In the Korean peninsula, a costly game of one-upmanship

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is going as far as possible without going to war. He is showing what he might do if sufficiently threatened by his enemies, the South Koreans under the conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol buttressed by their American ally. And he’s got his armed forces promising “sustained, resolute and overwhelming practical military measures,” unspecified but intended to be taken seriously.

Similarly, the U.S. and South Korea have put on a show of their own defensive/aggressive capabilities. Like the North Koreans, they stopped short of attacking North Korean facilities while demonstrating their tremendous fire power and prowess with missiles in response to the North’s daily tests.

On both sides, this entire display, the U.S.-South Korea exercises and the North Korean missile and artillery tests, completely ignored the mourning proclaimed by Yoon. There’s been no mention in any of the rhetoric of the terrible sadness of the deaths of 156 kids, including 101 women and 55 men, suffocated in the crush on a narrow downhill alley in Seoul’s Itaewon district. Once the playground of GIs, mostly from the nearby sprawling base that until four years ago was the headquarters for U.S. troops in Korea, Itaewon was a magnet for about 100,000 young people on Halloween.

Yoon has had to go back and forth, visiting memorials, expressing his own deep sadness, blaming the police for their failure to anticipate the impact of the huge crowds on Halloween, compounded by their failure to act swiftly after getting the first desperate calls of trouble. Almost simultaneously, Yoon had to issue statements vowing to stand up to the North Koreans, to avenge provocations. The North Koreans, as the American and South Korean planes took off, warned of the grave punishment that awaited them.

They’re all going to the brink, seeing how close they can come to opening fire, to risking a second Korean War. It’s a costly game of one-upmanship, and it carries the serious danger of stepping over the edge, opening a conflict in which North Korea’s Chinese and Russian friends surely would get involved. Similarly, friends of the U.S. and South Korea, including Japan and Australia, might also join a war they are still managing to avoid. 

It’s a game that may have deadly consequences even if all sides are keeping the lid on, showing what they might do if sufficiently goaded. North Korea has come out with a new doctrine that gives the impression that nuclear war could break out at any moment. Kim would not have to wait to be attacked; he could decide to open fire if merely threatened.

Frankly, that’s still not likely to happen. Aren’t the histrionics intended just to frighten the North’s enemies? Maybe, but the decibel level has been rising since Yoon reversed the soft-line policies of his predecessor, Moon Jae-in, who tried incessantly to get on Kim’s good side after their three summits in 2018. Those were the days, but Kim wanted nothing to do with Moon after the humiliating failure of Kim’s second summit with then-President Donald Trump at the end of February 2019. 

That failure was made all the more obvious after Trump and Kim had an impromptu 40-minute meeting four months later, on June 30, 2019, at the truce village of Panmunjom on the North-South line while Trump was on a mission to see Moon in South Korea. That final stab at rapprochement between the U.S. and North Korea went nowhere while the North ignored the understanding that Trump thought he and Kim had agreed on for “working-level” talks that were never held. 

Now, thanks to Yoon’s razor-thin margin of victory over a leftist foe in the presidential election in March, we’re riding the crest of a reverse cycle in which no one’s dreaming of North-South dialogue, with the possible exception of fantasists at the State Department who keep urging Kim to stop the missile shots and talk. Of course, Kim refuses to dignify these plaintive pleas with a response.

Nor is it certain that even the most benighted diplomat believes there’s any hope this time around, but the future lies ahead. Or, as that well known philosopher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra told us, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

One can never rule out the possibility, depending on the mood in Washington, Seoul and Pyongyang, that the pyrotechnics will devolve into more rounds of negotiations that go nowhere, as happened during the period of the “six-party talks” initiated in 2005 when Christopher Hill, then U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, faced off against Kim Gye-gwan, then North Korea’s vice foreign minister. Emissaries from China, Russia, Japan and South Korea filled the other seats, with China hosting the talks in Beijing. Intransigence over demands for North Korea to give up its nukes, and the North’s utter refusal, doomed the talking from the outset, but you never would have known it from all the hopeful sentiments expressed by Hill before the process petered out in 2009. 

Now the stakes are higher and the anger level far more pronounced than in those days. China, which had been playing the role of an almost benevolent overseer as host of the talks, is now much more deeply at odds with the U.S. than in the first decade of this century. China’s President Xi Jinping may not lust for a second Korean War, and he may not want Kim to order a seventh nuclear test — which would be the North’s first since 2017 — but he’s glad to keep the pot simmering while at bitter odds with Washington from the South China Sea to Taiwan to the South Pacific and the Indian subcontinent. 

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, fighting an American-backed force in Ukraine, can only be happy to see Kim defying the Americans in Korea, especially while Kim reportedly is supplying the Russians much-needed artillery of the sort that he’s been ordering his troops to fire in his ongoing shows of force against the Americans and South Koreans. And Japan, increasingly angered by China’s threats against Taiwan and alarmed by North Korea’s missiles flying over and near its territory, is no longer a sideline player. 

The mixture is combustible, awaiting one side or the other to light the match and start a fire that could take millions of lives. Already, Itaewon is receding into the long history of disasters in South Korea while the region edges closer to a war that still seems somehow unthinkable.

Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He currently is a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea. He is the author of several books about Asian affairs.