SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea’s artillery salvo earlier this month off the flashpoint Yeongpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea in fact preempted a South Korean gunnery drill, a South Korean academic charged Thursday, accusing Seoul of engaging Pyongyang in a high-risk “chicken game.”
The claim comes with mounting media reports that the nuclear-armed North has given up on diplomacy and is preparing for a new war on the divided, heavily armed Korean peninsula.
Just in recent days, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has announced that South Korea is his main national enemy, scrapped several government bodies that promoted reconciliation and reunification with Seoul, demolished a high-profile “unification arch” in Pyongyang, and further upgraded ties with Russia.
Mr. Kim’s forces continue artillery, missile and maritime drills — including strategic cruise missile firings over the weekend, while Pyongyang’s state media sprays a firehose of bellicose rhetoric.
South Korea is responding with tough talk of its own while upgrading security ties with Japan. Both allies are engaged in military exercises with the United States, deploying nuclear-capable bombers, submarines, and carrier groups to the peninsula in shows of “extended deterrence.”
Visitors to downtown Seoul, 35 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas, are unlikely to sense war fears.
Coffee shops and BBQ restaurants are packed, and traffic is frenetic. The stock market and won-dollar exchange rates are both recovering from early January downturns. Locals seem more concerned with the current cold snap than the peninsula’s deepening cold war.
But the geopolitical tensions are clear, even if Mr. Kim’s motives are not.
Opinion is divided over whether the North is responding to the moves by the U.S. and its allies. Some analysts say Mr. Kim is raising his country’s threat profile ahead of upcoming elections in the South and the U.S., while some speculate that Mr. Kim is acting for domestic reasons.
Veteran North Korea watchers Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker, writing earlier this month in the widely-read blog 38 North, ramped up the uneasy mood with a long analysis entitled “Is Kim Jong-un Preparing for War?’
“The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950,” they wrote, citing in part Pyongyang’s frustration in the aftermath of the breakdown of talks with the Trump administration in 2019.
“That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” Mr. Carlin and Mr. Hecker wrote. “We do not know when or how Kim plans to pull the trigger, but the danger is already far beyond the routine warnings in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo about Pyongyang’s “provocations.”
As the tit-for-tat cycle accelerates, cleavages are opening within politically polarized South Korea over who is to blame.
Blaming Seoul
North Korea conducted surprise coastal artillery drills near Yeongpyeong Island on January 5. No damage was reported on the South Korean-populated island that lies off the North Korean coast, but residents were ordered into shelters and ferry services suspended as South Korean forces subsequently conducted their own drill.
The island is a tinderbox. In 2010, North Korea, in apparent response to a South Korean artillery drill, bombarded the island with live rounds, killing four persons.
The question of who fired first on January 5 is misguided, says Kim Dong-yup, a professor specializing military and security studies at Seoul’s University of North Korean studies. He noted that the North Koreans preempted drills planned by Seoul.
“If you see the record…the South Korean government had planned artillery fire,” Mr. Kim said, citing public navigation warnings for the area posted by Seoul’s Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries on January 2. “We questioned the Defense Ministry about what happened during that time, but we have not been given an answer.”
He was briefing foreign reporters in Seoul on Thursday.
“It is questionable whether the government should so casually execute a game of chicken, a power-to-power game like the current one when there is nobody to back down,” Mr. Kim said.
A newly formed civic group, “Network of Borders Residents, Civil Society, Religions Groups for Peace and Solidarity,” sharply criticized Seoul’s hardline defense minister, Shin Won-sik.
On a recent visit to a South Korean Air Force unit, Mr. Shin remarked that the unit should plan to take out the North’s leadership — plans assumed to be long in place but never publicly mentioned.
Mr. Shin’s vows to “immediately and forcefully retaliate to the end” is a “declaration of war, not a crisis-management strategy,” the group. “We want a government that does its best to prevent war, not win it.”
A representative called on the conservative government of President Yoon Suk-yeol to “immediately halt military exercises” and urged the South Korean government to “stop blaming North Korea.”
Farmers working close to the DMZ expressed similar concerns.
“Inter-Korean relations have reached their worst point,” Lee Jae-hee, who farms in Paju, the border county north of Seoul, said. “Many people are worried that a local war with break out.”
Paju citizens are gathering to prevent South Korean activists from sending anti-regime leaflets over the DMZ, a practice banned by the previous pro-engagement administration but allowed to resume by the Yoon administration, Mr. Lee said.
“The people of Paju … have consistently opposed inter-Korean confrontation by preventing the spread of anti-NK leaflets,” he said.
Following the November collapse of a 2018 inter-Korean military agreement, “all channels of dialogue, both civilian and government,” have been closed, said Kim Yong-bin, a farmer from Cheorwon, another border county famed for its wartime ruins. “Nowadays, when we see military vehicles or troops traveling the region, we look at them with a sense of unease, wondering what kind of military operation is about to begin.”
Seoul unilaterally withdrew from two clauses of the 2018 de-confliction agreement after the North launched a spy satellite last year. Pyongyang subsequently exited the entire agreement.
Blaming Pyongyang
But the border farmers struggled to explain how today’s tensions differ from the past. The issues they raised — drone and helicopter flights near the DMZ and rollouts of mobile artillery from bases — were commonplace before the 2018 agreement.
Some say North Korea is raising the tensions, moving to its own internal rhythms.
“They are testing like there is no tomorrow — but they have a lot of things to test,” said Andrei Lankov, a North Korean expert at Seoul’s Kookmin University. “I would not describe these launches as provocations as they are not done for political purposes. They are done to make sure everything works.”
For the North, the South’s April parliamentary election is unimportant, said Mr. Lankov. Its result will not impact inter-Korean relations, which are conducted via the Defense, Foreign and Unification ministries, not the legislature.
Go Myong-hyun, a North Korea watcher at Seoul’s Asan Institute, told The Washington Times last week, “I think North Korea is going to return to the pattern of provocations and more provocations, then negotiations with the U.S.”
Mr. Lankov agreed that this U.S. election season “matters a lot” to North Korea. He warned that significant provocations will start later this year.
“To have any impact, they should start in summer or autumn,” he said.
Another analyst offered a novel reason for the North’s new belligerence.
Writing in The Conversation, University of Baltimore Professor of Global Affairs and Human Security Nusta Carranza Ko suggested Mr. Kim is raising tensions overseas to deflect from local issues.
Sources with contacts in the isolated country claim that a passenger train derailed due to a power shortage on December 23. While elites in the first two carriages survived, ordinary citizens in the seven carriages behind perished. The news spread.
Mr. Kim is “aware that the train incident comes amid discontent and protest over policies that have seen increased government surveillance and people’s homes raided over suspicion of anti-socialist tendencies,” Ms. Ko wrote. “As such, Kim appears to be deflecting domestic anger by signaling war.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.