OPINION — This is the 70th anniversary of the Mutual Defense Treaty between the U.S. and the Republic of Korea (ROK), signed October 1, 1953. It’s also the 70th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice, signed July 27, 1953, establishing the Demilitarized Zone along the 38th parallel, instituting a cease fire to the Korean War, when on June 25, 1950, North Korean troops, with the support of the Soviet Union and China, crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. It was a brutal war, with massive casualties.
During this 70 year period, North Korea did its best to destabilize the ROK. North Korean commandos attempted to assassinate President Park Chung Hee at the Blue House in January, 1968 and they attempted to assassinate President Chun Doo-Hwan in Rangoon, Burma in October 1983. North Korea bombed Korean Air Flight 858 in November 1987, killing 115 passengers and crew; and in March 2010, a North Korean submarine attack on a South Korean naval vessel – the Cheonan – killed 46 sailors. These are just some of the provocations the ROK endured from a belligerent North Korea.
Despite these egregious acts of terrorism, South Korea developed into a dynamic liberal democracy, with the 10th largest GDP and became a world leader in mobile phones, semiconductors, automobiles, chemicals, music, and cinema. The “miracle on the Han River” is testimony to what a free market economy, tethered to the rule of law and a vibrant democracy, is capable of accomplishing.
Since the end of the Six-Party Talks in early 2009, North Korea has been in a race to build more nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons. And since the failed Hanoi Summit in February 2019, North Korea has launched hundreds of ballistic missiles, to include two separate launches of a road mobile solid fuel intercontinental Ballistic Missile (Hwasong-18) in 2023, with a multitude of submarine launched ballistic missiles and hypersonic and cruise missiles.
Last year, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un announced a “first use” policy for nuclear weapons if there is an imminent or perceived to be an imminent threat, against the leadership or its command-and-control infrastructure. And last month, at a meeting of the Supreme People’s Assembly, Kim Jong Un announced a constitutional amendment that “enshrines” North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
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Russia and China were part of the Six-Party Talks with North Korea and supported efforts to denuclearize the country in return for providing the North with security assurances and economic development assistance. Indeed, Russia and China should also be concerned about the destabilizing impact of North Korea retaining nuclear weapons, and the likelihood that other countries in the region would seek their own such weapons. This would engender a nuclear arms race in the region and beyond.
The September 2023 summit of Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Russian Far East received significant world attention. There was considerable media reporting that North Korea was prepared to provide Russia with artillery shells and rockets for its war in Ukraine, in return for assistance with the North’s failed efforts to put a satellite in orbit and, possibly, with its nuclear program. Putin had to be pleased with North Korea being one of the four countries (Belarus, Nicaragua, and Syria) that joined Russia in voting against the United Nations Resolution calling for Russia to withdraw its forces from Ukraine.
But how ironic – North Korea aligning with and supporting a Russia that invaded a sovereign country that Russia had once provided with security assurances in exchange for the removal of over one thousand nuclear weapons, pursuant to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. The clear message to Kim Jong Un is: You can’t trust Putin and hold on to your nuclear weapons.
This is also the tenth anniversary of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry (COI) that investigated systematic, widespread, and grave violations of human rights in North Korea. The COI concluded that North Korea’s human rights violations amounted to “crimes against humanity” that should be referred to the International Criminal Court. The United Nations General Assembly then adopted a powerfully worded resolution that requested the Security Council consider the North Korea human rights issue as a threat to international peace and security. Russia and China vetoed the proposed resolution sanctioning North Korea for its human rights abuses.
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In August 2023, six years since its last session in December 2017, the Security Council convened a session on North Korean human rights and, according to the High Commissioner for Human Rights, decided that United Nations member states should “refrain from forcibly repatriating North Koreans” and provide North Koreans protections that UN member states are obligated to provide. The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea said human rights in the country were continuing to deteriorate and some people were starving, as others died from malnutrition, diseases, and lack of access to healthcare.
As efforts to get North Korea to return to negotiations persist, there should be greater effort to get information into North Korea and to the 25 million people living there. Truthful information that informs the people about the dire economic situation throughout North Korea, with over 40% of the population malnourished and facing the prospect of starvation, possibly like the 1990s, when over one million people died due to starvation. Information needs to be shared about the quality of life in South Korea and beyond. Information that incites the people to demand that their government provide the food and nutrition necessary for all people and improvements to a broken healthcare system, with inadequate medicines and facilities.
North Korea’s illicit activities, especially its cyber and ransomware programs, provides the leadership with hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of it goes to the nuclear and missile programs, and to the elites, not to infrastructure programs necessary to address the recurrent food scarcity issue and the broken health care system.
So, on the 70th anniversary of the ROK-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty, let’s embrace our close allied relationship and ensure that the U.S. continues to have a robust extended nuclear deterrence commitment to ROK while continuing to seek the denuclearization of North Korea with an active and creative program to get truthful information into North Korea that reaches the people. The goal, of course, is an eventual peaceful reunification of the two Koreas.
This column by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joe Detrani was first published in The Washington Times
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