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79 5 Obama, Trump and North Korea Bruce Cumings Introduction President Barack Obama’s historic “Pivot” to Asia, formally announced in late 2011, would come to have little appreciable effect on US policy towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), other than a dramatic uptick in Kim Jong-un’ s nuclear weapons development programme. Obama’s “strategic patience” towards Pyongyang failed to halt or slow its development of weapons of mass destruction, but it did manage to initiate greater levels of Sino-US cooperation over sanctioning the regime, the introduction of more US resources and weapons to the region (of which China disapproved), and helped tighten the security relationship between the Republic of South Korea (ROK) and Japan. Frustrations in Washington over North Korea intensified towards the end of Obama’s second administration as bipartisan support for a more assertive or aggressive policy grew. Obama therefore set the stage for a more aggressive American stance for his successor to the White House, yet no one anticipated the intensity of the rhetoric which President Donald Trump would employ as he threatened ‘fire and fury’ and total annihilation on the tiny Asian state. Historic summits with Kim Jong-un in late 2018 and early 2019 brought some hopes of a potential for the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, but familiar underlying patterns in the relationship endured. North Korea in Obama’s Pacific Century President Barack Obama’s initial stance towards North Korea can at least partly be inferred from his inaugural address in January 2009. ‘To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,’ he asserted, ‘know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.’1 The North Koreans proceeded to fire off a Bruce Cumings - 9781526135025 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 02:52:13PM via free access 80 80 Obama’s legacy in Asia and the Pacific long- range missile in April 2009, and test an atomic bomb on American Memorial Day in May. On 4 July, they tested seven short and medium range missiles. These provocative actions put North Korea on Obama’s back-bur ner for most of his first term, and he instead reached out to other former enemies or pariah states which he felt might be more receptive to overture, including Cuba, Iran, Burma and even Laos. One might have thought North Korea would have been a bigger concern because it was the most dangerous actor in the region Obama had quickly come to identify as his foreign policy priority, namely the Asia Pacific. Obama’s Pivot promoted a series of defence policy moves which, at the time, appeared to foreshadow the most significant transformation of the United States’ global military position since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The shift began with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s declaration of America’s ‘Pacific Century’. Clinton announced a shift away from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and ‘a stra- tegic turn’ towards the Asia Pacific, a region now said to be ‘the key driver of global politics’ where nearly half the world’s population lives, and where ‘key engines’ of the world economy reside. The security of those engines, she noted, ‘has long been guaranteed by the US military’, and their region would be more important and more central to American interests than any other for the remainder of the century.2 Meanwhile, Obama’s Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed preference that the United States voluntarily relinquish the ability to fight large wars along both the central front in Europe and in East Asia. This “two war” posture had defined Pentagon strategy for the past six decades. He also indicated that the defence triad of air, naval and land forces was outmoded.3 The seemingly endless European crisis over national debt in Greece, Portugal and Spain, with the future of the euro and the European Union itself hanging in the balance, added its own punctuation to the apparent eclipse of Europe and the dawn of a new Pacific era. Still, it may just have been that Panetta had run some new ideas up the flagpole to see what would happen; the Pentagon later appeared to retreat from giving up the two-war strategy and the triad.4 The Obama administration was the first since the Cold War ended to pay little or no attention to nuclear-ar med North Korea. This was perhaps guided by Colin Powell’s warning to Pyongyang that ‘you can’t eat plutonium. You can’t eat enriched uranium’, and that those who could help feed poverty-st ricken North Korea would not do so until it ceased its development of nuclear weapons.5 But the White House paid particularly close attention to easing strains both with Tokyo over US bases in Okinawa (which brought down the Hatoyama cabinet in 2010), and with Seoul over changes to the US defence posture in Korea. Indeed, US– South Korea relations had been at an all- time low from 2002 to 2007, with George W. Bush and President Roh Moo Hyun barely on speaking terms throughout that period. More broadly, along a great crescent from Rangoon to Darwin to Manila Bruce Cumings - 9781526135025 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 02:52:13PM via free access 81 Obama, Trump and North Korea 81 to Seoul to Tokyo, diplomatic efforts were underway with the permanency of the US Pacific defence posture in mind. That posture, with its political- economic cor- ollary, is now around seventy years old and has provided a remarkably durable regional order for the vast economic exchange taking place in recent decades. A key difference now was the remarkable emergence of China as a leading global actor, and a recognition that the significance of this issue had gone largely unad- dressed during the Bush administration. Obama meets regional historical legacies For his East Asia policy, Obama from the beginning relied on battle-t ested, tried- and- true insiders (that is, inside the Beltway) who typically move in a lockstep, bipartisan fashion – regardless of which president or party happens to be in office – towards their desired policies. Hillary Clinton was the perfect Secretary of State for such people, as a quintessential product of the Beltway herself, begin- ning with her Watergate investigation days in the early 1970s. And on his arrival to the White House in 2009, Obama found a big problem, a smaller problem, and a clear remedy. The big problem was the physical rise of China, which needed somehow to be contained, while not disrupting global economic exchange. The remedy was to get Japan and South Korea working together under the umbrella of the American alliance. The smaller problem, however, was that Seoul had been through a fit of “anti- Americanism” as Beltway denizens saw it, under Presidents Kim Dae- jung (1998– 2003) and, especially, Roh Moo- hyun (2003– 8). Fortune eventually smiled in the form of President Lee Myung- bak (2008– 13), a former Hyundai executive who harked back to the days of Korean– American amity when the dictators were in power (1948– 87). Even better, they thought, was the subsequent election of Park Geun- hye, a daughter of one such former dictator, who stayed in power until 2017. Also in 2012, however, came Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe yet again, and the best laid Beltway plans went awry. Abe’s grandfather, former Japanese Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, was in charge of munitions in Manchukuo when Kim Jong-un ’s grandfather, Kim Il-s ung, was fighting the Japanese in the 1930s. Grandchild Kim and grandchild Abe were thus always likely on a collision course. The arrival of Park Geun- hye stirred the pot, since her father, Park Chung- hee, had been an officer in the Japanese Imperial Army, also in Manchukuo, and had colluded with Kishi in the still- controversial normalisation of Japan– South Korean relations in 1965. Standing behind all this was the United States, which, after momentarily designating Kishi a Class A war criminal and incarcerating him in Sugamo Prison, promoted him as an anti- communist and moderniser. The US Military Government in South Korea (1945– 48) guided Manchukuo officer Park through its military academy in 1946, Bruce Cumings - 9781526135025 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 02:52:13PM via free access 82 82 Obama’s legacy in Asia and the Pacific and supported him after he led a successful coup of the national government in 1961. The Americans then pushed hard for a normalisation of Japan– South Korea relations, but have never shown much regard for long- standing Korean hatreds and grievances arising from nearly four decades of Japan’s colonial rule (1910–45). Instead, from the 1940s to the present, Americans have urged Koreans to unite under the fabled US– Japan alliance. This and other important elements of twentieth- century history severely constrained President Park, as she sought to manoeuvre between a voting public that suspected she was pro- Japanese, and an Obama administration that wanted her to ally with Abe to help in the containment of China. But to all appearances Park hated Abe; for years she refused to consent to a summit with him in spite of sustained pressure from Washington and Tokyo to do so. Park denounced visits by Abe and his close aides to the Yasukuni Shrine and was particularly vociferous on the issue of Tokyo’s continuing unwillingness to deal honestly with the legacy of its wartime sex slavery and the “comfort women” it abused, the vast majority of whom were Korean.

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