Seeking Peace on the Korean Peninsula

Although the date drew little notice in the U.S. media, July 27, 2020 marked the 67^th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice Agreement, an agreement that ended the fighting but not the war between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea).

The government of North Korea continues to seek a peace treaty with the United States, with the support of the current president of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), to finally bring an end to the Korean War.  The leadership of the United States remains opposed.  The costs of maintaining this state of war are immense.  Tragically, the media has done little to educate Americans about the actual history and consequences of U.S. policy towards Korea 

Founded in 2005, the Korea Policy Institute (KPI) is an independent research and educational institute that works to increase popular awareness and understanding of developments on the Korean peninsula and to promote a U.S. policy towards Korea that respects the Korean peoples’ desire for peace, sovereignty, reconciliation, and the reunification of Korea—I am a member of its board of directors.  In line with its mission, KPI has just published its second reader—this one titled Seeking Peace on the Korean Peninsula.

This 93-page reader, which features articles from leading analysts, journalists, and scholars in the United States, Asia, and the Pacific, offers critical context to developments on the Korean Peninsula. The reader is divided into four sections:

1. The Continuing Korean War
2. The Costs of U.S. Sanctions on North Korea
3. Trump’s North Korea Legacy: Failed U.S.-DPRK Summits
4. Time for a People’s Policy Toward Korea.

 

It can be viewed and downloaded for free here. 

There is great need for a new U.S. policy towards Korea, one that promotes peace on the Korean Peninsula:

• The ongoing state of war between the United States and North Korea helps to fuel an ever-growing U.S. military budget, an expanding U.S. military presence in Asia, the militarization of Japan, and an East Asian arms race, all at the expense of needed spending on social programs.
• U.S. hostility towards North Korea strengthens conservative political forces in South Korea, restricting the ability of labor and other social movements to freely pursue progressive political changes.
• U.S. policy towards Korea continues to undermine attempts by the leaders of South Korea and North Korea to end the division of Korea, keeping millions of families separated, including some 100,000 Korean Americans.
• U.S. sanctions on North Korea, which deny the country access to international aid, loans, and investment, and severely limit the country’s ability to engage in international trade, are causing wide-spread human suffering in North Korea, especially among women and children.
• U.S. militarism encourages the militarization of South Korea by pressuring the country to engage in joint military exercises that involve training for invasion and occupation of North Korea; purchase and deploy new U.S. missile defense systems aimed at both China and North Korea; construct new naval facilities for use by U.S. warships; and boost its military spending to, among other things, pay a large share of the costs of hosting U.S. bases and obtain increasingly expensive U.S. military weaponry.
• And then there is the real threat of a new, nuclear Korean War, with human and environmental costs that cannot be calculated.

To learn more about these and related issues, check out the new KPI reader, Seeking Peace on the Korean Peninsula.  And if you have the time, you might  want to check out the 130-page, 2018 KPI reader, U.S. Policy and Korea, which can also be viewed and downloaded for free.

US Militarism Marches On

Republicans and Democrats like to claim that they are on opposite sides of important issues.  Of course, depending on which way the wind blows, they sometimes change sides, like over support for free trade and federal deficits.  Tragically, however, there is no division when it comes to militarism.

For example, the federal budget for fiscal year 2018 (which ends on September 30, 2018), included more money for the military than even President Trump requested.  Trump had asked for a military budget of $603 billion, a sizeable $25 billion increase over fiscal year 2017 levels; Congress approved $629 billion.  Trump had also asked for $65 billion to finance current war fighting, a bump of $5 billion; Congress approved $71 billion.  The National Defense Authorization Act of 2018, which set the target budget for the Department of Defense at this high level, was approved by the Senate in a September 2017 vote of 89-9.

In the words of the New York Times: “In a rare act of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, the Senate passed a $700 billion defense policy bill . . . that sets forth a muscular vision of America as a global power, with a Pentagon budget that far exceeds what President Trump has asked for.”

That Act also called for a further increase in military spending of $16 billion for fiscal year 2019 (which begins October 1, 2018).  And, in June 2018, the Senate voted 85 to 10 to authorize that increase, boosting the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2019 total to $716 billion.

This bipartisan embrace of militarism comes at enormous cost for working people.  This cost includes cuts in funding for public housing, health care and education; the rebuilding of our infrastructure; basic research and development; and efforts to mitigate climate change.  It also includes the militarization of our police, since the military happily transfers its excess or outdated equipment to willing local police departments.

And it also includes a belligerent foreign policy.  A case in point: Congress has made clear its opposition to the Trump administration decision to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and halt war games directed against North Korea, apparently preferring the possibility of a new Korean War.  Congress is also trying to pass a law that will restrict the ability of the President to reduce the number of US troops stationed in South Korea.

In brief, the US military industrial complex, including the bipartisan consensus which helps to promote militarism’s popular legitimacy, is one of the most important and powerful foes we must overcome if we are to seriously tackle our ever-growing social, economic, and ecological problems.

The military is everywhere

The US has approximately 800 formal military bases in 80 countries, with 135,000 soldiers stationed around the globe.  Putting this in perspective, Alice Slater reports that:

only 11 other countries have bases in foreign countries, some 70 altogether. Russia has an estimated 26 to 40 in nine countries, mostly former Soviet Republics, as well as in Syria and Vietnam; the UK, France, and Turkey have four to 10 bases each; and an estimated one to three foreign bases are occupied by India, China, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

US special forces are deployed in even more countries.  According to Nick Turse, as of 2015, these forces were operating in 135 countries, an 80 percent increase over the previous five years.  “That’s roughly 70 percent of the countries on the planet. Every day, in fact, America’s most elite troops are carrying out missions in 80 to 90 nations practicing night raids or sometimes conducting them for real, engaging in sniper training or sometimes actually gunning down enemies from afar.”

This widespread geographic deployment represents not only an aggressive projection of US elite interests, it also provides a convenient rationale for those that want to keep the money flowing.  The military, and those that support its funding, always complain that the military needs more funds to carry out its mission.  Of course, the additional funds enable the military to expand the reach of its operations, thereby justifying another demand for yet more money.

The US military is well funded 

It is no simple matter to estimate of how much we spend on military related activities.  The base military budget is the starting point.  It represents the amount of the discretionary federal budget that is allocated to the Department of Defense.  Then there is the overseas contingency operations fund, which is a separate pool of money sitting outside any budgetary restrictions, that the military receives yearly from the Congress to cover the costs of its ongoing warfare.

It is the combination of the two that most analysts cite when talking about the size of the military budget. Using this combined measure, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute finds that the United States spends more on its military than the next seven largest military spenders combined, which are China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the UK, and Japan.

As the following chart shows, US military spending (base budget plus overseas contingency operations fund), adjusted for inflation, has been on the rise for some time, and is now higher than at any time other than during the height of the Iraq war.  Jeff Stein, writing in the Washington Post, reports that the military’s base budget will likely be “the biggest in recent American history since at least the 1970s, adjusting for inflation.”

As big as it is, the above measure of military spending grossly understates the total.  As JP Sottile explains:

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) tabulated all “defense-related spending” for both 2017 and 2018, and it hit nearly $1.1 trillion for each of the two years. The “defense-related” part is important because the annual National Defense Authorization Act, a.k.a. the defense budget, doesn’t fully account for all the various forms of national security spending that gets peppered around a half-dozen agencies.

William Hartung, an expert on military spending, went agency by agency to expose all the various military-related expenses that are hidden in different parts of the budget.  As he points out:

You might think that the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal — nuclear warheads — would be paid for out of the Pentagon budget.   And you would, of course, be wrong.  The cost of researching, developing, maintaining, and “modernizing” the American arsenal of 6,800 nuclear warheads falls to an obscure agency located inside the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA. It also works on naval nuclear reactors, pays for the environmental cleanup of nuclear weapons facilities, and funds the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories, at a total annual cost of more than $20 billion per year.

Hartung’s grand total, which includes, among other things, the costs of Homeland Security, foreign military aid, intelligence services, the Veterans Administration, and the interest on the debt generated by past spending on the military, is $1.09 trillion, roughly the same as the POGO total cited above.  In short, our political leaders are far from forthcoming about the true size of our military spending.

Adding insult to injury, the military cannot account for how it spends a significant share of the funds it is given.  A Reuters’ article by Scott Paltrow tells the story:

The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June [2016] report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

As a result, the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” the report concluded. The “forced” adjustments rendered the statements useless because “DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.” . . .

The report affirms a 2013 Reuters series revealing how the Defense Department falsified accounting on a large scale as it scrambled to close its books. As a result, there has been no way to know how the Defense Department – far and away the biggest chunk of Congress’ annual budget – spends the public’s money.

The new report focused on the Army’s General Fund, the bigger of its two main accounts, with assets of $282.6 billion in 2015. The Army lost or didn’t keep required data, and much of the data it had was inaccurate, the IG said.

“Where is the money going? Nobody knows,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning. . . .

For years, the Inspector General – the Defense Department’s official auditor – has inserted a disclaimer on all military annual reports. The accounting is so unreliable that “the basic financial statements may have undetected misstatements that are both material and pervasive.”

Military spending is big for business

Almost half of the US military budget goes to private military contractors.  These military contracts are the lifeblood for many of the largest corporations in America.  Lockheed Martin and Boeing rank one and two on the list of companies that get the most money from the government.  In 2017 Lockheed Martin reported $51 billion in sales, with $35.2 billion coming from the government.  Boeing got $26.5 billion. The next three in line are Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman.  These top five firms captured some $100 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2016.

And, as Hartung describes,

The Pentagon buys more than just weapons. Health care companies like Humana ($3.6 billion), United Health Group ($2.9 billion), and Health Net ($2.6 billion) cash in as well, and they’re joined by, among others, pharmaceutical companies like McKesson ($2.7 billion) and universities deeply involved in military-industrial complex research like MIT ($1 billion) and Johns Hopkins ($902 million).

Not surprisingly, given how lucrative these contracts are, private contractors work hard to ensure the generosity of Congress. In 2017, for example, 208 defense companies spent almost $100 million to deploy 728 reported lobbyists.  Lobbying is made far easier by the fact that more than 80 percent of top Pentagon officials have worked for the defense industry at some point in their careers, and many will go back to work in the defense industry.

Then there are arms sales to foreign governments. Lawrence Wittner cites a study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that found that sales of weapons and military services by the world’s largest 100 corporate military suppliers totaled $375 billion in 2016. “U.S. corporations increased their share of that total to almost 58 percent, supplying weapons to at least 100 nations around the world.”

Eager to promote the arms industry, government officials work hard on their behalf.  As Hartung explains: From the president on his trips abroad to visit allied world leaders to the secretaries of state and defense to the staffs of U.S. embassies, American officials regularly act as salespeople for the arms firms.”

More for the military and less for everything else

The federal budget is divided into three categories: mandatory spending (primarily social security and medicare), discretionary spending, and interest on the debt. Two trends in discretionary spending, the component of the budget set each year at the discretion of Congress, offer a window on how militarism is squeezing out funding for programs that serve majority needs.

The first noteworthy trend is the growing Congressional support for defense (base military budget) over non-defense programs. In 2001, the majority of discretionary funds went to non-defense programs,  However, that soon changed, as we see in the chart below, thanks to the “war on terror.”  In the decade following September 11, 2001, military spending increased by 50 percent, while spending on every other government program increased by only 13.5 percent.

In the 2018 federal budget, 54 percent of discretionary funds are allocated to the military (narrowly defined), $700 billion to the military and $591 billion to non-military programs. The chart below shows President Trump’s discretionary budgetary request for fiscal year 2019. As we can see, the share of funds for the military would rise to 61 percent of the total.

According to the National Priorities Project, “President Trump’s proposals for future spending, if accepted by Congress, would ensure that, by 2023, the proportion of military spending [in the discretionary budget] would soar to 65 percent.”  Of course, militarism’s actual share is much greater, since the military is being defined quite narrowly.  For example, Veterans’ Benefits is included in the non-defense category.

The second revealing trend is the decline in non-defense discretionary spending relative to GDP.  Thus, not only is the military base budget growing more rapidly than the budget for nondefense programs, spending on discretionary non-defense programs is not even keeping up with the growth in the economy.  This trend translates into a declining public capacity to support research and development and infrastructure modernization, as well as meet growing needs for housing, education, health and safety, disaster response . . . the list is long.

The 2018 bipartisan budget deal increased discretionary spending for both defense and non-defense programs, but the deal did little to reverse this long run decline in non-defense discretionary spending relative to the size of the economy.  A Progressive Policy Institute blog post by Ben Ritz explains:

The Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) capped both categories of discretionary spending as part of a broader effort to reduce future deficits. When Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement on taxes and other categories of federal spending, the BCA automatically triggered an even deeper, across-the-board cut to discretionary spending known as sequestration. While the sequester has been lifted several times since it first took effect, discretionary spending consistently remained far below the original BCA caps.

That trend ended with the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 (BBA). This budget deal not only lifted discretionary spending above sequester levels – it also went above and beyond the original BCA caps for two years. Nevertheless, projected domestic discretionary spending for Fiscal Year 2019 is significantly below the historical average as a percentage of gross domestic product. Moreover, even if policymakers extended these policy changes beyond the two years covered by the BBA, we project that domestic discretionary spending could fall to just 3 percent of GDP within the next decade – the lowest level in modern history [see dashed black line in chart below].

The story is similar for defense spending. Thanks to the pressure put on by the sequester, defense discretionary spending fell to just under 3.1 percent of GDP in FY2017. Under the BBA, defense spending would increase to 3.4 percent of GDP in FY2019 before falling again [see dashed black line in following chart]. Unlike domestic discretionary spending, however, defense would remain above the all-time low it reached before the 2001 terrorist attacks throughout the next decade.

In sum, Congress appears determined to squeeze non-defense programs, increasingly privileging defense over non-defense spending in the discretionary budget and allowing non-defense spending as a share of GDP to fall to record lows.  The ratio of discretionary defense spending relative to GDP appears to be stabilizing, although at levels below its long-term average.  However, discretionary defense spending refers only to the base budget of the Department of Defense and as such is a seriously understated measure of the costs of US militarism.  Including the growing costs of Homeland Security, foreign military aid, intelligence services, the Veterans Administration, the interest on the debt generated by past spending on the military, and the overseas contingency operations fund, would result in a far different picture, one that would leave no doubt about the government’s bipartisan commitment to militarism.

The challenge ahead

Fighting militarism is not easy.  Powerful political and business forces have made great strides in converting the United States into a society that celebrates violence, guns, and the military. The chart below highlights one measure of this success.  Sadly, 39 percent of Americans polled support increasing our national defense while 46 percent think it is just about right. Only 13 percent think it is stronger than it needs to be.

Polls, of course, just reveal individual responses at a moment in time to questions that, in isolation, often provide respondents with no meaningful context or alternatives and thus reveal little about people’s true thoughts.  At the same time, results like this show just how important it is for us to work to create space for community conversations that are informed by accurate information on the extent and aims of US militarism and its enormous political, social, economic, and ecological costs for the great majority of working people.

The US-DPRK Singapore Summit Was A Meaningful Step Towards Peace On The Korean Peninsula

The June 12^th Singapore Summit between the US and the DPRK was an important, positive step towards the achievement of peace on the Korean Peninsula, normalized relations between the US and North Korea, and the reunification of Korea.

In the words of the Korean Public Service and Transport Workers’ Union, one of South Korea’s largest unions:

The very fact that the top leaders of North Korea and the U.S., two countries whose relationship has been laced with hostility and mutual threats for the last seventy years, sat together in one place and shared dialogue is historic and signals a new era in which peace on the Korean Peninsula is possible. We therefore welcome the North Korea-U.S. Summit and joint statement.

At the same time, it is important not to lose perspective.  The Summit was a step, but only step, towards improved relations.  Many challenges remain on the road ahead, and it is going to require popular pressure to keep us moving forward.

The summit was a real movement away from war

On the North Korean side, Kim Jong Un, even before the Summit, announced an end to his country’s missile and nuclear weapons testing.  At the Summit, he once again committed his country to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which is a commitment to end the county’s nuclear weapons program if matched by a US commitment to refrain from threatening a nuclear attack on North Korea or introducing nuclear weapons on or around the Korean Peninsula.  He also agreed to destroy his country’s main missile engine testing facility, having already destroyed the country’s nuclear bomb testing facility. He also agreed to allow a return of US military personal to search for and repatriate the remains of US soldiers killed during the Korean War.

On the US side, Donald Trump pledged to end the war games which are held several times a year in and around the Korean Peninsula and which include simulated nuclear attacks on North Korea and planning for the “decapitation” of North Korea’s leadership.

And both sides agreed to more meetings to work on structuring a process designed to achieve the denuclearization of the Peninsula and the normalization of relations between the US and North Korea, which would mean among other things, an end to the Korean War and US sanctions against North Korea.

And thanks to the positive momentum generated by the Singapore Summit, North and South Korea continue to build on the success of their own recent summit.  For example, the militaries of the two countries recently held their first general level talks in ten years and agreed to fully restore their military communication lines, as well as began talks to demilitarize the DMZ area.

These are incredibly positive developments, especially in light of the fact that only months ago we faced the very real threat of a new Korean War.

There is strong support in South Korea for improved North Korean relations

These developments are extremely popular in South Korea.   More than 80 percent of South Koreans support South Korean President Moon’s policies, including his own summit meeting with Kim.  And in elections held the day after the US-North Korean summit, his Democratic Party won 14 of the 17 mayoral and gubernatorial races and 11 of 12 parliament by-elections.  Opposition parties that criticized Moon’s approach to North Korea were thoroughly defeated.

If this response has surprised people in the United States, it is only because many have little understanding of the costs paid by people in South Korea from the state of war between the US and North Korea.  For example, the state of war has allowed conservative governments in South Korea to use national security laws to outlaw a progressive political party, dissolve militant trade unions, arrest trade union leaders, break strikes, and restrict freedom of speech.  It has also enabled conservative forces to win massive increases in military spending at the expense of social programs and legitimated the growth of US military bases throughout the country, with their immense environmental and social costs.  And then there is the real and constant threat of war.

Of course, the people in North Korea have suffered the most—the threat of war and the need for greater military spending as well as the economic embargo and sanctions have taken a real social and economic toll; political and human rights have also suffered.  At the same time, it is worth pointing out that despite claims that the North Korean government cares little for the well being of its people,

several reports and academic studies show that North Korea’s food situation is stable and on par with – or even better than – some other nations in Asia.

Professor Hazel Smith, Director of the International Institute of Korean Studies at Cranfield University in the UK, concluded in a new research paper that levels of severe wasting – people being underweight for their height because of acute malnutrition – is lower in North Korea than in a number of other low-income countries [including India, Pakistan, and Indonesia] and equal to those in other developing countries in Asia.

Troubling criticisms of the Summit 

Tragically, many liberal voices have been raised in opposition to the Summit and the possibilities for peace it has encouraged.  Progressive commentators, as well as Democratic Party politicians and established journalists, have expressed outrage and worry over the fact that Trump met with Kim.  In broad brush, they say that the US gave Kim all he wanted, which was legitimacy on the world stage, and got nothing in return.  Or that by agreeing to halt war games, the US gave away its most important bargaining chip.  Or that the US flag and NK flag should never have flown side by side—given the dictatorial nature of the North Korean regime.  Or that the US is undermining the ROK-US alliance.

As Korea analyst Tim Shorrock noted:

Even as the first images flashed across the world of Trump and Kim shaking hands against the unusual background of US and DPRK flags flapping together, social media and op-ed sections of media sites were filled with denunciations of Trump. Democratic leaders in the House and Senate led the attack.

“In his haste to reach an agreement, President Trump elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo,” charged House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Senate minority leader Charles Schumer, who last week warned that the Democrats might oppose any agreement that didn’t include the now-famous CVID commitment, said on the Senate floor that Trump had “legitimized a brutal dictator.”

Conservative columnists had a field day. “The spectacle of the murderous dictator Kim Jong Un on equal footing with the president of the United States—each country’s flag represented, a supposedly ‘normal’ diplomatic exchange between two nuclear powers—was enough to turn democracy lovers’ stomachs,” Jennifer Rubin wrote in the Post. Similar analyses were posted all day on Twitter.

Progressive media commentators also joined in.  For example, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow warned that Trump was being played by both Russia and North Korea:

Russia has just this tiny little border, 11 mile long border, with North Korea, with one crossing on a train. And they’ve got a troubled and varied history over the decades with that country. But Russia is also increasingly straining at its borders right now, and shoving back U.S. and Western influence. Especially U.S. and Western military presence anywhere near what it considers to be its own geopolitical interests. And one of the things that they have started to loudly insist on is that the U.S. drop those joint military exercises with South Korea. The U.S. has kept those going as a pillar of U.S. national security strategy for 70 years, now. Until last night, when Trump casually announced that that’s over now. He’s doing away with those. Blindsided everybody involved. And gave North Korea something they desperately want and would do almost anything for. Except he gave it to them for free. How come?

This is puzzling and disturbing.  We were on the verge of a new Korean War, and now we are engaged in serious peace talks.  That is a positive step.  Underlying these criticisms seems to be the assumption that the US always pursues a democratic foreign policy and thus should be allowed to have nuclear weapons, test new ones, and threaten to use them against other countries as it sees fit.  And other countries should refrain from objecting to or actively resisting US actions, especially developing their own weapons in response to US threats.  This is a very problematic assumption.

The importance of history

Most Americans do not know the history that got us here, starting with the fact that the Korean War ended with a cease fire, not a peace treaty. For many years, neither the US or North Korea showed much interest in ending the state of war.  That changed in the early 1990s with the end of the Soviet Union.  This event left North Korea without a powerful military protector and its major trading partner.  At the same time, the country was also hit by major floods in the mid-1990s, further adding to its security and economic problems.  These developments led North Korea to seek an accommodation with the US, which it hoped would lead to an end to the state of hostilities between the two countries.  North Korean overtures were generally rejected by the United States.

The US threatened to drop nuclear bombs on North Korea during the Korean war.  The US introduced nuclear weapons into South Korea in the late 1950s, against the terms of the armistice agreement that ended the fighting in Korea.  In the 1970s the US began war games that soon included simulated nuclear attacks against North Korea.  Without the Soviet Union’s protection, the North felt it had no choice but to take steps to protect itself, and that led it to pursue its own nuclear weapons program while simultaneously seeking peace talks with the United States.  North Korea repeatedly said, as it said again in Singapore, that it would abandon its nuclear program if the US ended its hostile policies.

While North Korea is always presented as an aggressive military power, the fact is that South Korea has outspent North Korea on defense every single year since 1976.  According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, South Korea currently spends roughly $40 billion a year on defense–and this does not include US military spending in the region.  By contrast, North Korea spends only $4 billion.

Trump’s willingness to cancel war games is a positive first step in showing that the US is seriousness about creating a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.  These war games, which happen at least twice a year, include B-52 bombers that are nuclear capable, stealth fighters, submarines with nuclear missiles, hundreds of thousand troops, and are organized to practice attacking North Korea.

North Koreans still remember the Korean War, which included, as historian Bruce Cumings describes,

three years of “rain and ruin” by the US air force. Pyongyang had been razed to the ground, with the Air Force stating in official documents that the North’s cities suffered greater damage than German and Japanese cities firebombed during World War II.

Just as the Japan scholar Richard Minear termed Truman’s atomic attacks “exterminationist”, the great French writer and film-maker Chris Marker wrote after a visit to the North in 1957: “Extermination crossed this land.” It was an indelible experience still drilled into the heads of every North Korean.

In light of this history, one can easily understand why North Korean leaders find current US war games threatening.

Agreeing to halt these massive exercises is not giving North Korea something undeserved.  It is an important way for the United States to demonstrate that it is serious about achieving peace.  And, as noted above, North Korea is taking its own actions to demonstrate its seriousness, halting all missile and nuclear tests and destroying its test sites.  In this context, it is worth pointing out that North Korea has not demanded that the US stop all its missile and bomb testing, which continue.  It asks only that the US agree to normalize relations and commit not to threaten to attack the North or introduce nuclear weapons onto the Korean Peninsula—thus producing a nuclear free Korean Peninsula.

Agreeing to end the state of war is not giving North Korea some special benefit.  It is helping the Korean people gain the space they need to deal with their own division. Supporting such a process is also the best way to generate the kinds of interactions needed to promote real democratic change in both Koreas.  It also helps us in the United States, making it easier to confront our own militarism and the huge costs that we pay for it.

Real change is possible.  This is the moment to do what we can to build a strong popular movement on both sides of the Pacific for peace and reconciliation.

 

I recently discussed the Singapore Summit on KBOO radio.  You can hear the interview here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

US Policy and Possibilities For Peace On The Korean Peninsula

 

KOREAN CONFEDERATION OF TRADE UNIONS UNIFICATION COMMITTEE AND US LABOR AGAINST THE WAR SOLIDARITY DELEGATION TO KOREA, May 3, 2018, in front of the U.S. Embassy, Seoul, South Korea

The recent inter-Korean summit and the upcoming US-NK summit have suddenly made real the possibility for an end to the Korean War, normalization of relations between the US and North Korea, and meaningful progress toward Korean reunification.  Although the peace process is being driven by Korean efforts, clearly, the outcome depends heavily on US actions.

Unfortunately, the US press is not doing a very good job informing people about the history of US policy towards Korea, North and South, which means that it is not as easy as it should be to build a popular movement for peace. In response, the Korea Policy Institute has just published a reader on US Policy on Korea.  It is 130 pages long, with 19 articles by authors from the United States and Asia, and organized into the following five sections:

1. The Unending Korea War
2. US Foreign Policy Towards North Korea
3. South Korea: The Democratic Struggle
4. Voices For Peace
5. A Hopeful Start To An Era Of Peace

You can download it or order hard copies here:

http://kpolicy.org/the-kpi-reader-2018-important-new-resource-on-korea/

And keep checking the Korea Policy Institute website for the latest news and analysis of events.

North Korea in the Age of Trump

On January 23, Hyun Lee, the managing editor of ZoominKorea, and I spoke at a UCLA Center for Korean Studies sponsored event titled “North Korea in the Age of Trump.”  I went first, offering a critical perspective on US foreign policy towards Korea, North and South.  Hyun Lee then talked about the importance of Science and Technology in North Korea.

Both presentations can be viewed here:

Tragically the US media and government appear more eager for war than peace on the Korean Peninsula.  This reality was underscored by their negative reactions to Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s declaration, which included a call for talks between North Korea and South Korea and acceptance of South Korea’s invitation to participate in the Winter Olympics being held in South Korea.

Here are some examples:

Choe Sang-Hun and David Sanger, writing in the New York Times, quickly declared that Kim Jong-un’s welcoming of renewed contacts with South Korea represented little more than “a canny new strategy” designed to divide South Korea from the US and weaken the alliance.  They raised the “fear that if dialogue on the Korean Peninsula creates a temporary reprieve from tensions, the enforcement of sanctions could also be relaxed.”

Scott Snyder, senior fellow for Korea studies and director of the program on U.S.-Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, struck a similar tone in an article published in the Atlantic magazine.  Considering the possibility of talks to be a trap for South Korea, he ended his article expressing fear that South Korean President Moon could be forced into concessions that “might weaken South Korea’s alliance with the US.”

A few days later, Robert Litwak, a senior vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “Washington and Seoul should not take Mr. Kim’s bait.  Instead, the North Korean offer should be put to the diplomatic test through a united Washington-Seoul front.”

A New York Times article quoted Daniel R. Russel, a former assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Obama administration, as saying: “It is fine for the South Koreans to take the lead, but if they don’t have the U.S. behind them, they won’t get far with North Korea. And if the South Koreans are viewed as running off the leash, it will exacerbate tensions within the alliance.”

Heather Nauert, the US State Department’s spokesperson, made clear that the US is carefully watching South Korea.  “Our understanding,” she said, is that these talks…will be limited to conversations about the Olympics and perhaps some other domestic matters.”  South Korea isn’t “going to go off freelancing” she told the press.

The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, told journalists at the UN that “We won’t take any of the talks seriously if they don’t do something to ban all nuclear weapons in North Korea.”

And then, just as the talks were getting ready to begin on January 9, US officials let it be known to The Wall Street Journal that they were “quietly debating” the possibility of what they called a “bloody nose” tactic that would involve a “limited military strike” against North Korea’s nuclear and missiles sites without somehow setting off “an all-out war on the Korean Peninsula.”

And as a measure of just how seriously the US is considering such an action, President Trump recently withdrew his support for Victor Cha’s nomination to be the US ambassador to South Korea.  Although Cha advocates the strongest possible sanctions on North Korea, he lost his position because he expressed reservations about the wisdom of such a military strike.

The fact that North Koreans and South Koreans walked together under one flag in the opening ceremony of the Olympics does not mean that the danger of war has passed.  But it is a good sign.  We in the US need to do what we can to ensure that US government actions, including a new round of war games, do not throw up roadblocks to a process that needs to be encouraged.

Media Complicity Increases The Possibility Of A New Korean War

Tensions between the US and North Korea are again rising in the wake of North Korea’s November 28^th test of an ICBM that experts believe has the potential to deliver a nuclear bomb to cities on the east coast of the US, including Washington D.C.

As I have written before, we desperately need to change US foreign policy towards North Korea.  North Korea’s leaders continue to seek talks with the United States, with all issues on the table, those of concern to them and those of concern to the US government.  But the US government continues to refuse.  The Trump administration has even rejected North Korean offers to freeze its production and testing of missiles and nuclear weapons in return for a halt to US war games directed against North Korea.

Instead, Trump continues Obama’s strategy of responding to every North Korean missile launch or nuclear test with new military threats and sanctions.

Unfortunately, changing US foreign policy towards North Korea is no easy matter.  One reason is that there are powerful forces opposing a de-escalation of tensions.  Sadly, the tension is useful to the US military industrial complex, which needs enemies to support its desire increase in the military budget.  It is also useful to the US military, providing it with a justification for maintaining troops on the Asian mainland and in Japan.  The tension also helps the US government isolate China and boost right-wing political tendencies in Japan and South Korea, developments favorable to our own militarists and right-wingers.  Of course, the costs of US policy fall on ordinary people.

Another reason for the difficulty in changing US policy towards North Korea is that the US media does little to provide the context necessary for people in the United States to understand its lawless and destructive nature.

The illegality of Trump administration threats of destruction

The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened North Korea with total destruction.  What is missing from media accounts of these threats is the explanation that they represent a violation of the UN Charter and international law.  As Gavan McCormack explains:

According to the UN Charter’s Article 2 (3), disputes between states must be settled by peaceful means and (4) “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state …” [italics added]. Article 33 further specifies the obligation of parties to any dispute likely to endanger international peace and security to “first of all, seek a solution by negotiation inquiry, mediation, conciliation … or other peaceful means of their own choice.” By ruling out negotiations with North Korea and insisting only on submission, the US, Japan and Australia ignore or breach this clear rule (and Japan breaches also the proscription on the “threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes” in its own constitution). Going beyond that, President Trump has also not only insulted the North Korean leader from the platform of the UN General Assembly but actually threatened his country with “total destruction,” by “fire and fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.” That surely qualifies as threat. It is even genocidal, and therefore criminal behavior, not only on the part of those (Trump) who utter it but on the part also of those like Abe and Turnbull (to whom perhaps now India’s Modi is to be added) who endorse and encourage it.

Moreover, in 1996, the International Court of Justice, in response to a UN request, ruled that threats to use nuclear weapons against another country are a violation of international law except “in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”  In certainly seems clear that the US is in violation of international law because of its repeated threats and military exercises designed to practice a nuclear attack on North Korea.

Tragically, the US media has remained silent about this lawlessness on the part of the US government.

The illegality of US-initiated UN sanctions on North Korea

The US has aggressively pursued the adoption of UN sanctions on North Korea.  The ones adopted in August and September are the most sweeping yet. They call for blocking North Korean exports of coal, iron, iron ore, lead, lead ore, seafood and textiles, all of which are important earners of foreign exchange. The resolutions also ban countries from opening new or expanding existing joint ventures in North Korea or renewing labor export agreements.  They also impose a cap on the amount of oil North Korea is allowed to import and call for a total ban on the country’s import of natural gas and condensates.  If rigorously enforced these sanctions will devastate living conditions for the great majority of North Koreans.

However, sanctions that target an entire population with the aim of causing economic collapse, such as those being imposed on North Korea, are illegal under the UN charter.  As McCormack points out:

Only sanctions carefully tailored to apply to those who act in the name of the government and bear responsibility for its offensive actions may be legitimate. . . . The point is clear that that those imposing sanctions bear an obligation to ensure they impact only upon those who are in a position of power, not on innocent civilians. There is reason to wonder if the United Nations itself, by the ordering of collective punishment of the entire North Korean people for offenses committed by their government, may be acting criminally.

Again, where are the stories pointing out the lawlessness of US and UN actions?

The missing explanation of North Korean responses to US policy

The reporting on North Korea’s November 28^th ICBM test offers another example of the US media’s failure to educate its readers. For example, here is the LA Times:

The launch is North Korea’s first since it fired an intermediate-range missile over Japan on Sept. 15, and may have broken any efforts at diplomacy meant to end the North’s nuclear ambitions. U.S. officials have sporadically floated the idea of direct talks with North Korea if it maintained restraint. . . .

Italy’s U.N. Ambassador Sebastiano Cardi, the current Security Council president, told reporters late Tuesday that “it’s certainly very worrying. Everybody was hoping that there would be restraint from the regime.”

This reporting certainly suggests that North Korea just doesn’t want peace no matter how hard the US and broader international community try.  But the story changes if we provide some missing context.

Since 2013 North Korea has offered to halt its testing of missiles and nuclear weapons if the US would halt its war games.  The US organizes two different annual war games in South Korea, the first is held over March and April and the second is in August.  But from time to time, it also engages in other smaller military exercises on and near the Korean peninsula.

The August 2017 war games included planning for a nuclear attack and “decapitation” of North Korea’s leadership.  These August war games are smaller than the March-April ones but still large.  This one included some 20,000 US and 50,000 South Korean troops.  And this year, for the first time, they were combined with a separate 18 day live-fire exercise involving US and Japanese forces on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

North Korea responded to these threatening maneuvers by first firing a missile over Hokkaido on August 29, the day after the completion of the US-led exercises.  Then on September 3, it conducted its sixth and largest test of a nuclear weapon.  And finally, on September 15, it tested a new intermediate-range missile to demonstrate its ability to hit the major US air base in Guam.

There are 75 days from September 15 to November 28; this is an important interval.  The reason is that the US had publicly called upon North Korea to halt its missile testing for at least 60 days to show its good will.

For example, in August, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told a group of reporters that “The best signal that North Korea could give us that they’re prepared to talk would be to stop these missile launches . . . We’ve not had an extended period of time where they have not taken some type of provocative action by launching ballistic missiles. So I think that would be the first and strongest signal they could send us is just stop, stop these missile launches.”  And in October, Joseph Yun, the U.S. State Department’s top official on North Korea policy, told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations “that if North Korea halted nuclear and missile testing for about 60 days, that would be the signal the United States needs to resume direct dialogue with Pyongyang.”

As we have seen, the North Koreans did refrain from missile launches and weapon tests for more than 60 days.  But, what did the US do during that time to encourage North Korea?

On September 23 the Pentagon sent B-1B Lancer bombers, nicknamed “the swan of death,” to fly over international airspace just off the coast of North Korea, the first time since the Korean War that a U.S. bomber flew over North Korea’s east coast.

Then for five days, starting October 16, the US conducted joint naval exercises with South Korea that included the nuclear aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, three nuclear submarines, Aegis destroyers and more than 40 other battleships and numerous fighter aircraft.

In November, the US conducted more navel drills.  This time it was a four-day exercise involving three aircraft carriers–the USS Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt and Nimitz–and their multiship strike groups in the waters between South Korea and Japan.  This was the first time all three aircraft carriers were together in the Western Pacific in a decade.  South Korean and Japanese warships also participated in the exercise.

Also in November, President Trump placed North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, which meant new sanctions.  And finally, again in November, the US announced yet another war game to be scheduled for the period December 4-8 involving US, Japanese, and South Korean forces.  Called Vigilant Ace, the military announced that this exercise would include “enemy infiltration” and “precision strike drills” and involve 8 air bases, 12,000 soldiers, and 280 aircraft, including the two stealth fighters, the F-22 and the F-35.  This was to be the first time that the F-22 and F-35 would be used in war games on the Korean peninsula.

So, after waiting 75 days, and observing US actions, all of which were hostile, North Korea not surprisingly responded with the launch of its most powerful ICBM, showing the US that it could target even its capital if attacked.  But by presenting this missile launch without the appropriate context the media made it appear as just another example of North Korea’s recklessness and hostility.

 

Sadly, we have a lot of work to do.

Challenging US Foreign Policy Toward North Korea

It is an understatement to say that relations between the US and North Korea are very tense—the US government continues to threaten to further tighten economic sanctions on North Korea and launch a military attack to destroy the country’s missiles and nuclear weapons infrastructure.  And the North for its part has said it would respond to any attack with its own strikes against US bases in the region and even the US itself.

Making matters worse are Trump’s personal attacks on Kim Jong Un, the head of the North Korean government.  And as an indicator of how much tensions have ramped up, Kim himself spoke, responding in kind to Trump.  It is very rare, in fact this may be the first time, that a North Korean leader has personally responded to comments made by another government; usually the North Korean position is conveyed by a government official or their news service.

This is obviously not a good situation, but it is also important to realize that what is happening now is not new.  The US began conducting war games with South Korean forces directed against the North in 1976 and it was not long before those included simulated nuclear attacks against the North, and that was before the North had any nuclear weapons.  In 1994, President Bill Clinton came very close to launching a military attack on North Korea.  In 2002, President Bush talked about implementing a naval blockade of North Korea and seizing its ships, an act of war, and also announced the adoption of a new National Security Strategy under which the US announced its right to take pre-emptive military action against any nation that it felt posed a threat to US interests, with North Korea said to be at or near the top of the list.  Since 2013, the US has conducted annual war games involving planning for preemptive attacks on North Korean targets that include the use of nuclear weapons and what the military calls the decapitation of the North Korean leadership.

The point here is not just that we have a history of threatening war, including nuclear attack, against the DPRK, but that it is a bipartisan history, involving both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Although we have thankfully so far averted a new Korean war, the cycle of belligerency and threat making on both sides is intensifying, and it is always possible that a miscalculation could trigger the start of military actions.  However, and this is very important, even if war is averted, the high level of tension between the US and North Korea itself comes with unacceptably high costs.

President Trump is continuing the strategy of past administrations of responding to every North Korean missile launch or nuclear test with new sanctions.  These sanctions are cutting deep, hurting North Korean living conditions.  It is collective punishment of the entire North Korean population.  As Gregory Elich explains, the US is already at war with North Korea, “doing so through non-military means, with the aim of inducing economic collapse.”

For example: UN resolution 2371, passed August 5, 2017, aims to block North Korea “from exporting coal, iron, iron ore, lead, lead ore, and seafood, all key commodities in the nation’s international trade. The resolution also banned countries from opening new or expanding existing joint ventures with the DPRK.”  UN resolution 2375, passed September 11, 2017, is designed to further limit “North Korea’s ability to engage in international trade by barring the export of textiles. It is estimated that together, the sanctions may well eliminate 90 percent of the DPRK’s export earnings. . . . The September resolution also adversely impacts the livelihoods of North Korea’s overseas workers, who will not be allowed to renew their contracts once they expire.”

The social costs of US policy are not limited to North Koreans, although they bear the greatest burden.  The tensions generated by the escalating US-NK standoff are helping to fuel greater military spending and militarization in Japan and China, as well as the US.  This is a dynamic that strengthens the political power and influence of dangerous rightwing forces in all these countries.  And in South Korea, these tensions are already at work undermining democratic possibilities, as labor leaders are jailed, civil rights curtailed, and progressive political parties disbanded in the name of national security.

So, it is not enough for us to just work to oppose outright military conflict.  We need to change the dynamics driving US and North Korean relations.  And, there is no mystery about the best way to achieve this end: the US needs to accept DPRK offers for direct negotiations to end the state of hostility between the two countries.  Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to forcing the US to the negotiating table. It requires building a strong popular movement that can cut through the myths and distortions that the US media and government promote in defense of current policy.  For an example of some of what we must overcome, see “The need for a new US foreign policy towards North Korea.”

Cutting through the myths and distortions also requires that we hear progressive voices from South Korea.  Jang Jinsook, Director of Planning of the Minjung Party of South Korea, a new progressive party that will formally launch on October 15, is one such voice.  What follows is a short excerpt from her talk titled “Honoring The Candlelight Revolution In A Time Of Looming War In Korea” that was given at the People’s Congress of Resistance at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in mid-September: 

The U.S.-North Korea Conflict: The Final Stage

Military tension between North and South Korea has always been headline news in Korea. Every year in March and August, when the U.S. and South Korean militaries conduct their massive military exercises, tensions escalate, and each time, people in Korea experience renewed fear: “Maybe this time, it will really lead to war.”

The U.S. and South Korean militaries say these are routine exercises, but they deploy weapons of mass destruction, rehearse the occupation of North Korea, and simulate real-war scenarios as well as the decapitation of the North Korean leadership. North Korea has strongly objected to these exercises, but this has been going on for a long time.

The Korean peninsula has always lived with the imminent threat of war. But until recently, it never made headline news in the United States.

I’ve been seeing the headlines in U.S. news in the few days I’ve been here: “Kim Jong-un, North Korea, missiles….” This ironically pleased me because finally what was once considered only a problem of the Korean peninsula has now become a U.S. problem. Now that the war threats are acute, it has finally become headline news in the United States.

It is the United States that has conducted the greatest number of nuclear tests, possesses the greatest nuclear arsenal, and has actually dropped atomic bombs on a civilian population. North Korea is in the stage of developing and testing nuclear weapons, opposes U.S. aggression and sanctions, and demands a peace treaty. Which party is the real threat?

For the first time in a long time, defending the U.S. mainland from the threat of nuclear war has become a priority policy agenda for the U.S. government. Of course, news about North Korea must be distressing for the people who live in the United States.

But it is the U.S. government that has created this situation, and the solution is quite simple. It is to realize a peace agreement between the United States and North Korea.

The more the United States piles on sanctions against North Korea through the UN, the more North Korea will become hostile and the two countries will inch closer to war. And the more this crisis intensifies, the U.S. government will sell more weapons to South Korea and increasingly meddle in South Korea’s internal affairs.

For the past sixty years, since the Korean War and the 1953 signing of the Mutual Defense Treaty between South Korea and the United States, South Korea has been a military outpost for the United States. The so-called U.S.-ROK alliance seriously undermines the sovereignty of South Korea. The forced deployment of the U.S. THAAD missile defense system is a case in point.

We demand the following:

1. The United States must end sanctions against North Korea, which are an act of war.
2. North Korea and the United States must sign a permanent peace agreement.
3. U.S. forces in Korea should withdraw from the Korean peninsula along with their weapons of mass destruction.
4. The United States must stop meddling in South Korea’s internal affairs.
5. Lastly, we must build enduring solidarity for peace in Korea and across the world.

 

You can read her entire speech and learn more about the Minjung Party of South Korea here, on the Korea Policy Institute website.

The Need For A New US Foreign Policy Towards North Korea

US-North Korean relations remain very tense, although the threat of a new Korean War has thankfully receded.  Still the US government remains determined to tighten economic sanctions on North Korea and continues to plan for a military strike aimed at destroying the country’s nuclear infrastructure.  And the North for its part has made it clear that it would respond to any attack with its own strikes against US bases in the region and even the US itself.

This is not good, but it is important to realize that what is happening is not new.  The US began conducting war games with South Korean forces in 1976 and it was not long before those included simulated nuclear attacks against the North, and that was before North Korea had nuclear weapons.  In 1994, President Bill Clinton was close to launching a military attack on North Korea with the aim of destroying its nuclear facilities.  In 2002, President Bush talked about seizing North Korean ships as part of a blockade of the country, which is an act of war.  In 2013, the US conducted war games which involved planning for preemptive attacks on North Korean military targets and “decapitation” of the North Korean leadership and even a first strike nuclear attack.

I don’t think we are on the verge of a new Korean war, but the cycle of belligerency and threat making on both sides is intensifying.  And it is always possible that a miscalculation could in fact trigger a new war, with devastating consequences. The threat of war, perhaps a nuclear war, is nothing to play around with.  But – and this is important — even if a new war is averted, the ongoing embargo against North Korea and continual threats of war are themselves costly: they promote/legitimatize greater military spending and militarization more generally, at the expense of needed social programs, in Japan, China, the US, and the two Koreas.  They also create a situation that compromises democratic possibilities in both South and North Korea and worsen already difficult economic conditions in North Korea.

There is a choice for peace

We doesn’t have to go down this road—we have another option—but it is one that the US government is unwilling to consider, much less discuss.  That option is for the US to accept North Korean offers of direct negotiations between the two countries, with all issues on the table.

The US government and media dismiss this option as out of hand—we are told that (1) the North is a hermit kingdom and seeks only isolation, (2) the country is ruled by crazy people hell bent on war, and (3) the North Korean leadership cannot be trusted to follow through on its promises.  But none of this is true.

First: if being a hermit kingdom means never wanting to negotiate, then North Korea is not a hermit kingdom.  North Korea has been asking for direct talks with the United States since the early 1990s.  The reason is simple: this is when the USSR ended and Russia and the former Soviet bloc countries in central Europe moved to adopt capitalism.  The North was dependent on trade with these countries and their reorientation left the North Korean economy isolated and in crisis.

The North Korean leadership decided that they had to break out of this isolation and connect the North Korean economy to the global economy, and this required normalization of relations with the United States.  Since then, they have repeatedly asked for unconditional direct talks with the US in hopes of securing an end to the Korean War and a peace treaty as a first step towards their desired normalization of relations, but have been repeatedly rebuffed.  The US has always put preconditions on those talks, preconditions that always change whenever the North has taken steps to meet them.

The North has also tried to join the IMF and WB, but the US and Japan have blocked their membership.

The North has also tried to set up free trade zones to attract foreign investment, but the US and Japan have worked to block that investment.

So, it is not the North that is refusing to talk or broaden its engagement with the global economy; it is the US that seeks to keep North Korea isolated.

Second: the media portray North Korea as pursuing an out of control militarism that is the main cause of the current dangerous situation.  But it is important to recognize that South Korea has outspent North Korea on military spending every year since 1976.  International agencies currently estimate that North Korean annual military spending is $4 billion while South Korean annual military spending is $40 billion.  And then we have to add the US military build-up.

North Korea does spend a high percentage of its budget on the military, but that is because it has no reliable military ally and a weak economy.  However, it has largely responded to South Korean and US militarism and threats, not driven them.  As for the development of a nuclear weapons program: it was the US that brought nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula.  It did so in 1958 in violation of the Korean War armistice and threatened North Korea with nuclear attack years before the North even sought to develop nuclear weapons.

Third: North Korea has been a more reliable negotiating partner than the US. Here we have to take up the nuclear issue more directly.  The North has tested a nuclear weapon 5 times: 2006, 2009, 2013, and twice in 2016.

Critically, North Korean tests have largely been conducted in an effort to pull the US into negotiations or fulfill past promises.  And the country has made numerous offers to halt its testing and even freeze its nuclear weapons program if only the US would agree to talks.

North Korea was first accused of developing nuclear weapons in early 1990s.  Its leadership refused to confirm or deny that the country had succeeded in manufacturing nuclear weapons but said that it would open up its facilities for inspection if the US would enter talks to normalize relations.  As noted above, the North was desperate, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, to draw the US into negotiations.  In other words, it was ready to end the hostilities between the two countries.

The US government refused talks and began to mobilize for a strike on North Korean nuclear facilities.  A war was averted only because Jimmy Carter, against the wishes of the Clinton administration, went to the North, met Kim Il Sung, and negotiated an agreement that froze the North Korean nuclear program.

The North Korean government agreed to end their country’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for aid and normalization.  And from 1994 to 2002 the North froze its plutonium program and had all nuclear fuel observed by international inspectors to assure the US that it was not engaged in making any nuclear weapons.   Unfortunately, the US did not live up to its side of the bargain; it did not deliver the aid it promised or take meaningful steps towards normalization.

In 2001 President Bush declared North Korea to be part of the axis of evil and the following year unilaterally canceled the agreement.  In response, the North restarted its nuclear program.

In 2003, the Chinese government, worried about growing tensions between the US and North Korea, convened multiparty talks to bring the two countries back to negotiations.  Finally, in 2005, under Chinese pressure, the US agreed to a new agreement, in which each North Korean step towards ending its weapons program would be matched by a new US step towards ending the embargo and normalizing relations.  But exactly one day after signing the agreement, the US asserted, without evidence, that North Korea was engaged in a program of counterfeiting US dollars and tightened its sanctions policy against North Korea.

The North Korean response was to test its first nuclear bomb in 2006.  And shortly afterwards, the US agreed to drop its counterfeiting charge and comply with the agreement it had previously signed.

In 2007 North Korea shut down its nuclear program and even began dismantling its nuclear facilities—but the US again didn’t follow through on the terms of the agreement, falling behind on its promised aid and sanction reductions.  In fact, the US kept escalating its demands on North Korea, calling for an end to North Korea’s missile program and improvement in human rights in addition to the agreed upon steps to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.  And so, frustrated, North Korea tested another nuclear weapon in 2009.

And the US responded by tightening sanctions.

In 2012 the North launched two satellites.  The first failed, the second succeeded.  Before each launch the US threatened to go to the UN and secure new sanctions on North Korea.  But the North asserted its right to launch satellites and went ahead.  After the December 2012 launch, the UN agreed to further sanctions and the North responded with its third nuclear test in 2013.

This period marks a major change in North Korean policy. The North now changed its public stance: it declared itself a nuclear state—and announced that it was no longer willing to give up its nuclear weapons.  However, the North Korean government made clear that it would freeze its nuclear weapons program if the US would cancel its future war games.  The US refused and its March 2013 war games included practice runs of nuclear equipped bombers and planning for occupying North Korea.  The North has therefore continued to test and develop its nuclear weapons capability.

Here is the point: whenever the US shows willingness to negotiate, the North responds.  And when agreements are signed, it is the US that has abandoned them.  The North has pushed forward with its nuclear weapons program largely in an attempt to force the US to seriously engage with the North because it believes that this program is its only bargaining chip.  And it is desperate to end the US embargo on its economy.

We lost the opportunity to negotiate with a non-nuclear North Korea when we cut off negotiations in 2001, before the country had a nuclear arsenal. Things have changed.  Now, the most we can reasonably expect is an agreement that freezes that arsenal.  However, if relations between the two countries truly improve it may well be possible to achieve a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula, an outcome both countries profess to seek.

New possibilities and our responsibilities

So, why does US refuse direct negotiations and risk war?  The most logical reason is that there are powerful forces opposing them.  Sadly, the tension is useful to the US military industrial complex, which needs enemies to support the ongoing build-up of the military budget.  The tension also allows the US military to maintain troops on the Asian mainland and forces in Japan.  It also helps to isolate China and boost right-wing political tendencies in Japan and South Korea.  And now, after decades of demonizing North Korea, it is difficult for the US political establishment to change course.

However, the outcome of the recent presidential election in South Korea might open possibilities to force a change in US policy. Moon Jae-in, the winner, has repudiated the hard-line policies of his impeached predecessor Park Guen-Hye, and declared his commitment to re-engage with the North.  The US government was not happy about his victory, but it cannot easily ignore Moon’s call for a change in South Korean policy towards North Korea, especially since US actions against the North are usually presented as necessary to protect South Korea. Thus, if Moon follows through on his promises, the US may well be forced to moderate its own policy towards the North.

What is clear is that we in the US have a responsibility to become better educated about US policy towards both Koreas, to support popular movements in South Korea that seek peaceful relations with North Korea and progress towards reunification, and to work for a US policy that promotes the demilitarization and normalization of US-North Korean relations.

I discuss this history of US-North Korean relations and current developments in South Korea in a May 8 interview on KBOO radio; you can hear the interview here: http://kboo.fm/media/57730-how-us-has-provoked-north-korea

To keep up on developments I encourage you to visit the following two websites:

Korea Policy Institute: kpolicy.org

ZoominKorea: zoominkorea.org

President Trump’s Hollow Job Promises

President Trump’s election success rested to a considerable degree on his pre-election attack on globalization and verbal pledge to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. However, as I argued in a previous post, there is no reason to believe that President Trump is serious about wanting to restrict corporate mobility or fashion new, more domestically-centered, worker-friendly trade relations.

In fact, several of his appointees to key economic policy positions are people whose past work was promoting the very globalization he criticized.

Still, there are some in the labor and progressive communities who continue to hold out hope that they can find common ground with the Trump administration on trade.  Unfortunately, it appears that these people are ignoring what we do know about the nature of existing manufacturing jobs in the globalized industries that President Trump claims he will target for restructuring.  Sadly, the experience of workers in many of those jobs reveals the hollowness of Trump’s promises to working people.

The Southern Strategy of the Automobile Industry

The automobile industry, one of the most globalized of US manufacturing industries, offers a powerful example of the dangers of thinking simply about employment numbers. As an Economic Policy Institute report describes:

Political and market pressure on Japanese and European (and later, Korean) manufacturers to reduce imports to the United States has led to a rising number of “transplants” supplying auto components and assembling autos.

Initially, the transplants operated in the Midwest, including assembly plants in Illinois (Mitsubishi), Michigan (Mazda), Ohio (Honda), and Pennsylvania (Volkswagen), along with California (Toyota’s joint venture with General Motors, now a Tesla facility). More recently, however, the growth has been in Southern states, including assembly plants in Alabama (Honda, Hyundai, and Mercedes-Benz), Georgia (Kia), Kentucky (Toyota), Mississippi (Nissan and Toyota), South Carolina (BMW and Mercedes-Benz), Tennessee (Nissan and Volkswagen), and Texas (Toyota).

As a result of these trends, the weight of motor vehicle manufacturing employment (including parts suppliers) in the United States has shifted from the Midwest to the South.  And what kind of jobs has this investment brought?  The title of a Bloomberg Businessweek article – Inside Alabama’s Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs – sums it up all too well.

As the article explains:

Alabama has been trying on the nickname “New Detroit.” Its burgeoning auto parts industry employs 26,000 workers, who last year earned $1.3 billion in wages. Georgia and Mississippi have similar, though smaller, auto parts sectors. This factory growth, after the long, painful demise of the region’s textile industry, would seem to be just the kind of manufacturing renaissance President Donald Trump and his supporters are looking for.

Except that it also epitomizes the global economy’s race to the bottom. Parts suppliers in the American South compete for low-margin orders against suppliers in Mexico and Asia. They promise delivery schedules they can’t possibly meet and face ruinous penalties if they fall short. Employees work ungodly hours, six or seven days a week, for months on end. Pay is low, turnover is high, training is scant, and safety is an afterthought, usually after someone is badly hurt. Many of the same woes that typify work conditions at contract manufacturers across Asia now bedevil parts plants in the South.

“The supply chain isn’t going just to Bangladesh. It’s going to Alabama and Georgia,” says David Michaels, who ran OSHA for the last seven years of the Obama administration. Safety at the Southern car factories themselves is generally good, he says. The situation is much worse at parts suppliers, where workers earn about 70¢ for every dollar earned by auto parts workers in Michigan, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Many plants in the North are unionized; only a few are in the South.)

In 2014, OSHA’s Atlanta office, after detecting a high number of safety violations at the region’s parts suppliers, launched a crackdown. The agency cited one year, 2010, when workers in Alabama parts plants had a 50 percent higher rate of illness and injury than the U.S. auto parts industry as a whole. That gap has narrowed, but the incidence of traumatic injuries in Alabama’s auto parts plants remains 9 percent higher than in Michigan’s and 8 percent higher than in Ohio’s. In 2015 the chances of losing a finger or limb in an Alabama parts factory was double the amputation risk nationally for the industry, 65 percent higher than in Michigan and 33 percent above the rate in Ohio.

The article provides several stories of low paid workers forced to work in unsafe conditions who suffered devastating injuries.  “OSHA records obtained by Bloomberg document burning flesh, crushed limbs, dismembered body parts, and a flailing fall into a vat of acid. The files read like Upton Sinclair, or even Dickens.”

The Story of Reco Allen

Here is one story from the article: in 2013 Reco Allen, a 35 year old father of three, with a wife working at Walmart, took at $9 an hour job with Surge Staffing, a temp agency that provides workers to Matsu Alabama, a Honda parts supplier.  Allen sought and was given a janitorial position at Matsu.  But after six weeks on the job, he was pressured by a supervisor to finish his shift by working on a metal-stamping press.  Matsu was in danger of not meeting its parts quota and the company “could have been fined $20,000 by Honda for every minute its shortfall held up the company’s assembly line.”

Allen received no training on operating the machine.  Moreover, there were known problems with the vertical safety beam that was supposed to keep the machine from operating if a worker was in danger of being caught in the stamping process.  Tragically, Allen’s arm was indeed caught by the die that stamped the metal parts.  As Businessweek reports:

He stood there for an hour, his flesh burning inside the heated press. Someone brought a fan to cool him off. . . . When emergency crews finally freed him, his left hand was “flat like a pancake,” Allen says, and parts of three fingers were gone. His right hand was severed at the wrist, attached to his arm by a piece of skin. A paramedic cradled the gloved hand at Allen’s side all the way to the hospital. Surgeons removed it that morning and amputated the rest of his right forearm to avert gangrene several weeks later.

The company had been told by the plant’s safety committee several times that the machine needed horizontal as well as vertical safety beams. In fact, one year before Allen’s accident, another worker suffered a crushed hand on the same machine.  Moreover, the company’s treatment of Allen was far from unusual.  Matsu “provided no hands-on training, routinely ordered untrained temps to operate machines, sped up presses beyond manufacturers’ specifications, and allowed oil to leak onto the floor.”

And what happened to the company?  They received a $103,000 fine from an Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.

The Businessweek article includes several other stories of workers maimed because of unsafe work conditions at firms with long histories of safety violations.  And they all ended in much the same way: with corporations paying minimal fines.  And, apparently with little change in corporate behavior.

Known Knowns

We know that most employers will push production as hard as they can to cut costs, with little regard for worker safety.  We also know that union jobs are better than non-union jobs in terms of wages and benefits, and safety.

We also know that President Trump is taking steps to weaken labor laws and unions, as well as gut federal and state agencies charged with protecting worker health and safety and the environment.

Thus, even if President Trump does succeed in enticing some globalized corporations to shift parts of their respective production networks back to the US, the experience of the auto industry demonstrates that the resulting job creation is unlikely to satisfy worker demands for safe, living wage jobs.

In sum, no matter the campaign rhetoric, and no matter the twists and turns in policy, it should be clear to all that President Trump is committed to an anti-worker agenda.

Asia’s Economic Future

There is strong reason to expect a further weakening of global economic activity over the next several years, putting greater pressure on majority living and working conditions.

In brief, Asia’s economic dynamism is ebbing.  Given the region’s centrality in the international economy, this trend is both an indicator of current global economic problems and a predictor of a worsening global situation.

Asia’s central role in the global economy

Asia’s central role in the world economy is easily documented.  For example, as the Asian Development Bank points out, “Global headwinds notwithstanding, developing Asia will continue to contribute 60% of world growth.”

Asia’s key position is anchored by China.  China is the single largest contributor to world GDP growth, likely accounting for almost 40 percent of global growth in 2016.  Stephen Roach, former Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the firm’s chief economist, estimates that China’s contribution to global growth was 50 percent larger than the combined contributions of all the advanced capitalist economies.

The rise of Asia, and in particular China, owes much to the actions of transnational corporations and their strategy of creating Asian-centered cross-border production networks or global value chains (GVC).  In the words of the Asian Development Bank, these networks or chains involve “dividing the production of goods and services into linked stages of production scattered across international borders.  While such exchange of inputs is as old as trade itself, rapid growth in the extent and complexity of GVCs since the late 1980s is unprecedented.”

The strategy was initiated by Japanese transnational corporations who began shifting segments of their respective production processes to developing Asian countries in the late 1980s; US and European firms soon followed.  The process kicked into high gear in the mid to late 1990s once China opened up to foreign investment and decided to pursue an export-led growth strategy.

Asia, as a consequence, became transformed into a highly efficient, integrated, regional export machine, with China serving as the region’s final assembly platform.  Developing Asian economies became increasingly organized around the production of manufactures for export; their share of total world manufacturing exports rose from 18.4 percent to 32.5 percent over the period 1992-3 to 2011-12.   And, following the logic of cross border production, a growing share of these exports were parts and components, which were often traded multiple times within the region before arriving in China for final assembly.   Parts and components accounted for more than half of all developing Asian intra-regional manufacturing trade in 2006-7.

China, befitting its regional role, became the first or second largest export market for almost every developing Asian country, with the majority of those exports the parts and components needed for the assembly of advanced electronics.  Between 1995 and 2014, the electronics share of manufacturing exports to China from Korea grew from 8.5 percent to 32.2 percent.  Over the same period, the electronics share from Taiwan exploded from 9.1 percent to 63.7 percent, for Singapore the share grew from 17.5 percent to 36.8 percent, and for the Philippines it rose from 3.4 percent to 78.3 percent.  China’s exports to the region, and especially outside the region, were mostly final goods, with the most technologically advanced assembled/produced under the direction of foreign transnational corporations.  In line with this development, China became the premier location for foreign investment by transnational corporations from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as leading non-Asian corporations.

This history allows us to appreciate the forces that powered Asia’s growth.  Growing demand for manufactures by consumers and retailers in the US and the Eurozone became increasingly satisfied by exports from Asia.  The production of these exports triggered the production of and trade in parts and components by developing East Asian countries and their final assembly in China, as well as massive investment in new factories and supportive infrastructure, especially in China.  East Asian export production also required significant imports of primary commodities, which were largely purchased from countries in Latin America and Sub Saharan Africa, who experienced their own growth spurt as a result.

As we now well know, this growth was heavily dependent on the borrowing capacity of working people in the advanced capitalist world, especially in the US, whose incomes had been falling in large part because of the shift of production to Asia.  The collapse of the debt-driven US housing bubble in 2008 triggered a major financial crisis and global recession, which also greatly depressed international trade.   A weak international recovery has followed; international trade and growth remain far below pre-crisis levels, raising questions about Asia’s future economic prospects.  To appreciate why I am pessimistic about Asia’s economic future requires us to delve more deeply into the ways in which Asian economies have been restructured by transnational capital’s accumulation dynamics.

The Dynamics of Asia’s Economic Transformation

The three charts below, which come from an article authored by the Monetary Authority of Singapore in collaboration with Associate Professor Davin Chor of the National University of Singapore, provide a useful visualization of the Asian economic transformation described above, in particular, changes in the trading relationships of the countries, with each other and with the rest of the world.  The authors use what they call a measure of “upstreamness” to highlight “where a country fits in the operation of cross border production networks, more particularly whether it specialized in producing raw input, intermediate inputs or finished goods.”  The more a country specializes in producing raw inputs, the greater is the value of its upstreamness index; the more it specializes in producing final goods, the smaller is its upstreamness index.

More precisely: the upstreamness index for an industry takes on values equal to or larger than 1.  A value of 1 means that the industry’s output “is just one stage removed from final demand.” A greater value means that the industry’s output enters the relevant production process as an input that is a number of stages removed from final demand.  Here are some examples of upstreamness values for select US industries:

For the charts below, the upstreamness measure for each country is calculated by weighting the upsteamness of its export industries by the share of each industry in the country’s total exports for the year in question.

As the authors explain:

Charts 2 to 4 depict the changing networks of trade flows between the Asian economies, and in relation to the US, UK, Eurozone (EZ), Australia, as well as the rest of the world (ROW). In these charts, the arrows indicate the direction of the net trade balance between each pair of economies, while the width of each arrow is proportional to the magnitude of this balance.

The arrows are color-coded to reflect the upstreamness of the export flows that move in the same direction as the net trade balance between each pair of nodes. For simplicity, export upstreamness values lying between 1 and 2 are labelled as “downstream” (green), those between 2 and 2.5 as “midstream” (yellow), and those above 2.5 as “upstream” (red).

As we can see in Chart 2, in 1995, a time when cross boarder production networks were still limited, Japan dominated the Asian region.  It was a significant downstream (green) exporter to the US, the Eurozone, the UK, and China.  And it was a significant supplier of key midstream machinery to Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.  It generally purchased its upstream inputs from the ROW.   As we can also see, China was well on its way to becoming a major exporter of final goods to the US, the world’s dominant consumer of both downstream and midstream goods.

By 2005, as illustrated in Chart 3, Japan’s role in the region had dramatically diminished.  China was now the region’s hub, and as such, the dominant exporter of finished goods to the US, the Eurozone, Hong Kong, and the ROW.  The economies of Korea and Taiwan had also been transformed, increasingly oriented to supplying upstream parts and components to China-based exporters.

Chart 4, which captures conditions in 2014, shows a deepening of the trade patterns of the previous period.  China’s export dominance is greater yet, as illustrated by the increase in the width of its green trade arrows pointing to the US, ROW, EZ, and Hong Kong.  The Korean and Taiwanese economies are even more dependent on sales of parts and components to China.  Because of their relatively small trade activity, it is difficult to appreciate the transformations experienced by other Asian countries.  Many ASEAN countries, as noted above, had become suppliers of key electronic components to China.  Vietnam, due in large part to the expansion of South Korean production networks, has become an important assembly and export location for some consumer electronics such as smart phones.

What is also not visible from these charts is the effect that transnational corporate-driven regionalization dynamics have had on the structures and stability of individual countries, and of course on the working and living conditions of Asian workers.  One consequence of the rise of China as the region’s key final assembly and production platform is that leading firms from other Asian countries significantly reduced their domestic investment activity as they located operations in China. This deliberate deindustrialization was a natural outcome of the establishment of cross border production networks which involve, as stated above, the dividing of production activities into segments and the location of one or more of these segments in other countries.

The chart below highlights the dramatic decline in Japanese investment as Japanese firms shifted segments of production overseas.   This ongoing decline in investment is one of the most important reasons for the country’s ongoing economic stagnation.

The following chart shows a similar sustained decline in investment, although beginning at a later date than for Japan, for the grouping “Rest of emerging Asia,” which includes Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand.   China, on the other hand, has experienced a dramatic and sustained rise in its investment ratio. Chinese state activity, rather than foreign direct investment, accounts for the great majority of this investment, although in many cases it was undertaken to attract and support foreign production.

As leading Asian transnational corporations expanded their production networks, their actions tended to restructure their respective home economies in ways that left these economies more unbalanced and crisis prone.  For example, almost all Asian economies became increasingly export dependent at the same time that their exports narrowed to a limited range of parts and components.   And with transnational corporations increasingly able to shift production from one national location to another, China’s pull became ever stronger.  One consequence was that governments throughout Asia were forced to match China’s relatively low labor costs and corporate friendly business environment.  In many cases, they did so by transforming their own labor markets though the introduction of new laws and actions designed to weaken labor rights.  This, in turn, tended to suppress regional purchasing power, thereby reinforcing the region’s export dependence.  Not surprisingly then, the decline in exports that has followed the post 2008 Great Recession poses a serious challenge to Asia’s growth strategy.

According to the Asian Development Bank:

Developing Asia’s exports grew rapidly in real terms at an annual rate of 11.2 percent in 2000–2010 (Figure 1.2.1). Excepting a brief rebound in 2010, the region’s export volume growth has slowed since the crisis, recording annual growth of 4.7 percent in 2011–2015. A major concern is that developing Asia’s exports actually declined by 0.8 percent in 2015, which was a particularly bad year for world trade. Regional trends follow the lead of export growth in the PRC, which contributes about 40 percent of developing Asia’s export value.  PRC export growth slowed from an annual average of 18.3 percent in 2001–2010 to 6.4 percent in 2011–2015, falling into a 2.1 percent decline in 2015. The slowdown in developing Asia excluding the PRC was less pronounced as growth halved from 8.0 percent in 2001–2010 to 4.1 percent in 2011–2015, still growing marginally in 2015 at 0.8 percent. . . .

The slowdown has meant that developing Asia’s export growth in 2011–2015 was, at 4.1%, similar to the 4.3% averaged by other developing economies and not much higher than the 3.6% of the advanced economies—two groups that developing Asia has historically outperformed in export growth.

And as the region’s export growth rate declined, so did overall rates of GDP growth, as we see in the table below.

Still, these growth rates remain impressive, especially in light of the steep decline in regional exports.  Perhaps not surprisingly, developing Asia’s buoyancy owes much to China’s ability to maintain its relatively high rates of economic growth.  However, as I will discuss in a following post, contradictions and pressures are mounting in China that will intensify its economic slowdown and significantly depress growth in the rest of Asia, with negative consequences for the rest of the world.