Reflecting on the 70th anniversary of the U.S.-South Korea alliance

OPINION:

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the Mutual Defense Treaty between the U.S. and South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea, signed Oct. 1, 1953.

This year is the 70th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement, signed July 27, 1953, establishing the Demilitarized Zone along the 38th parallel, instituting a cease-fire in the Korean War, which began June 25, 1950, when 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.

Over this 70-year period, North Korea has done its best to destabilize South Korea:

• North Korean commandos attempted to assassinate President Park Chung Hee at the Blue House in January 1968.

• North Korean commandos attempted to assassinate President Chun Doo-Hwan in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), in October 1983.

• North Korea bombed Korean Air Flight 858 in November 1987, killing 115 passengers and crew.

• North Korea executed the March 2010 North Korean submarine attack on a South Korean naval vessel, the Cheonan, killing 46 sailors.

These are just some of the provocations South Korea has endured from a belligerent North Korea.

But despite these egregious acts of terrorism, South Korea developed into a dynamic liberal democracy, with the world’s 10th-largest gross domestic product and a global leader in mobile phones, semiconductors, automobile manufacturing, 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, can accomplish.

Since the Six-Party Talks ended 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, including two separate launches of a road mobile solid fuel intercontinental Ballistic Missile (Hwasong-18) this year, with a multitude of submarine launched ballistic missiles and hypersonic and cruise missiles.

Last year, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced a “first use” policy for nuclear weapons if there is a threat to the leadership or its command-and-control infrastructure that is imminent or is perceived as imminent. And last month, at a meeting of the Supreme People’s Assembly, Mr. Kim announced a constitutional amendment that “enshrines” North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

Russia and China were part of the Six-Party Talks with North Korea and supported efforts to denuclearize North Korea, 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 to the region of a North Korea retaining nuclear weapons, and the likelihood that other countries in the region would seek their own nuclear weapons.

This would engender a nuclear arms race in the region and beyond.

Last month’s meeting between Mr. Kim 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 efforts to put a satellite in orbit and possibly with its nuclear program.

Mr. Putin had to be pleased with North Korea being one of the four countries (along with Belarus, Nicaragua and Syria) that joined Russia in voting against the U.N. 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 provided security assurances to in exchange for the removal of over 1,000 nuclear weapons, pursuant to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. The clear message to Kim Jong Un is, you can’t trust Vladimir Putin and hold on to your nuclear weapons.

This is also the 10th anniversary of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry that investigated systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights in North Korea. The commission concluded that North Korea’s human rights violations amounted to “crimes against humanity” that should be referred to the International Criminal Court.

The U.N. General Assembly then adopted a powerfully worded resolution requesting that the Security Council consider the North Korean human rights issue a threat to international a peace and security. Russia and China vetoed the proposed resolution sanctioning North Korea for its human rights abuses.

This past August, nearly 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, U.N. member states should “refrain from forcibly repatriating North Koreans” and provide North Koreans protections that U.N. member states are obligated to provide.

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea said that human rights in North Korea continue to deteriorate and people are starving, and others have died due to malnutrition, disease, and lack of access to health care.

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 in North Korea. Truthful information about the dire economic situation in North Korea, with over 40% of the population malnourished and the prospect of starvation, possibly like the 1990s, when over 1 million people died due to starvation. Information 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 health care 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 recurrent food scarcity and the broken health care system.

So, on the 70th anniversary of the South Korea-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 our ally and continues 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.

• Joseph R. DeTrani served as special envoy for six-party negotiations with North Korea from 200 to 2006 and is the former director of the National Counterproliferation Center. The views are the author’s and not those of any government department or agency.