Obama Ought to Go to Korea

Obama Ought to Go to Korea

By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, May 29, 2009

Barack Obama has been caught flat-flooted by Kim Jong-Il.

The North Korean nuclear and missile tests this week have heightened tensions on the Korean subcontinent and throughout the Pacific.

Obama had let the issue of North Korea slide when he came into office.

But that was a bad mistake, since Kim Jong-Il has been in failing health, there may be a power struggle brewing, and South Korea has taken an increasingly hostile approach to the North.

The latest belligerent acts by North Korea may be designed to grab Obama’s attention.

But now that he’s awake to the issue, Obama shouldn’t jump out of bed and overreact.

“North Korea doesn’t want a war,” Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago said on Democracy Now! on Friday.

Army chief of staff George Casey said the United States could win a war against North Korea, but that would be at an unacceptable cost: the deaths of many if not most of the 70 million people on the Korean peninsula, and tens of thousands of U.S. troops, if things went nuclear.

Cumings, one of the leading Korea scholars in America, faults Obama for not paying more attention to North Korea, and Hillary Clinton for pursuing a neocon strategy.

“The Obama Administration, and especially Secretary of State Clinton, are running on the same tracks as George Bush did in ’07 and ’08,” he says. “They’re even talking about the Proliferation Security Initiative, PSI, which is something that was handcrafted by John Bolton to put pressure on North Korea.”

Cumings notes that since 1950, the United States has threatened North Korea with nuclear annihilation, and that it’s natural for the North Koreans to be concerned about this, which is one reason they may be in such a hurry to demonstrate their nuclear possessions.

“If I or you were in North Korea, uppermost in our mind would be American nuclear weapons,” he said. “I think the ultimate way to solve this is to actually implement the Non-Proliferation Treaty by the major nuclear powers drawing down their nuclear weapons eventually and hopefully to zero. In the meantime, it’s just an unequal treaty, where we get to have nuclear weapons, but other countries don’t.”

For the time being, the best approach would be for Obama to do what he pledged to do during the campaign: speak to any foreign leader, without preconditions, including Kim Jong-Il. After all, we talked with Stalin, Khrushchev, and Mao.

If Kim’s nuclear saber-rattling was a cry for attention, Obama should answer it, and should go to Pyongyang with his Chinese and Russian counterparts.

This not a time for war. It is a time for diplomacy. And disarmament, all around.