Seoul’s move to fully join the Proliferation Security Initiative is welcome. But it’s China that really needs to be on board.
‘An outright military provocation and an open declaration of war against us.’ That, at least, is how North Korea’s state-controlled media saw last week’s Proliferation Security Initiative military exercise between Australia, Japan, South Korea and the United States.
Pyongyang has made no secret of its disdain for the initiative, especially with South Korea hosting the exercises for the first time on October 13-14 off the south-eastern port of Busan. Seoul’s decision to host the exercises, this time dubbed Eastern Endeavor 10, was announced in May after its investigators concluded that North Korea had torpedoed the Cheonan warship two months earlier, killing dozens of sailors. Pyongyang has, of course, denied having done any such thing, but South Korea’s position is backed by the other three participants in last week’s activities.
The PSI is a voluntary multinational coalition, and was established to tackle the illegal transfer of all weapons of mass destruction (WMD), their means of delivery (e.g. ballistic missiles) and related issues. The four states participating last week are among its strongest advocates, but there’s been broad support for it around Asia. Singapore and New Zealand, for example, have both joined in previous military exercises, while India, Indonesia and Malaysia have said they support the PSI’s general principles, but haven’t joined the PSI as formal participants due to legal and other considerations. Even landlocked Mongolia signed a ship boarding agreement with the United States in 2007. (Although Mongolia is by no means a major maritime power, its commitment signals its government’s interest in deepening security ties with Washington to balance its more powerful neighbours).
Yet while the initiative has been broadly popular in the region (and has given South Korea’s allies an opportunity to show some solidarity in the wake of the Cheonan incident) it has left some regional powers cold.
The North Koreans, needless to say, hate the PSI because they’ve been its main target. However, China also opposes the PSI, partly because it annoys their North Korean neighbour, but also because Chinese entities themselves are often accused of exporting proliferation-sensitive technologies to countries whose governments have aspirations to acquiring WMD.
Self-Defeating
What was perhaps most interesting about the latest exercise was that it saw Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force and the South Korean Navy simulate their first joint interception so close to their home waters (their previous involvement in multinational exercises has been in the RIMPAC series, held off the coast of Hawaii).
Photo Credit: US Navy
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Cheonan, China, China Navy, India, Kim Jong-il, North Korea, PSI, US Navy, WMD
Brian from Chicago
Will everyone in Seoul please step about 25 miles to the south? This will take about 8 hours. Thank you for your cooperation.
Brian from Chicago
Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m just bothered that “the People” of North Korea are determined to translate every single thing as a declaration of war. From my perspective, North Korea’s citizens are the hostages of the free world, and their condition weighs heavily on our collective conscience. But I don’t live in Seoul and I’m sure that my instinct to “yank the band-aid” would not be well-received there. So I’d like to rescind my own smart-ass comment.
autoversicherung
Very enlightening and beneficial to someone whose been out of the circuit for a long time.
- Kris
Huang
A true reflection of impatience among the gang(US-Japan-South Korea?)about their hopes(a kind of ill-will)of somehow the North Korean would make a mistake which would give them a pretext to launch their combined assault against the North Koreans. To the gang,the opportunity is now or never. They might be lucky or they be very disappointed as the power tranfer will be smooth. Bad guys or good guys,it depends on who you believe or you are wise enough to understand what is going on. One thing that is of paramount important is peace and stability in the region. South Korea and Japan should be sober at this critical moment. Ambitions and dreams based on self-deception is a recipe for disasters.
S P Dudley
Ultimately we have to admit that North Korea is just a client state of China, and China will never abandon it’s vassal for fear of having a modern Asian-style democracy at it’s doorstep. It’s no accident that the Norks have a nuke program because China wants it that way, and any real attempt to get teeth into non-proliferation enforcement will never work so long as the Chinese require North Korea as a buffer state. Thus the whole effort of getting the Chinese in PSI is pointless.
Truthfully North Korea is a hollow shell, using the media circus it creates around succession and its continued campaign to foist its nuclear program to scare opposing nations into fear or uncertainty. But any nation in the modern world that forces its people to put out the lights at night for fear of using up too much energy is not going to be truly capable of defending itself. It’s time to call the Kim’s bluff. North Korea is not 10 feet tall, rather they are exceedingly weak and we should be working on ways to topple them over and not allowing the regime to buy time to make more nukes that it can sell to other bad guys.