U.S.-Japan-South Korea Military Exercises: For Whom Are They Putting on a Show?

Recently, a new technique for debt collection has become popular in the underworld of Japanese crime — they don’t directly demand payment from the person himself, but instead spray paint the door of said person’s neighbor or incessantly harass the neighbor over the phone, making it so that the neighbor can no longer bear the disturbance until he resorts to exerting a formidable effort to force the person to obediently give in. Now, this technique of the Japanese criminal underworld is unexpectedly alive on the political stage in the Northeast Asian region.

On Nov. 23, North Korea suddenly launched a military attack shelling South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island, bringing about the death of four South Korean officers as well as civilians. This was the first time since the Korean War ended in 1953 that North Korea carried out a military attack on South Korea and its people. South Korea — not going to war lightly, but also not willing to swallow defeat — could only look to the U.S. government for help in dealing a blow to the North. The U.S. understands that the optimal shortcut that leads to Pyongyang passes through Beijing. However, the U.S. learned from its mistakes last time when the Cheonan incident was handed over to the United Nations Security Council where China’s meticulous cover-up for North Korea settled the incident by leaving it unsettled. This time, the U.S. has not only put pressure on North Korea, it has also refused even to engage in direct talks. Instead, it launched an unprecedented deployment of two naval battle groups led by aircraft carriers to South Korea and Japan’s respective gateways to China’s capitol and surroundings — the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea, and initiated 10 days of large-scale joint military exercises in order to build up huge psychological pressure on China so as to force the Chinese government to act to restrain North Korea’s repeated military provocations.

Why has North Korea, who previously was in no hurry, now become unceasingly anxious to manufacture military conflict against South Korea, to gain an international audience for itself?

First, there is North Korea’s interior regime change to consider: Kim Jong-un wants to establish his military prestige in North Korea by means of launching military conflict. In the past, after Kim Jong-il was appointed as successor in 1982, it was only after he had gained a lengthy 20 years of political experience that he smoothly won the approval of North Korea’s Workers’ Party. Now, however, Kim Jong-il is not at all in good health and it will not be long before Kim Jong-un gradually succeeds his father. Therefore, he can only create military conflict against South Korea to establish Kim Jong-un’s image of “military genius” among the people, so as to seek a stable position for his successor in a short time.

Secondly, there are foreign considerations: North Korea wants to force the U.S. to take a seat at the negotiation table and progressively relax its economic sanctions on North Korea. After Obama’s administration took office in 2008, North Korea had high hopes for the U.S., expecting that Obama would be able to change the Bush administration’s unyielding attitude towards North Korea. The U.S. and North Korea would then conduct direct bilateral negotiations in order to remove the international economic sanctions on North Korea. But North Korea realized the Obama administration’s policy towards North Korea was not much different than that of the Bush era — it is still monolithic. In other words, North Korea needs to give up its development of nuclear weapons before it will be able to advance bilateral dialogue with the U.S. This reality is an enormous gap from what North Korea imagined would take place.

So, has North Korea’s repeated launch of military actions “to the brink of war” already surpassed the critical limit of what China can tolerate?

In the past, when North Korea has launched small-scale military conflicts on the Korean peninsula, China not only intervened and condemned these actions, but it also utilized the mechanism of the six-party talks to play the role of negotiator, promoting its own role as hegemony within East Asia. However, starting this year, the U.S. has gradually turned its attention from the Middle East back over to Asia, and in doing so, realized an abruptly risen China had already appeared in the East Asian region. Therefore, recently it seems that the United States’ strategy toward East Asia has already changed direction. Not only has the U.S. abandoned the mechanism of the six-party talks, but it also gave up on the opportunity for direct dialogue with North Korea, thereby upgrading U.S.-North Korean relations to U.S.-China relations, directly confronting and surrounding China.

The military exercises the U.S. has held with Japan and South Korea respectively, could not only force China to exert pressure on North Korea, but could also contain China’s navy from breaking through the Western Pacific island chain; this strategy kills two birds with one stone. Thus, the recent repeated military provocations carried out by North Korea have increased instead of gradually decreased U.S. military presence in Asia. Formerly simple conflicts between North and South Korea, under the influence of the military exercises carried out by the U.S. with great fanfare, have gradually evolved into a stand-off between two mighty nations — the U.S. and China. This, China finds undesirable.

This whole scene was written and directed by the U.S.; the U.S., Japan and South Korea collaboratively acted out the big show of joint military exercises. The goal of this was not to start a war, but to put on a play for which there seems to be no offstage audience other than China. There’s no such thing as a free lunch; to see a play, one must pay the cost — after the curtain call of military exercises, if China does not take the measures necessary to contain North Korea, the United State’s spell of military control surrounding China will only grow tighter and tighter.

North Korea, whose schemes usually play out well, did not think that by lighting a small flame it would actually trigger a huge forest fire, or that little conflicts between South and North Korea would unexpectedly play out into a confrontation between two major powers, the U.S. and China. But the United States’ strategy of “striking a blow from a distance” appears to have already proved effective with China. If North Korea repeatedly continues to create tense relations in the region for its own benefit, in the process losing China as its backstage supporter, on the international level North Korea will find itself isolated.

(The author is the head of the Division of Asia-Pacific Studies at National Chengchi University’s Institute of International Relations.)