Can war on the Korean Peninsula be averted?
Mar 4, 2024
The US seems to have decided it cannot tolerate China as a threat to its global hegemony.
But how to attack or put pressure on China? Logistically and politically Taiwan is out of the question. But the brewing tension between South Korea and North Korea provides an opportunity, not unlike the Ukraine-Russia situation.
In other words, a war using proxies.
Under a new South Korean leader, the ultraconservative, Yoon Suk Yeol, nuclear tensions have been ratcheted up again on the Korean peninsula. According to the US Brookings Institute border clashes in recent weeks reflect a breakdown in inter-Korean relations and raise the specter of conflict. The US has sent a nuclear-powered submarine to South Korea.
North Korea responded by increased missile testing, including another test of a ballistic missile capable of hitting the US mainland.
The scenario some paint is of further increased conflict between north and south Korea with Beijing having quickly to intervene to support the north (as it did in 1950) and counter the north Korean nuclear threat.
This would then give the US the excuse to use its Japan bases to back up south Korea against north Korea.
Japan with its long running dispute with north Korea over some Japanese citizens abducted some fifty years ago is the key to this scenario. As if realising this Pyongyang is now making approaches to Tokyo to resolve the dispute.
On February 15 Kim Yo Jong, the sister of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, and often mentioned as de facto deputy leader of the regime, gave as her “personal opinion” the hope that “if Japan makes a political decision to open up a new way of mending the relations on the basis of courageously breaking with anachronistic hostility and unattainable desire, and recognizing each other, the two countries can open up a new future together.”
She added however that “Japan has persistently raised as a precondition the abduction issue, which has already been settled.’
The ‘abduction issue’ so called was the creation of the former Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe. So far, his replacement, Fumio Kishida, has felt the need to pay lip service to Abe’s still powerful legacy.
But Kishida also says he wants to visit North Korea. Kim Yo Jung urged him to “take an opportunity and change history” and that, if the opportunity is seized, “there will be no reason for the two countries not to become close and the day of the prime minister’s Pyongyang visit might come.”
And war be averted?
Gregory Clark was the first postwar Australian diplomat trained in Chinese, with postings to Hong Kong, Moscow and the UN before retiring in protest against the Vietnam War. After PhD studies at the ANU he became Japan correspondent for The Australian. A spell in Canberra’s Prime Ministers department led to professorships at Tokyo’s Sophia University and presidency of Tama University, before becoming co-founder of the very successful English language Akita Kokusai Daigaku. He has now retired to Latin America (Peru) and Kiwi fruit growing in Boso peninsular south of Tokyo.
His works include ‘In Fear of China’ (1969) and several books in Japan on education and foreign policy.
He used to speak Chinese and Russian with fluency. He now speaks Japanese and Spanish.
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