Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

As the 1990s began, it became clear to North Korea that it had to try something short of war to break out of the trap in which the end of the Cold War—which had stripped it of its main allies and their economic support—had left it. It began by trying to open relations with Japan, inviting a delegation led by a senior Japanese politician to visit Pyongyang. In September 1990, only a few weeks after President Roh Tae-woo of South Korea had met with President Mikhail Gorbachev of the USSR in San Francisco and obtained Soviet diplomatic recognition, the then vice president of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, Shin Kanemaru, led a joint Liberal Democratic Party–Socialist Party delegation to the North Korean capital. The idea of going to North Korea was entirely Kanemaru’s and was vigorously opposed by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the time, however, it was widely assumed in South Korea that Japan was deliberately trying to undermine its increasingly friendly relations with the USSR, just as the North Koreans naturally assumed that Kanemaru, as a representative of Japan’s longstanding, one-party government, was coming as an official spokesman.

As it turned out, Kanemaru’s visit was just the last hurrah of one of Japan’s most corrupt politicians trying to further line his pockets. As Tokyo political commentator Takao Toshikawa has put it, “It was very much a personal initiative: a last chance for diplomatic glory in old Shin’s declining years, and also a brazen attempt to generate huge kick-backs out of the flow of grants, yen credits, etc., that would flow to Pyongyang once the principle of paying reparations [for Japanese colonial and wartime acts of brutality] was established.” While in Pyongyang, Kanemaru, “drunk and slightly senile, is suspected of having promised the North Korean strongman [Kim II-sung] grants and low-interest loans totalling ¥100 billion.”⁴

Ever since this meeting the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied that what took place in any way represented official policy. More important, from a North Korean point of view, Kanemaru was arrested in March 1993 on bribery and corruption charges and died shortly thereafter. His downfall seemed to convince Pyongyang that its Japanese initiative was not viable. Kim Il-sung then evidently decided to see if he could deal directly with the United States.

As a result of the end of the Cold War, North Korea had lost the patronage of the USSR. For the previous forty years, the Soviet Union had competed with the People’s Republic of China to curry favor in Pyongyang, and this was the chief international structural condition that allowed the North to prosper and become somewhat independent of both. In 1974, following the first OPEC oil crisis, North Korea’s Soviet ally sponsored its entry into the International Atomic Energy Agency so that the Soviets could help North Korea develop a nuclear-power-generating capability. In 1985, North Korea adhered to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, also at the Soviet Union’s behest. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea lost not only Soviet nuclear aid and any continuing reason to participate in Western-dominated atomic control regimes, but also its second most important source of fuel oil. China, previously its leading source, now compounded these difficulties by asking North Korea to pay largely in hard currency for Chinese oil imports (though they also accepted some barter payments).

Under these circumstances, in March 1993, North Korea gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Whatever its reasons—including fear of Japan, energy demands, post—Cold War isolation, and thoughts of possible “posthumous retaliation” (Raymond Aron’s phrase) against Japan and a triumphant South Korea—North Korea developed the foundations for a small future nuclear-weapons capacity, or at least convinced the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it had. It has never actually tested a nuclear device. (It is highly unlikely, in fact, that it yet has one to test.) The initial American reaction was belligerent. The Pentagon talked about “surgical strikes,” á la the 1981 Israeli attack on an Iraqi reactor being built at Osisraq. Patriot missile brigades were transferred to Seoul, and the United States seemed poised once again to use force on the Korean peninsula.