North vs. South, again

The scene on Yeonpyeong-do late this afternoon. Photo via

I know it's right after a Foreign Lands roundup, but this probably shouldn't wait until next week. So, kids, here's the deal. The North fired some shells on an inhabited island near the disputed maritime border between North and South Korea today. This was ostensibly in response to a provocative exercise by the South Koreans, though the South Korean government is denying the claims that any shells came close to the boundary. This is a fairly big deal because instead of firing upon a military target, the North Koreans fired on civilian targets - homes and businesses on the island of Yeonpyeong. The South Korean and American militaries are on heightened alerts, with South Korean fighter jets being (apparently) scrambled near the border and South Korean troops at the ready. More can be read here, here, and here.

Of course, most of this information is fairly shaky at best - South Korea is not exactly known for its stellar journalistic practices (barest foundation for this fourth-person hearsay? LET'S PUBLISH AS UNQUALIFIED FACT!), and that goes double for the shitty Korean English-language news outlets, so the precise situation is not exactly known, and probably won't be known until tomorrow morning. But I figured some of you might be curious, so I am going to go ahead and give you my gut reaction to all this.

To me, this feels like the sinking of the Cheonan, which happened back in March of this year. It was one of the most deadly attacks on South Korea since the cease fire in 1953, and was a real tragedy for this country. But ultimately, in the grand scheme of things - nothing happened. Well that's not precisely true. Most of the last vestiges of the Sunshine policy of President Roh Moo-hyun (which had largely been gutted by current president Lee Myeong-bak in previous years) were reversed, and business continued on as normal in the South. The GNP talked big, but, as expected, did little.

Nor, on the other hand, did North Korea. Really. Nothing - and I mean literally nothing - came of the Cheonan incident other than people talked about what to do with a problem like North Korea. My gut reaction is that this incident will ultimately be similar - North Korea putting on a show of violence that is as much to shore up support amongst the top-ranking party officials for the impending transition of power from Kim Jong Il as it is to regain international attention as they seek to restart the 6 party diplomatic talks.

That's sort of the beauty of this strategy. While I'm not 100% sure that the talks would go their way, they have pretty much forced the other five nations (Japan, China, Russia, South Korea and the US) to agree at least in principle in order to avoid further violence. I'm betting that sometime during 2011, we'll be hearing about new rounds of talks between the six nations. Neither South Korea nor North Korea really wants all-out war - it would be way too destabilizing in the north, and I'm not sure the south is convinced it could win in a war with North Korea - 700,000 troops vs 3 million is a fairly daunting disadvantage.

So there you go - I believe, at this moment, that this was a one-off, isolated incident. The problem, though, is North Korea sees these isolated incidents as viable ways to get the rest of the world to pay attention, and will almost certainly continue to do them whenever they need something. The key here is to stop treating North Korea like a petulant child - it just reinforces their behavior. What's more, I think it does us a real disservice in terms of our own abilities to understand and think through situations involving North Korea when we write it off as a child. It would behoove us to put ourselves in the shoes of Kim Jong Il and do a bit of critical thinking to try to figure out what they want and what they would be willing to sacrifice to get it. Only then will the outside world be able to come up with a workable strategy to successfully interact with/contain/isolate/solve North Korea.

Oh yeah basic message: I'm fine over here, guys. No need to worry.