For North Korea, Blowing Hot and Cold Is Part of the Strategy
Alternating between raising tensions and extending an olive branch — all to confuse the enemy — has been part of the regime’s dog-eared playbook.
SEOUL, South Korea — One of North Korea’s favorite
geopolitical strategies has long been compared to dipping alternately in pools
of scathingly hot and icy cold water in a public bathhouse.
Just a week ago, Kim Yo-jong, the only sister and key aide
of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, threatened to kill the country’s agreements with
South Korea that were intended to ease military tensions along the border. She
called the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, “disgusting” and “insane.” Then
the North blew up the joint inter-Korean liaison office, the
first of a series of actions that threatened to reverse a
fragile détente on the Korean Peninsula.
On Wednesday, Mr. Kim emerged as the good cop, overruling his military and suspending its plans to
deploy more troops and resume military exercises along the world’s most
heavily armed border. Hours later, South Korean border guards confirmed that
the North Korean military had dismantled loudspeakers installed on the border
in recent days as part of its threat to revive propaganda broadcasts against
the South.
If
the flip-flop seemed disorienting, that was exactly the effect North Korea
intended. Over the decades, alternating between raising tensions and
extending an olive branch has been part of the North’s dog-eared playbook.
In 2017, Mr. Kim conducted a series of
increasingly daring nuclear and long-range ballistic missile tests,
driving his country to the edge of war with the United States. Then he made a
sudden switch the next year to a giddy round of diplomacy with
President Trump, as well as with Mr. Moon.
Mr. Kim’s grandfather Kim Il-sung, North
Korea’s founding president, proposed reconciliation with South Korea even as he
prepared to invade the South to start the 1950-53 Korean War. His father and
predecessor, Kim Jong-il, discussed co-hosting the 1988 Summer Olympics with
South Korea before North Korean agents planted bombs on a Korean Air Boeing 707
in 1987. The plane exploded near Myanmar, killing all 115 on board.
When the move is toward peace, the change of tack is so
dramatic that North Korea’s external enemies often take the shift itself as
progress, even though there is no evidence that the country has decided to
abandon its nuclear weapons.
“When such a shift comes,
the world goes, ‘Wow!’” said Yun Duk-min, a former chancellor of the Korea
National Diplomatic Academy. “The world is so impressed that just starting
dialogue with the North feels like a major turnaround.” Mr. Kim’s decision on Wednesday will at least
temporarily keep the latest tensions from spinning out of control on the Korean
Peninsula. But it also showed that Mr. Kim was calibrating his moves as he
sought to reclaim some of the domestic credibility and diplomatic leverage he
had lost after his two years of diplomacy with Mr. Moon and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Kim returned from his second summit with
Mr. Trump, held in Vietnam in February of last year, without winning a badly needed
reprieve from international sanctions that he had promised to
his people. Those sanctions have devastated the North’s exports since late
2017.
Mr. Kim began this year by exhorting his
people to build a “self-reliant economy” impervious to international sanctions.
At the same time, he tried to ease the pain of sanctions by attracting more Chinese
tourists and encouraging illegal smuggling.
But that plan sputtered amid the coronavirus
epidemic, which has forced the country to
shut its borders.
“First and foremost, the economy is the problem
for Kim Jong-un,” said Park Won-gon, a professor of international relations in
Handong Global University in South Korea. “As the impact of the prolonged
Covid-19 epidemic wore heavily on his people’s livelihoods, Kim Jong-un doesn’t
have a lot of time left” before he must find a way out, Mr. Park said.
In the North’s playbook, domestic trouble
often calls for raising tensions with its outside enemies to win their
concessions and also consolidate internal unity.
The North is widely
believed to have expedited its nuclear weapons development after it struggled
under a devastating famine in the late 1990s. It has pushed its nuclear program
as a deterrent against “American invasion,” as well as a tool to extract
economic and other concessions from Washington and its allies. This year, the North’s first target was South Korea and
Mr. Moon. North Korea has repeatedly accused Mr. Moon of being so beholden to
Washington’s policy of enforcing sanctions that he has reneged on his promise
to Mr. Kim to improve inter-Korean economic ties.
Mr. Kim’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, took the lead
in the attack against South Korea. But Mr. Kim stayed out of the escalating
standoff with the South, giving himself flexibility to change course.
“The brother and sister play the good and
bad cop toward South Korea,” said Lee Byong-chul, a North Korea expert at
Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul.
Although North Korea has often sounded incorrigibly
bellicose, it has proved to be a shrewd strategist capable of judging when to
throttle up the tensions and when to pull back on them.
After two South Korean soldiers were injured by
land mines in 2015, the South accused the North of planting the devices near
the soldiers’ front line guard post. In retaliation, South Korea resumed
loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts along the border, bombarding North Korean
soldiers with K-pop music and screeds against Mr. Kim. When
North Korea fired at the loudspeakers, the South responded with artillery
fire. As both sides raised their military alert level, it was
the North that first proposed dialogue, and it later expressed regret over
the South Korean soldiers’ injury.
In 2018, a North Korean diplomat called Vice
President Mike Pence “stupid” and a
“political dummy,” threatening to cancel a planned summit between Mr. Kim and
Mr. Trump. When Mr. Trump acted first and called off the meeting, North
Korea immediately issued another statement saying that Mr. Kim wanted to meet
Mr. Trump “at any time.” Mr. Trump was happy to revive the summit plan.
This month too, North Korea has been
carefully calculating its maneuvers. Even when its military drew up action
plans along the border, the state news media took pains to point out that they
would need Mr. Kim’s “ratification.”
Mr. Kim suspended those
plans during a meeting of his Central Military Commission on Tuesday. The
next day, the North Korean media said the meeting was “preliminary.” The
language prompted some analysts to suspect that the commission could hold a
regular meeting to have more discussions and potentially reverse course if
needed.
“Now that he has succeeded
in seizing the attention of Washington, Seoul and Beijing, Kim Jong-un thinks
he can pause for a bit to see how they respond,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a North
Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul. “By saying that he
‘suspended,’ not terminated, the action plans, he is still keeping the option
on the table.”
There were signs that
North Korea’s strategy was already working in the South.
As tensions rose on the
peninsula, South Korea moved swiftly to ban sending anti-North Korean
leaflets across the inter-Korean border. Liberal politicians
urged Mr. Moon to persuade Washington at least to allow inter-Korean economic
cooperation and humanitarian aid shipments to the North.
There was another reason
Mr. Kim hesitated: Some of the actions North Korea threatened against the South
were tantamount to shooting itself in the foot.
If
North Korea follows through on its threat to restart
propaganda broadcasts and leaflet distribution across the border,
the South would likely respond in kind. North Korea has more to lose, say
analysts. The North’s propaganda has little impact on South Koreans, who are
far more affluent, while the regime doesn’t have sufficient electricity to
raise the volume on its loudspeakers. Cross-border hostilities will also weaken
South Koreans’ support for economic or humanitarian help for the North.
But analysts also warned that Mr. Kim may
shift his posture again if Seoul and Washington don’t appease the North. As the
presidential election in the United States draws near, Mr. Kim could attempt
major military provocations to gain leverage with whoever wins the election.
“There
may be a pause in provocations or Pyongyang might temporarily de-escalate in
search of external concessions,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of
international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. “But North Korea will
almost certainly continue to bolster its so-called ‘deterrent.’”
