{"id":12002,"date":"2017-09-22T13:48:08","date_gmt":"2017-09-22T13:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=12002"},"modified":"2021-02-17T21:15:15","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T21:15:15","slug":"whats-behind-the-escalating-conflict-between-the-usa-and-north-korea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/whats-behind-the-escalating-conflict-between-the-usa-and-north-korea\/","title":{"rendered":"WHAT’S BEHIND THE ESCALATING CONFLICT BETWEEN THE USA AND NORTH KOREA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Below we are posting an analysis of the North Korean state, written by Mike McNair, first posted at:- \u00a0http:\/\/weeklyworker.co.uk\/worker\/1170\/not-enforcing-juche\/\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

NOT ENFORCING JUCHE<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On September 11 the United Nations security council adopted a new set of sanctions against North Korea (formally the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea), with the aim of forcing an end to its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile development. These are extended from the very extensive, already-existing sanctions, and now ban North Korean textile exports and the sale of natural gas to the country. But they are substantially less that the United States\u2019 original proposals, which would have banned all exports of petroleum products to North Korea, imposed a full naval blockade, and authorised the use of force to enforce this blockade (1). Donald Trump said on September 11 that the new sanctions are \u201cnothing compared to what ultimately will have to happen\u201d (2).
\n<\/p>\n

The US administration\u2019s bellicose statements thus do not indicate a present<\/em> willingness to launch World War III for the sake of regime change in North Korea. Rather, they are leverage to force through an increase in what are very<\/em> long-standing sanctions by threatening megadeaths. The result, if the US succeeds in bringing down the North Korean regime, will still probably be megadeaths, in the form of the destruction which has been rained on Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria – now imposed on a more densely populated area of east Asia.<\/p>\n

The US has backed down in the face of clear indications from China and Russia that they would veto the original proposals. Alongside the diplomacy have gone naked threats of war from Trump and other senior figures in the administration. These, in turn, have been matched by Russian and Chinese troop build-ups on the border with North Korea in the spring (3) and in the Russian case by a display of airforce capability over the Korean peninsula in early September (4). The threatened veto is grounded on the fear that the full sanctions package the US proposed last week would either be a short prelude to war or result in a rapid, disorderly melt-down of the North Korean regime into state failure.<\/p>\n

The political ideology of North Korea is the juche<\/em> or \u2018self-reliance\u2019 doctrine. It is a curious blend of an extreme version of \u2018socialism in a single country\u2019 with pre-colonisation Korean Confucianism, which was similarly isolationist to try to keep a degree of distance from its big Chinese neighbour. The Stalinist \u2018cult of personality\u2019 of Kim Il Sung, Korean Workers Party leader from 1949 to 1994, had morphed by his death into something closer to the idea that the mandate of heaven had settled on the Kim family as a dynasty, with deification of the founder. The tag \u2018Hermit Kingdom\u2019 was applied to Korea before the Japanese colonisation of the country from 1910; since the 1990s, the western media has begun to apply it to North Korea (5).<\/p>\n

The Russian and Chinese fear (and perhaps US hope) that extreme sanctions will bring down the regime illustrates precisely that juche<\/em> is, as \u2018socialism in a single country\u2019 was, an untruth: North Korea\u2019s economy and state have never<\/em> been fully autarkic, and are nothing like autarkic at present. The regime was a product of geopolitical manoeuvres in the late 1940s. It has been preserved since then by its strategic situation, and survives today for the same reason: as a buffer state between China and far-eastern Russia, on the one hand, and the US and its dependent allies, on the other hand.<\/p>\n

The other side of this coin is the very<\/em> long-term core aim of the US state of \u2018regime change\u2019 in North Korea, which has persisted since the origin of the state with varying degrees of intensity. This persistent aim is apparently irrational – like the US\u2019s recent regime-change operations in the Middle East – but has the same underlying \u2018pseudo-rationality\u2019 – of \u2018making America great again\u2019 or \u2018defending the American way of life\u2019 – as those operations.<\/p>\n

Founding and war<\/strong><\/p>\n

The USSR declared war on Japan on August 8 1945, and rapidly overran Manchuria before the Japanese surrender on August 15. As a result, the USSR became entitled to a significant level of territorial gains and influence in east Asia under the Yalta agreement, and the US agreed to split the post-war occupation of Korea with the USSR at the 38th parallel. The Japanese colonial regime had developed industry more in the north, while old-style landlordism remained dominant in the south. Manoeuvres ended in two governments – the landlord-clerical southern Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Stalinist northern DPRK – being created in 1948. The UN, under US dominance, did not recognise the DPRK.<\/p>\n

In 1950 war broke out between the DPRK and ROK (6) and the ROK forces initially collapsed; a large US army, under UN flags and with UN backing (7) threw the northern army back, and entered the northern zone. The Chinese now intervened (as well as the USSR providing air support); and eventually the front stabilised at the present border between North and South Korea. No peace treaty has ever been agreed and the US still does not recognise North Korea.<\/p>\n

This is, in fact, the origin of US economic sanctions against North Korea. They were initially imposed on June 28 1950, and added to in 1955, 1961, 1975 and 1978 under various pretexts before the current round of US and UN sanctions created by the \u2018nuclear issue\u2019 since the 1990s (8).<\/p>\n

After 1953, in spite of sanctions, North Korea was relatively successful economically. Starting with a stronger industrial base inherited from Japanese development (though savaged by the war itself), it had prolonged success in the 1950s-70s through Chinese and Soviet support; down to the early 1970s, it was a more<\/em> developed country than South Korea.<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, however, US subsidies to South Korea, together with US permission to South Korea to maintain a mercantilist, protectionist system and still export to the US, had facilitated a South Korean economic take-off. Meanwhile, the normal process of Stalinist \u2018planning\u2019 methods, together with the very heavy military budget, had led North Korea\u2019s economic development to slow down.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s, first China under Deng Xiaoping and then Russia under Gorbachev and Yeltsin refused to roll over development loans which had previously been made to North Korea and demanded repayment. The 1991 fall of the USSR in particular triggered a deep-going regression of the North Korean economy, involving episodes of mass starvation (9).<\/p>\n

These developments confirm the point already made. Juche<\/em> was an illusion. North Korea under Kim Il Sung was deeply embedded in trade and financial relations with the \u2018Soviet bloc\u2019 and China. The disruption of these relationships had devastating economic consequences (as, it must be said, 1990s \u2018shock therapy\u2019 also had for the former Soviet Union and all its components).<\/p>\n

Nuclear arms<\/strong><\/p>\n

After the fall of the USSR the North Korean regime in the first place attempted to develop its own nuclear weapons as a substitute for the Soviet nuclear umbrella, which had been held up for it previously.10 At the same time, it was clear that the regime was willing to \u2018trade off\u2019 this development against security guarantees and the relaxation of sanctions by the US; and such a deal was, in fact, reached in 1994.<\/p>\n

The Clinton administration was, however, unable to deliver on its side of the deal due to Republican control of Congress. Then Bush in 2001 announced that North Korea was not compliant with it, and in 2002 listed North Korea as part of the \u2018axis of evil\u2019 together with Iran and Iraq (John R Bolton in 2002 added Cuba, Libya and Syria to this list).<\/p>\n

The North Korean regime has understandably responded to these developments by pushing ahead with the nuclear and missile programmes as fast as it can. Even the ability to hit one <\/em>US city with a warhead of the same yield as those of 1945 would be a serious tradable asset and deterrent against operations like those conducted against Iraq and Libya. How far it has got is open to question: both sides have an interest in exaggerating progress (11)<\/p>\n

US dominance<\/strong><\/p>\n

This story is not about nuclear proliferation. Israel has had the bomb, with US tacit approval, since the 1960s. India has been a \u2018declared nuclear weapon power\u2019 since 1998, and Pakistan announced its capability in the same year. Neither attracted more than grumbling and token sanctions, later lifted.<\/p>\n

Nor is it about the North Korean regime being a personal dictatorship run by a mad individual. In spite of its undoubted Stalinist-monarchical character and the idea of the dynastic \u2018mandate of heaven\u2019 (12) the actual decisions of the regime are perfectly rational. It should be remembered that the US has been committed to its overthrow since 1950, contemplated using nuclear weapons against it (and China) in 1950-51, and stationed battlefield and intermediate-range nuclear weapons in South Korea between the 1950s and 1991. The purpose of US economic sanctions against North Korea has always been regime change, and the US has never been willing to negotiate in good faith a normalisation of relations (13).<\/p>\n

The irrationality – or rather rational-irrationality – is on the other side; as we can see from the fate of other members of the \u2018axis of evil\u2019. What is at issue is the defence of the status of the US as the world\u2019s top-dog power; and how to do so under conditions where there is no longer a Soviet enemy to force \u2018the west\u2019 to cohere, and where, at the same time, the US is in relative<\/em> decline as an industrial <\/em>producer, though still absolutely dominant in financial and military affairs and in military technology.<\/p>\n

Under these conditions, the US can no longer proceed to summarily \u2018send in the Marines\u2019 as it did to Latin American countries between 1905 and 1965. The US succeeded in imposing order in South Korea at a very heavy cost, and at the price of tolerating North Korea. It failed miserably in South Vietnam.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, under the Carter administration, it ceased to attempt to impose order. But the US is still necessarily committed to punishing those who have in the past defied it in any way, and their descendants to the nth generation. If it fails to do so, like any protection racketeer (which US foreign policy increasingly resembles) it will lose \u2018turf\u2019 and be \u2018dissed\u2019 more and more. Instead of attempting to impose order, which is beyond its capabilities, it merely punishes those who defy it with chaos, US-sponsored terrorists, destruction and state failure. Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen are merely the most recent examples of a litany which began with 1970s interventions against Mozambique, Angola, Cambodia, Afghanistan …<\/p>\n

North Korea is undergoing<\/em> the punishment in the form of siege warfare, euphemistically described as \u2018sanctions\u2019.14 But the US is not satisfied with the results: they have not yet produced regime change and the state failure and chaos which will follow. It wants more (and it initially proposed, but did not get, a form which would allow UN-backed military action).<\/p>\n

China and Russia have rightly resisted this proposal; but, remaining within the framework of \u2018international law\u2019, and the United Nations, they necessarily allow the US to tighten the screws towards the death and destruction which will result from the attainment of its aims.<\/p>\n

This is not a matter of Donald Trump\u2019s supposed narcissism, any more than the \u2018axis of evil\u2019 was a matter of George W Bush\u2019s supposed stupidity. Preserving the \u2018American way of life\u2019 actually<\/em> requires preserving America\u2019s global top-dog status. That is also the coded meaning of \u2018making America great again\u2019 and the open meaning of the \u2018new American century\u2019. Restoring American industrial<\/em> dominance is no more possible than restoring Venetian or Genoese shipping dominance was in the 17th century or Dutch in the 18th, or British industrial dominance in the early 20th. What remains possible is to preserve US financial dominance through military dominance, by spreading destruction across the world.<\/p>\n

Just as juche<\/em> was illusory, so are all forms of nationalist separatism in response to this global threat. The struggle posed is one for the overthrow of capitalist rule as such<\/em>, in the US as much as everywhere else.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. New York Times<\/em> September 11.<\/li>\n
  2. The Independent <\/em>September 12.<\/li>\n
  3. Daily Mail<\/em> April 20.<\/li>\n
  4. CNN, September 3: http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2017\/09\/01\/asia\/russia-north-korea-analysis\/index.html.<\/li>\n
  5. It appears to be seriously misleading; see, for example, a couple of accounts by foreigners more or less friendly to the regime: F Abt, A capitalist in North Korea<\/em> Tuttle 2014; A Lankov Daily life in North Korea<\/em> NK News 2015. Both no doubt in a sense see \u2018Potemkin villages\u2019, rather than the worst aspects of the regime; but they also see that behind the facade there has actually been substantial movement towards Chinese-style \u2018economic reform\u2019 and access of the North Korean middle classes to external information sources.<\/li>\n
  6. Standard sources characterise the beginning of the war as a North Korean invasion, reflecting the US-UN point of view. Bruce Cumings (The Korean war: a history<\/em> New York 2011) and other authors have argued that what was involved was in fact a civil war which was already underway.<\/li>\n
  7. Front-line troops were contributed by Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Colombia, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and Turkey.<\/li>\n
  8. S Chang, \u2018A chronology of US sanctions against North Korea\u2019, S Chang and SH Kim (eds) Economic sanctions against a nuclear North Korea<\/em> Jefferson 2007, chapter 2.<\/li>\n
  9. TF Cargill and E Parker, \u2018Economic reform and alternatives for North Korea\u2019, SH Kim, T Roehrig and B Seliger The survival of North Korea<\/em> Jefferson 2011, chapter 6.<\/li>\n
  10. The prior developments listed in Wikipedia, etc are pretty clearly research projects in nuclear power<\/em> production rather than in nuclear weapons<\/em> production.<\/li>\n
  11. See, for example, from some time ago, B Cumings, \u2018Wrong again\u2019 London Review of Books<\/em> December 4 2003; the point is not that Cumings was necessarily right then, but the fact that North Korean capabilities are likely to be exaggerated by various interests and mechanisms.<\/li>\n
  12. Eddie Ford commented in this paper, on the occasion of the funeral of Kim Jong-Il, on the similarities between this cult and the British cult of the royal family: \u2018Of kings and Kims\u2019 Weekly Worker<\/em> January 12 2012.<\/li>\n
  13. Indeed, the episode of 1994-99 illustrates the point, visible elsewhere (recently in Trump\u2019s denunciation of the Paris climate agreements), that the US political system makes it constitutionally unable<\/em> to negotiate international agreements in good faith.<\/li>\n
  14. There is a useful discussion in R Frank, \u2018The political economy of sanctions against North Korea\u2019 Asian Perspective<\/em> Vol 30, No3, 2006, pp5-36.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Below we are posting an analysis of the North Korean state, written by Mike McNair, first posted at:- \u00a0http:\/\/weeklyworker.co.uk\/worker\/1170\/not-enforcing-juche\/\u00a0   NOT ENFORCING JUCHE   On September 11 the United Nations security council adopted a new set of sanctions against North Korea (formally the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea), with the aim of forcing an end…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1845,1848],"tags":[6099],"class_list":["post-12002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-imperialism","category-ex-ussr","tag-author-mike-macnair"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"views":2640,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12002"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12025,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12002\/revisions\/12025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}