Between June of 1950 and July of 1953, over 36,000 American troops died in the Korean War. That’s a fraction of the 373,000 lost by the South Korean military—and that still doesn’t include 138,000 civilian deaths. Losses on the other side of the conflict may have topped 600,000 North Koreans and Chinese deaths.
That’s worth noting because what’s happened over the 64 years since the beginning of the Armistice in Korea hasn’t been an ongoing, destructive, high casualty war. There have been a few skirmishes, and incidents, but nothing like the opening of a new conflict. That’s despite two large, opposing forces facing each other across a narrow strip of land while remaining in a technical state of war.
Which makes Mike Pence’s statements in South Korea particularly ominous.
"We're going to abandon the failed policy of strategic patience. But we're going to redouble our efforts to bring diplomatic and economic pressure to bear on North Korea. Our hope is that we can resolve this issue peaceably," Pence said in an exclusive interview at the DMZ.
That policy of “strategic patience” is also known under the quaint term of “peace.” And while Pence may mention a desire to “resolve the issue peaceably” it’s not clear at all what would count as resolution or how much desire there is to avoid open conflict.
In the wake of North Korea’s failed medium-range missile test this weekend, President Donald Trump is willing to consider ordering “kinetic” military action, including a sudden strike, to counteract North Korea’s destabilizing actions in the region, said a person familiar with the White House’s thinking.
“Kinetic?” As in moving? Actually, the phrase is a Bushism, created at the outset of the War in Afghanistan as another way to say “killing a lot of people.”
Does Team Trump also have a term for “unraveling a stalemate that no one particularly likes but which has kept millions of people from dying over a period of decades?” If not, there’s surely someone working on that now.
Trump is counting on a day and half of sitting with Chinese President Xi—and the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake in history—as the foundation of a new agreement that the Chinese government will lean heavily on North Korea. And so far there do seem to be signs that China is at least willing to work toward a solution.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in a daily briefing Monday that the onus was on all parties -- including the US and China -- to reach a peaceful solution.
"Resolving this issue requires all relevant parties, especially parties that bear major responsibility and play a key role in this issue, to work in the same direction and make a joint effort," he said.
But it’s extremely unclear what “resolving the issue” would actually represent. If it’s surrendering weapons, Kim Jong Un could be singularly reluctant to cooperate for a simple reason.
The Taliban didn’t have any nuclear weapons or long range missiles. Afghanistan was bombed and taken over.
Saddam didn’t have any nuclear weapons or long range missiles. Iraq was bombed and taken over.
Assad doesn’t have any nuclear weapons or long range missiles. Syria was bombed and … stay tuned.
That North Korea massively accelerated nuclear ambitions after 2001 and exploded its first test blast in 2006 is no coincidence. US policy often seems to treat North Korean leaderships as unreasoning blowhards who understand that giving up the weapons will lead to being left alone. But that leadership appears to believe exactly the opposite — surrendering the weapons, or even failing to continue with development, is something they see as tantamount to handing over their nation. As futile, and even nonsensical, as North Korea’s bristling, blatant disregard for international agreements, and finger-on-the-trigger actions may seem, the leadership there could well be sincere in the belief that they’re taking the only route to secure the continued existence of the entire regime.
That’s not a formula that leads toward easy resolution.
China’s position is also not so easily described. On the one hand, North Korea represents a tiny part of China’s trade, and having a poor, unstable, nuclear-armed neighbor may seem like the sort of situation where helping disarm that neighbor would be a great idea. On the other hand, North Korea holds an out-sized position in China’s recent history. While America sees the Korean War as an ugly, unresolved conflict that represented only the opening act in a East-West conflict—a conflict so drowned out by what came later that it’s been called “the forgotten war”—that’s not how it’s seen in China.
For China, the Korean conflict was the first opportunity for new communist government to challenge nations that had treated it as an afterthought to that point. After being invaded, defeated, and disrespected during World War II, China places a huge amount of pride behind the idea that, just a few years later, they challenged the most powerful military in the world and fought it to a draw. Even if the Korean War didn’t end in the south being completely overrun, the Chinese version of the story treats the war as a huge victory. There are six decades of mythology behind the relationship of North Korea and China, and even if the government is ready to alter that story, it’s unlikely to happen overnight. Or over cake.
Is it possible to retain stability on the Korean penisula? Yes. Sixty plus years of relative peace says that’s true. But it’s hard to think of any region that enjoyed a similar period of stability whose story begins with the phrase “first we carried out a preemptive strike...”