doing anything to protect ourselves, lest we provoke them.” In this mentality, the recent agreement between the USA and South Korea to deploy the THAAD anti-missile system has received some criticism, especially from China. Considering the clandestine nature of North Korean operations, however, is it really such a bad move?
The Huffington Post argued in May that “THAAD is a waste of money,” and that “it’s crucial to bring the diplomats back to the negotiating table to address the causes of insecurity and not just the symptoms.”[1] Indeed, it is generally in the best interest of the sufferer to take up precautionary measures to try and thwart the origins of a sickness before taking on the symptoms, but once the fever gets too hot, it becomes necessary to try and take on both. It would be a bold move to say that negotiations with the despotic Kim Jong-un of the necrocracy of North Korea has proven to be futile, but it would certainly not be wrong to call it ineffective. In 2000, South Korea offered amnesty to 3500 North Korean prisoners, and the negotiation table seemed to have bared some fruit, with North Korea agreeing to family reunions and other declarations of peace. Only two years later, however, Kim Jong-il’s reluctance to accept the Northern Limit Line caused a naval battle at the Yeonpyeong islands with South Korea. This suggested from the start that the North may not be most trustworthy entity in upholding agreements.
North Korea’s 2003 withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (not to mention their 1993 violation thereof, after joining it only 8 years earlier in 1985) marks this further, and later in the same year they withdrew from yet another agreement – that of keeping the Koreas free of nuclear weapons – which was made along with South Korea in 1992. Furthermore, the 2005 concession by Kim Jong-il that he was indeed producing nuclear weapons, and the subsequent testing of long-range missiles not only solidified the notion that agreements did not mean much for the despot, but it also struck fear into the US and South Korea. Later, in 2009, North Korea ended all previous agreements with the South.
This is all a sequel to the well-known “hydrogen” bomb testing and heavy sanctions imposed by the US on North Korea regarding their nuclear-proliferation programme. As a digression, it is widely believed that the bomb tested by Kim Jong-un in January 2016 was not, in fact, a hydrogen bomb at the size of 10 000 kilotons, but a fission atomic bomb at about 20 kilotons, perhaps. The highly inflated report by the dictator alludes to the deceitfulness in international relations and their unwillingness to find peaceful resolutions to differences in an honest, non-manipulative way. With this in mind, one can say almost certainly that it would be impossible to conduct realistic negotiations, since it is likely that North Korea would constantly overstate their negotiation power in order to gain the upper hand and force the UN to accept otherwise-ludicrous terms.
Considering all the abandoned agreements and broken promises by North Korea, it is not difficult to conclude that negotiations at this point in time would not be sufficient in the protection of South Korea and the West against a nuclear threat from Pyongyang. Opposition to the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system, based on the fear that North Korea would see it as a threat, resembles the notion of abstaining from whistle-blowing out of fear of being reprimanded by the same entity whom you are blowing the whistle on in the first place.
[1] The Huffington Post, The Madness of THAAD, by John Feffer, May 2016
