South Korean Engagement Policies and North Korea

Key-young Son

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134189595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia coreana

A fresh historical and theoretical exploration of the much-debated, but still elusive, question of the Korean divide. In contrast to much of the literature on the divide, which deals with state-building on the two sides of the Demilitarized Zone, this book sheds light on the slow, but steady process of homogenization between the two estranged peoples, as accelerated after the end of the Cold War and especially after the inauguration of President Kim Dae-jung in 1998.

Providing immense empirical detail as well as theoretical debate on the ideas in policy shaping in South Korea, the book presents a rich 'history of enemies' and covers issues including:

• an overview of the structural shift and the rise and fall of identity groups in South Korea
• history of 'enemy-making' and 'peace-building'
• North Korea's external relations with the US, Japan and Europe
• Hyundai's groundbreaking, cross-border tourism and other economic cooperation projects
• the lingering nuclear weapons crises.

By focusing on the question of identities, the book presents a new approach on one of the most important legacies of the Cold War and threat to peace in the contemporary world: the divided Korean peninsula. As such it fills a major gap in the literature, utilizing new theoretical and empirical frameworks to deal with the Korean division and its future implications in East Asia.

Part I
Theorizing comprehensive engagement

1 The concepts of containment and engagement

More often than not, strategies of engagement have been defined as a mix of incentives and punishments, or carrots and sticks, to ameliorate the behaviour of an enemy state. This seemingly fair definition, however, disguises reality. History tells us that the success rates for these strategies were extremely low and, in most cases, these initiatives failed to generate the behavioural change of the target state. Even in the case of relatively successful strategies, the use of coercive tactics, including economic sanctions, accompanied far-reaching civilian suffering and the economic devastation of the target state. These shortcomings, evident in the strategies of containment and limited engagement, lead to this book’s central argument; namely, that an innovative approach is in demand, even though such an approach could be subject to criticism by opponents for being no more than ‘appeasement’. Sir Winston Churchill, as a politician, shifted his position on the notion of ‘appeasement’ from time to time, but his remarks, made on 14 December 1950 in the House of Commons, offer a clue to discriminating between ‘appeasement from strength’ and ‘appeasement from weakness’:

Appeasement in itself may be good or bad according to the circumstances. Appeasement from weakness and fear is alike futile and fatal. Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.

(quoted in Morgenthau 1948: 66–7)

Even though the Sunshine Policy was criticized for being an appeasement policy, it could rather be defined as what Churchill referred to above as ‘appeasement from strength’. Hans Morgenthau (1948: 64) noted that appeasement is a foreign policy that attempts to deal with an imperialistic state with methods appropriate to the policy of the status quo. In this sense, criticism of the Sunshine Policy as an appeasement policy does not take into account the subtle differences pointed to by Churchill and Morgenthau, since North Korea was hardly an imperialistic state by any account.

This book will add a new dimension to the conventional understanding of strategies of engagement, thus making it possible to analyse the Sunshine Policy in the wider context of comprehensive engagement. Before conceptualizing comprehensive engagement in detail in the following chapters, this chapter will provide a historical account of various strategies of containment and engagement and elucidate their theoretical grounding, in order to uncover parallels and discrepancies between these strategies and identify the key conceptual components of comprehensive engagement.

The twin concepts of containment and engagement have long been used by state policy elites to formulate strategies towards their adversaries. In fact, the history of containment and engagement is synonymous with the history of US foreign policy since World War II, given that the hegemonic state of the Western hemisphere had mobilized all available means of statecraft to frustrate what they called an ‘expansionist’ penchant by the Soviet Union and other communist states. In the fierce ideological competition of the Cold War period, foreign policies adopted by the allies of the United States were part of the grand strategy drawn up by the hegemonic power. Even after the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies faced another group of smaller but still menacing states, namely ‘rogue states’, which they needed to contain in some cases or engage in others.

Despite the seemingly clear-cut definition of the two concepts, however, containment and engagement do not invoke identical images when theorists or policymakers use them. We may notice that they are actually evolving terms in the long span of post-World War II history against the backdrop of structural and domestic opportunities and constraints. This complexity frustrates scholars and practitioners when they try to define clearly the terms and lump past policies and initiatives together as either containment or engagement. In fact, most policies and initiatives are somewhere on the continuum between containment and engagement. In face of these seemingly insurmountable obstacles, many theorists and specialists have rejected a containment-engagement dichotomy and instead called for the formulation of country-specific stratecies (Litwak 2000: Haass and O’Sullivan 2000: Georee 1993).

This chapter will analyse the two concepts of containment and engagement by dividing the post-war era into the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. While the focus of this chapter is on the post-Cold War period when the debate on whether to contain or engage ‘rogue states’ has become a particularly salient policy issue, the contemporary debate on containment and engagement is without doubt closely linked to Cold War policies and initiatives, making it fruitless to merely delve into the post-Cold War situation. In particular, the Korean Peninsula, which in 1950–3 experienced the first ‘hot war’ of the Cold War period, is where both the structural and ideological legacies of the Cold War remain more or less intact.

Containment and engagement during the Cold War

Containment has been regarded as a by-product of the Cold War, in which the United States and other Western states made all-out efforts to contain the ever-multiplying sphere of ‘red’ stretching across the Eurasian continent. In his seminal book, Strategies of Containment, John Lewis Gaddis (1982) sought to analyse containment in terms of ‘strategies’ as a way to elucidate this illusive concept, which had undergone transformations through successive US administrations. As part of its global strategies of containment, the United States needed to build close alliances with democratic states worldwide, virtually establishing a wall around the Soviet Union and its allies and giving birth to such metaphors as Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’. Even though the United States placed priority on rebuilding Western Europe, it also allocated limited resources to Asia. First, it turned to Japan in an attempt to find a key security partner in the region, while trying to make war-devastated South Korea a frontline bulwark against communism (Iriye 1977; Ikenberry 2001a). In particular, the United States opened its market to Japanese and South Korean exports to help them to reconstruct the war-torn economies, which could counterbalance the expansion of communist states in East Asia. Nevertheless, the United States did not remain steadfast in its strategies of containment, as it deviated from its original roadmap to introduce strategies of engagement, for example, vis-à-vis China from the early 1970s onwards.

This section will review a set of US strategies of containment and engagement to illustrate that they had alternated between concepts of symmetrical and asymmetrical response to communist states in the face of structural and domestic constraints. For the advocates of asymmetrical response, such as George Kennan, the Eisenhower administration (1953–61) and the Nixon administration (1969–74), the major policy instruments on hand were economic aid and nuclear deterrence. Meanwhile, the authors of NSC-68, the Kennedy administration (1961–3) and the Reagan administration (1981–9) advocated flexibility in mobilizing resources to frustrate any communist encroachment. Henry Kissinger (1977) noted that the US approach to the world had oscillated between isolationism and overstretch and what was needed was a sense of realism to accept the world as given. Gaddis (1982) contended that the prime reason for these oscillations derived from internal forces operating within the United States, such as the Congress and the military-industrial complex, rather than the attitude or actions of the Soviet Union. Mary Kaldor (1995) argued that the Cold War was an ‘imaginary war’ created by the leaders of the two competing blocs as part of their political strategies to divert public attention from domestic problems by spawning periodic threats.

George Kennan and containment

The emergence of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union as a powerful socialist state prompted US officials to grasp the vague idea of containing it from 1941 onwards. Even before the concept of containment took life as a type of policy, the United States had already put into practice a kind of containment in both the Central European and East Asian theatres in the closing days of World War II, in an automatic response to what it called Soviet expansionism. For example, the US’s occupation of the southern half of the Korean Peninsula was mainly aimed at denying the Soviet military control over the whole peninsula, as Washington defeated another of Moscow’s territorial ambitions in the Japanese archipelago (Oberdorfer 2001: 6).

On 22 February 1946, George Kennan, then-minister counsellor at the US Embassy in Moscow, sent his famous ‘long telegram’ to Washington to explain Soviet foreign policy, but the term ‘containment’ was not coined until July 1947 when Kennan published an article in Foreign Affairs, entitled ‘The sources of Soviet conduct’, under the name of ‘X’ to preserve his anonymity. Kennan (1947) called for the implementation of a long-term policy of containment to thwart the Soviet Union’s expansionism, enabling the term ‘containment’ to win prominence as a post-war US policy. Ambrose (1991: 86) argued that the policy of containment acted as a guiding light for the United States to emerge from isolationism and make a strong commitment to intervention in global affairs for the first time ‘in a period of general peace’.

Kennan’s ideas were based on strategic calculations in which ‘distinctions had to be made between what was vital and what was not’, since US capabilities were limited (Gaddis 1982: 32–3). In his grand strategy, based on his notion of five vital centres of industrial and war-making capability,¹ Kennan (1947: 1954) formulated a set of key strategies of containment, including the reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan to counterbalance Soviet expansionism on a global scale, the exploitation of tension between the Soviet Union and China for the purpose of hampering the unity of the communist powers,² the obstruction of Soviet ability to project its power beyond its borders, and the modification of Soviet behaviour and worldview through dialogue, which could put an end to the Cold War.

Kennan’s idea of containment, based on the concept of the balance of power, centred on maintaining US hegemony by frustrating Soviet expansionism worldwide. While calling for ‘a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment’, Kennan (1947: 575) was both pessimistic and optimistic over the future international order: pessimistic since he thought that the US-Soviet rivalry was inevitable because of Soviet expansive tendencies; and optimistic since he believed the United States had enough power and resources to induce the Soviet Union to ameliorate its behaviour. As a specific step to achieve this goal, Kennan (ibid.: 581) called for the establishment of ‘unalterable counter-force at every point where they [the Soviets] show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world’, which became the tactical foundation of the Truman Doctrine.

Truman Doctrine

In a reflection of the political situation created by the tight competition of the two opposing blocs, realism and its neo-realist variants dominated the theories of containment during and after the Cold War, as they were theories of wars, confrontations and alliances. The ideological precursor of Kennan’s containment harks back to Reinhold Niebuhr, who revived the pessimistic Augustinian view of human nature to challenge the Lockean view of benign human nature (Cox 1981). Morgenthau (1948), who espoused determinist realism, believed that history would repeat itself in an endless struggle for power, propped up by the self-fulfilling prophecy in which the worst-case thinking generates the very worst case.

Although there is still a debate over the origins of the Cold War, President Harry Truman (1945–53) needed at least a public excuse to offer aid to Greece, which was suffering from communist insurgencies. Therefore, the Truman Doctrine, announced in March 1947, was conceived to achieve the immediate aim of preventing the communization of Greece and Turkey. In the course of drafting the doctrine, however, its authors came to champion the US’s ‘grand heroic crusades on a worldwide scale, a struggle between light and darkness with the fate of the world hanging on the outcome’ (Ambrose 1991: 85) and signal the US’s willingness to support anti-communist forces anywhere in the world (Halliday 1986: 3). Truman exaggerated the situation to the extent that he portrayed ‘the Greek civil war as part of a global struggle between the forces of freedom and totalitarianism’ (Larson 1985: 327). From the outset, Truman needed to imbue the American public with a sense of danger in order to garner support for anti-communist campaigns worldwide, which might require a huge amount of political, economic and military aid to be put to use by the administration (Ambrose 1991: 85).

Nevertheless, the Truman Doctrine, as a strategy embodying Kennan’s idea of containment, was deceptive because it did not result in the proliferation of US commitments across the world, but in a ‘reordering of priorities which emphasized economic assistance to Western Europe at the expense of interests in the Far East and elsewhere’ (Gaddis 1977: 281). For example, US troops left South Korea in 1949, and US Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s National Press Club speech in January 1950 publicized South Korea’s exclusion from the US defence perimeter. The withdrawal of both US and Soviet troops from the Korean Peninsula and their ambiguous commitment to security resulted in the transfer of ‘the power of decision from the major power to small allies’, inviting challenges to the US implementation of containment from its early years (Flemming 1961: 608).

NSC–68

Following his re-election in 1948, President Truman was forced to review his foreign and defence policies in light of the communist triumph in mainland China in 1949, the Soviet Union’s development of nuclear weapons, and rising McCarthyism (Ambrose 1991: 113). In a new document drafted in 1950 in the name of the National Security Council (NSC) policy paper No. 68, Kennan’s strategy of defending strong points asymmetrically gave way to an emphasis on perimeter defence in which all points are equally important to US interests. Although Kennan believed that it was crucial to defend only vital interests since US resources were limited, the new document, authored by Paul Nitze, director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Bureau, was based on a new interpretation of the scale of Soviet threats and the possible mobilization of US resources. NSC-68 declared that, in view of its economic power, the United States could spend US$50 billion, or 20 percent of its gross national product, in 1950 for military expenditure (ibid.: 114). The document is regarded as having established the parameters and rationale for post-war US foreign policy (Campbell 1992). The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 apparently validated one of NSC-68’s premises that if the US were to tolerate any shift in the balance of power, this could invite similar aggression elsewhere (Smith 1998: 62).

Orthodox realist explanations of the Cold War are based on the structural and materialistic division of power between the United States and the Soviet Union after World War II, which many saw as making conflicts between the two powers inevitable (Halle 1967; Schlesinger 1967; Yergin 1978). Others believed the confrontation to be a tragedy of misperceptions and missed opportunities (George and Smoke 1974; Jervis 1976). Meanwhile, revisionists focused on the economic dimensions and the expansionist US political culture. Explaining the stability and longevity of the Cold War template, Johan Galtung (1971) attributed it to material impediments to change, caused by the imperialist structures of the international system, while John Galbraith (1978) shed light on the ominous workings of military-industrial complexes in both superpowers.

‘New Look’

President Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61), who won the 1952 presidential election with a pledge to liberate the ‘enslaved’ countries of the world under communist rule, did not endeavour to fulfil his commitment to ‘rollback’, but implemented the policy of containment in the name of the ‘New Look’ (Ambrose 1991: 134–5). The major premise of Eisenhower’s New Look principle, supported by his Cabinet figures stressing the importance of a balanced federal budget and tax cuts, was that an insurmountable increase of security burdens might cripple the domestic economy.

The New Look spawned the idea of ‘massive retaliation’, which signalled to the communist powers that, rather than accepting casualties and costs while defending the territories of the communist periphery in a protracted war, the United States might resort to strategic nuclear attacks on the communist heartlands, as it threatened to do at the end of the Korean War to speed up the process of obtaining an armistice agreement (George and Smoke 1974: 28). Despite the inception of the Cold War, however, the concept of containment was lacking in any strategy or theory linking military planning to foreign policy objectives prior to 1950. Therefore, the idea of ‘massive retaliation’, approved in 1953 by Eisenhower, can be regarded as the first systematic theory of deterrence in the Cold War era. Deterrence is a policy aimed at thwarting an enemy state from aspiring to change the international status quo in its favour. Its basic idea was to encircle the Soviet Union and China with a ring of states aligned with the United States either by treaty or unilateral declaration, with the hope that an American security umbrella over them would discourage the communist countries from launching attacks. George and Smoke (ibid.: 48) noted that in its simplest form, ‘deterrence is merely a contingent threat: If you do x, I shall do yto you. If the opponent expects the costs of y to be greater than the benefits of x, he will refrain from doing y’. In spite of the introduction of the concept of deterrence, the New Look became known for containing fundamental flaws because of its excessive dependence on the potential use of nuclear weapons to compensate for manpower shortages vis-à-vis the Red Army, thus limiting effective responses (Ambrose 1991: 71) and running the risk that the Soviets might dismiss it as US bluffing (Haass 1999: 11; George and Smoke 1974: 30).

Flexible response

In a significant departure from the New Look strategies, President John F. Kennedy (1961–3) sought to expand the range of options to counter the Soviet Union by advocating bold steps on the basis of a more expansive perception of means available to the United States. In particular, Kennedy called for the strengthening of both conventional and unconventional military capabilities and the build-up of strategic missiles. However, the ‘flexible response’ strategy, which favoured counter-insurgency operations by a small number of ‘military advisors’ over direct combat against adversaries, was again bogged down in the Vietnam War because efforts to find a middle ground between a nuclear war and appeasement were frustrated since the war in Vietnam required more US military assistance over time (Smith 1998: 71). Deterrence theory also shifted its focus from an ‘attack out of the blue’ by the Soviet Union to the prevention of escalation of small-scale warfare (Schelling 1960; Holsti 1972; Brodie 1966). With the Soviet Union achieving nuclear parity with the United States, the Kennedy administration introduced the concept of ‘sufficiency’, based on the idea of ‘mutually assured destruction (MAD)’. The idea of MAD was to leave one’s population vulnerable to the other’s attack because, regardless of whoever attacks first, the results are mutual annihilation.

There has been a long-running debate among realists as to whether nuclear weapons were the key variable that contributed to the maintenance of peace during the Cold War. It appears, however, that a majority of scholars agree on the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, bolstered by a flurry of relevant concepts such as ‘massive retaliation’ and MAD. Supporters of nuclear deterrence theory contend that the imperative of fending off a nuclear war had apparently prompted the superpowers to use great caution in their decisions which might have led to major wars or the possible escalation of small-scale wars (Bundy 1988; Waltz 1981; Mearsheimer 1990; Haass 1999). In particular, mainstream neo-realists like Waltz and Mearsheimer could be categorized as core believers in the deterrent power of nuclear weapons to the extent that they would endorse a world of multiple states armed with nuclear weapons, checking and balancing each other. Kenneth Waltz (1979; 1981) notes that the controlled proliferation of nuclear weapons would help to promote international peace and stability. In particular, John Mearsheimer (1990) advocated Germany’s possession of nuclear weapons because the economically powerful state might be again tempted to threaten international peace if it felt insecure. Meanwhile, other scholars, including Robert Gilpin and John Mueller, are sceptical about the deterrent power of nuclear weapons. Gilpin (1981: 218) noted that ‘the thesis that nuclear weapons have made hegemonic war or a system-changing series of limited wars an impossibility must remain inconclusive’. John Mueller (1989), an advocate of the obsolescence of great power war, argues that a large-scale war between the superpowers had been impractical even before World War II because they experienced the calamities and costs of World War I. For Mueller, World War II was an exceptional war initiated by Hitler, an evil genius, and Japanese militarists, romantic risk-takers who had not experienced World War I (ibid.).

Détente

Fred Halliday (1986: 205–6) viewed the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of détente as an attempt to preserve US hegemony with a comprehensive package of punishments and inducements, while Gaddis (1982: 314) stressed that the initiative, based on Kennan’s strategy of containment, was aimed at integrating the Soviet economy with that of the Western world to such an extent that the Soviet Union would have no motive for shattering the status quo. President Richard Nixon’s credentials as a staunch anti-communist po...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Theorizing comprehensive engagement
• Part II Operationalizing comprehensive engagement
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: The South-North Joint Declaration (15 June 2000)
• Appendix 2: President Kim Dae-jung’s Berlin Declaration (9 March 2000)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index