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The global outcry over North Korea’s latest nuclear weapons test is over-the-top, hubristic and unnecessary. America, the world, and especially South Korea have nothing to gain by pushing a hard-line stance against the Stalinist regime.

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The global outcry over North Korea’s latest nuclear weapons test is over-the-top, hubristic and unnecessary. America, the world, and especially South Korea have nothing to gain by pushing a hard-line stance against the Stalinist regime.

Barak Obama, the great leader of ‘change’ in American politics delivered what should have been one of the most silly, ridiculous statements in recent memory over the ongoing North Korean-nuclear weapons drama.

Obama – the leader of a global empire with military bases in at least 130 countries around the world and an annual military budget that is higher than the rest of the world’s combined – seemed to have forgotten his place when he said the United States and the world needed to ‘stand up’ to North Korea.


President Obama would have it seem that the Stalinist regime’s successful test of a nuclear bomb matching the power of those dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII had the potential to send the world into a nuclear winter.


The mainstream media peddled this angle with aplomb, yet the drama involving this isolated country – which holds millions of impoverished citizens and is running on old, worn out Soviet technology – has been ‘on again, off again’ since the mid-nineties.

In 1994 the Clinton administration negotiated a treaty with the North Koreans called the Agreed Framework of 1994. Under this treaty the North Korean regime agreed to become a signatory of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty, to stop producing plutonium, and to “eventually dismantle [its] reactors and related facilities.” In return the North Korean’s were to have a number of financial and trade sanctions lifted within three months of the agreement, and to see an improved relationship between the two nations to the eventual level of having an ambassador on each others’ territory.

The Clinton administration failed to live up to the agreement and when George W. Bush came to power all hope of head-to-head talks between the two nations were obliterated when he declared the nation part of the global ‘axis of evil’. The U.S. has forever since accused the North Koreans of having a secret uranium enrichment program in addition to its plutonium enrichment (uranium being the necessary radioactive element to produce a nuclear weapon of potency), something which North Korea has always denied.


China and Russia eventually stepped in, and convinced the Bush regime to get involved in Six-Party talks between China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, North Korea and the US with the hopes of finally ending the official war that still stands between the Koreas. In 2007 an agreement was made that the U.S. and the North Koreans would hold direct negotiations (without the other nations), with the hopes of normalizing their relationship.



This might sound familiar to a major crux of the Clinton Agreed Framework. The North Koreans have always wanted to deal with the U.S. (who have military bases throughout South Korea and as many 25000 troops in the region as of 2008) directly.

Bush years ended hope of reconciliation

But later in the year Bush declared that relations could never be normalized unless North Korea showed them the whereabouts of suspected nuclear equipment and proved without a doubt that North Korea was not trying to enrich uranium.


Yet, when does this final shred of doubt disappear? Iraq and the current Iran situation (both cases where the IAEA has verified no nuclear weapons program existed – in the case of the former – and exists – in the case of the later) proves that the U.S. has no respect for the internationally accepted safeguards against non-proliferation. So there can be no method to prove innocence or guilt, save mere whim of an American administration.

Fast forward to late April this year under the Obama administration when Pyongyang launched what it says was a peaceful satellite into space and what the UN says was an illegal missile test. Sanctions and rebuke from the international community ensued.

The North Koreans responded by removing themselves from diplomatic talks and declaring in late April that they were going to begin a uranium enrichment program and, yes, test nuclear weapons and missile material. They did this one month later.

There is a pattern that emerges here that shouldn’t be hard to see: when the North Korean regime is condemned internationally and hit with sanctions, it responds with what is viewed as belligerence by the international order in the form of nuclear weapons testing.

One might then conclude that perhaps the best play here might be to give them what they want, as in, negotiate with the regime directly. The U.S. still owes them the Agreed Framework of 1994.

After all, Obama is the leader who has claimed he will negotiate with any group of people in the name of peace.

Surely this applies to the North Koreans as well?

Aggressive stance is useless

Much has been made about the blustering of the Obama administration, and most notably of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates when he said that the U.S. will ‘not stand idly by’ and let the North Koreans become a nuclear nation. Kurt Campbell, the administration’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian affairs, said the U.S. would never accept a Nuclear North Korea.

But with the recent successful test, and one more apparently on the horizon as of this writing, it would seem that this poor nation may already be nuclear, and that a preventative stance is too late. Given the small amount of trade the isolationist nation already engages in, it is hard to imagine sanctions will have much effect unless China, their major trading partner, truly clamps down. If the U.S. freezes international bank accounts of North Korean leaders it could only infuriate them more. Usually when people are pushed back against the wall, crazy dictator or not, they don’t respond meekly. So far it has proven ineffective against North Korea, at any rate.

So how might they prevent a nuclear North Korea? By reigniting the Korean War? As foreign policy and war expert Eric Margolis has said, the U.S. military is already overstretched in Iraq and Afpak ( Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan cross-border debacle) and would suffer heavy casualties if it were to fight a conventional battle against Pyongyang’s 1.1 million strong army. Another option might be to completely obliterate the face of North Korea with bombs. However, like Afghanistan, the country is not infrastructure heavy, and such a matter could simply be waited out and retaliated against by wreaking havoc on Seoul.

The North Korean arsenal is in its infancy, and it is unlikely they have an effective method of deploying its small arsenal. It has been said by some very worthy writers that the people themselves have been forced to eat bark (or grass) to even have had enough resources to successfully test one weapon (the U.S. has 10,000 nukes at home and abroad). However, having the capability to threaten Seoul, which sits very close to the DMZ should be enough to prevent any type of military belligerence from the U.S.

This is why the U.S. hates the idea of North Korea getting a nuclear weapon. Were they to do so, it would effectively take the idea of forced regime change off the table. If Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, the U.S. would never have invaded. In this sense, as Margolis said to Scott Horton on antiwar.com radio, the DPRK did what was, in their view, the right thing given the unwillingness of the U.S. to negotiate face-to-face. Consider it mission accomplished then.

Where are the North Korean people?

As an outsider, it might be hard to understand how this regime has survived with such power for so long with its population starving and without the barest amenities. As Justin Raimondo, cheif editor of antiwar.com, has said, North Korea is a nation that has maintained power through successful demonization of outsiders. It is, and has always been, the world against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It may not be a tough sell to a people whose infrastructure and population was systematically brutalized by the American air force in the Korean War, and whose livelihoods have been severely compromised by sanctions that only seem to affect those without power (this was also the case in Iraq in the 90’s where sanctions were estimated to have been the cause of over a million children deaths).


If the U.S. and the world want to effect change on the northern part of the peninsula, the best thing they could do would be to normalize relations as quickly as possible and quit giving the Dear leader (or leaders, whoever is in control) an excuse – the people’s perception that it’s the world against them – for maintaining military dictatorship over it’s people.


Why this alarmism, aggression from the U.S.?


Follow the trail of money, whether it’s the South Korean purchase of bunker buster bombs from the U.S., or just a few more F-15 contracts passing through the Pentagon and enriching the people at the top of the chain to the detriment of the American tax payer (and North Korean citizen). Sometimes it doesn’t take an actual war, but simply the threat of it, to justify further military spending (not to mention the continued presence of American troops in the region).

Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden tracking unit once said that Washington was the indispensible ally of Osama Bin Laden. In this he meant that American foreign policy in the region was the precise reason he was able to garner any form of popular support – when you blow up civilians homes, kill their relatives and promote vicious despots to power they will get angry and turn to somebody who can provide leadership and a chance to strike back. This is the concept of blowback, and September 11th was a rather large example of this phenomenon.

The same case can be made for North Korea and the continuance of the Kim dynasty. By continuing aggressive relations with the country, its leaders are inherently given justification for their policies. It is not a stretch to say that Kim Jong Il and the military industrial complex that influences so much of American policy indirectly benefit from one another.

Is the world about to be blown up?

The North Korean regime is just beginning to develop its first weapon, the power of which is only as strong as the U.S. had in WWII (the American arsenal has since far surpassed this technology). It is not an uncommon belief that they likely have no stable method of propelling a nuclear device, and it is probably unlikely they will develop a method to propel a rocket across the vast Pacific Ocean.

Even if they somehow developed the technology, they would be committing suicide to do so. The potential for an American retaliatory strike, whether in response to a nuclear attack on Seoul, or abroad could turn the entire northern peninsula into a wasteland in which nobody would survive.

Kim Jong Il and his youngest son successor would have no regime to control and no people to lord over. They would likely be dead anyway. For a person (or group of people, whoever is in control) who craves power to offer it up in such a fashion is unthinkable, and it necessarily goes against everything that authoritarianism stands for, which is to maintain power at any cost.

The only way an attack occurs is if the U.S. drives the North to it (sanctions that promote a blockade of ships in North Korean waters could be considered an act of war by the regime). The North has threatened war in the event it’s ships are boarded. This would be a tragic result to the South. It would destroy a way of life which has so quickly and firmly been established and set the peninsula back irrevocably.


The Obama administration needs to reverse its policy on North Korea and stop furthering the damage Bush did to the progress of Korean reunification. But so far, this situation seems just the latest example that Obama represents little change in the area of foreign policy.

Stuart Smallwood is a Canadian journalism graduate from the University of Kings College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. To comment on this article, or to view links and sources go to the online edition at http://stuartsmallwoodonline.blogspot.com/ every underlined phrase in this article has a link on Stuart’s blog.

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