A Half Success?

It's Time for Both Koreas to Make Resolutions

North Korea thinks its rocket launch Sunday a great success by sending a satellite into orbit, which most countries ``know" was not the case.

One might as well call it a ``half success," as the communist country has managed to redouble the projectile's flight distance to more than 3,000 km. What matters more, however, should be who, if anyone, it was a success for, and at what expense.

It was in the early 1980s that the isolationist regime country began to go all out to develop ballistic missiles to secure ``asymmetrical" war potential against its presumed adversaries, so even the half-success was the result of three decades of live-or-die efforts. Coincidentally or not, the North's biggest ally, China, started to reform and open its economy around the same time, and one can easily see the difference between what they have achieved over the period.

Pyongyang might think it has added a big bargaining chip in post-launch negotiations with the United States, earning several times more than its reported cost of up to $300 million, based on its past experiences. It is hard to guess for now how U.S. President Barack Obama's diplomatic keynote of ``no-nuke" policy would work on the North Korean calculation, but chances are high that the reclusive regime's nuclear saber rattling would only offer grounds for Japan's rearmament by accelerating the development of the missile defense system jointly with the United States.

Even if Pyongyang's scheme works to some extent, however, it's difficult to understand why it never dawned on the North's leadership how drastically its gross domestic product could have expanded had it followed China's path. Considering nuclear war ability is decided by capacity to make massive retaliatory attacks, can seven or eight nuclear warheads be any threat to those with dozens of thousands, particularly when each of its launching squeezes the impoverished North dry?

In the wake of the ― at best ― partially successful rocket launch, global responses appear to be divided into overreaction ― as seen by Japan, near-total ignorance ― as argued by some Western commentators, and coolheaded approaches of yet more carrots and sticks or dialogue and sanctions combined, as claimed by seasoned analysts and diplomats.

At stake is how quickly regional powers can make Pyongyang realize its ``military first" policy would gradually choke itself to a brain death. Only a suicidal regime would believe in military power not backed by corresponding economic might. Critical in this process are the roles of China and Russia, which should dissuade Pyongyang from any more self-destroying military adventures, provoking only Washington and Tokyo and making not just Northeast Asia but the entire world far less safe.

Now that its military show as the basis for power transfer has ended, the North Korean leadership should begin to make a big diplomatic turnaround toward dialogue and stop testing the limit of the new U.S. administration's goodwill.

Seoul must ― and can ― play a decisive role in bringing about the policy shift, one precondition being the Lee Myung-bak administration drop its own wait-and-see policy first to be an effective and influential mediator. It's regretful in this regard the government still seems to waver between hard-line and soft-line tactics.

Suggesting full-participation into the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative and sending a special envoy at the same time is not a carrot-and-stick tactic but just shows it has no policy. Whether the Koreas can determine their own fates or not depends on their resolutions to that end.

[출처 : 코리아타임스]