Ten years have passed since Ralph Cossa first asked me to write for this esteemed journal. Comparative Connections was young then. Launched in mid-1999, then as now its remit was to cover and track East Asia’s key bilateral relationships: with the US and regionally.

At the outset, inter-Korean relations must have seemed too insubstantial to be included. That changed in 2000: the annus mirabilis which saw the South’s then president, Kim Dae-jung, fly to Pyongyang in June and hold the first ever North-South summit meeting with the man who still leads the North, Kim Jong Il. The former, but thankfully not the latter, was awarded the year’s Nobel Peace Prize for this among other achievements.

At the time this seemed, and was, a breakthrough. The summit was not just a one-off photo-op. We did not yet know that money had gone under the table to bring it about. Even so, to write as I did then of “the wholly new phase of regular and substantive inter-Korean dialogue that has ensued – ministerial and defense talks, family reunions, economic deals, transport links, and more” – was not mistaken. Seven years followed in which inter-Korean relations moved forward. Not evenly, not enough, and not reciprocally – but forward, none the less.

Another sentence that I wrote a decade ago, on the broader vista, is painful to reread now:

In a for once happily inapt metaphor, diplomatically speaking the DPRK blazed away on all barrels in all directions during the past year, apparently seeking better ties across the board, both reviving old alliances and embarking on new ones.

And I concluded:

We are in a new phase, which has no pre-written script.  The challenge in 2001 will be for the DPRK to show that its change is more than just cosmetic and tactical by imbuing its new formal ties with substantive content, and above all by moving to address at least some of the many real security concerns of its various interlocutors.

Merciless thunderbolt of revenge

That was then. A decade on, alas, talk of guns blazing away is not a metaphor. On Dec. 24, DPRK’s Central TV featured some of the actual Korean People’s Army (KPA) artillerymen who a month earlier on Nov. 23 shattered the fragile peace in the West (Yellow) Sea with a volley of shells onto Yeonpyeong, one of five Southern-held islands northwest of the ROK’s main land-mass, all too close to the North Korean coast. Two marines and two civilians died, 18 were wounded and there was widespread fire damage to the island’s buildings, fields, and forests.

Here are the gunmen’s own words, quoted by the Seoul daily Chosun Ilbo:

Fire burned in our eyes when we saw [South Korean] artillery shells fall into our territorial waters. We poured our merciless thunderbolt of revenge on them. When we saw the first shell hit the enemy’s radar post and several pillars of fire soar there, shouts of ‘Hurrah’ celebrated our victory… We clearly demonstrated that our earlier pledge to fight was no empty talk and launched the attack without an ounce of mercy.

That is the mood in which the peninsula enters 2011. Moreover, the hostility is mutual. One hesitates to pronounce on public opinion in Seoul, which tends to be volatile politically, not least regarding the North. Yet some reckon the Yeonpyeong shelling – more so, oddly, than Pyongyang’s earlier attack on March 28 when it sunk the corvette Cheonan, drowning 46, mostly young naval conscripts – has wrought a sea change in South Korean perceptions.

No more ‘nutty uncle’

That may be another metaphor too hastily used, given how quickly the political weather can change on the peninsula. In a useful and varied recent edited volume on New Challenges of North Korean Foreign Policy (ed. Kyung-Ae Park; Macmillan, 2010), the doyen of liberal US scholars of Korea, Bruce Cumings, writes in the present of what is now the past:

[T]he stark reversal of Seoul’s former anticommunist strategy created a sea change in their perceptions of the North – from evil enemy to long-lost cousin, led by a nutty uncle perhaps.

Or perhaps not. This particular sea-change now looks more of a tide that rolled in for a time, only to roll out again. Either way, it is history. As for nutty uncle, nasty now seems a better epithet – and arguably always was. We return to such wider issues at the end of this article.

Succession moves forward

Also by way of context-setting, let us remind ourselves that, in Rumsfeldian parlance, the last quarter of 2010 was when at least one North Korean known unknown became slightly less unknown. Kim Jong Il’s third son, Kim Jong Un, having made his public debut on Sept. 28 at a rare delegates’ conference of the DPRK’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), cemented his raised status by appearing again soon after on Oct. 10 at a large-scale military parade marking the WPK’s 65th anniversary. In a last-minute decision, about 80 of what Pyongyang sometimes calls the “reptile press” were flown in from Beijing, to see the ‘young general’ on the saluting dais with his visibly ailing father. (Also on the stand, less noticed, was a new top Chinese envoy, but that is another story – no doubt told elsewhere in this issue of CC.)

Had any doubt remained, two days earlier a veteran figure, Yang Hyong Sop, vice president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA, the DPRK’s rubber-stamp Parliament), confirmed Kim Jong Un’s status as successor in an interview with Associated Press Television News: “Comrade Kim Jong Il and now the young general Kim Jong Un, who will follow him, is leading the revolution …  The North Korean people take pride in the great leadership that has continued for three generations from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un.”

Throughout the quarter the young general made various appearances, always at his father’s side – no solo roles, thus far – at public events or (more often) guidance visits. The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)’s English language service mentioned him four times in late September, 12 in October, 13 in November and 7 in December. These outings included one on Nov. 22, ostensibly to a fish farm in the southwest – close to the artillery bases which the next day rained fire on Yeonpyeong. A very thorough recent study by the International Crisis Group (ICG) of this and other West Sea incidents (including the Cheonan) reckons that “it is inconceivable for such a high-level delegation not to have visited nearby military units.”

(North Korea: The Risks Of War In The Yellow Sea. Asia Report N°198, 23 December 2010, page 26. Summarized and downloadable at http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/north-east-asia/north-korea/198-north-korea-the-risks-of-war-in-the-yellow-sea.aspx )

Speaking of domestic politics, as the quarter began South Korea finally got itself a new prime minister, after a two-month hiatus, when the National Assembly confirmed Kim Hwang-sik in the post. (An earlier nominee was unable to explain his links to a businessman jailed for bribery.) That in turn cleared the way for a new foreign minister; there was none for nearly a month after Yu Myung-hwan quit on Sept. 4 over a nepotism scandal. The new man is Kim Sung-hwan, a career diplomat of moderate views, previously senior presidential secretary for foreign affairs and national security. Kim was nominated on Oct. 1 and in post by Oct. 8; he pledged to reform his ministry, as new ministers in Seoul invariably do. These damaging vacuums in key posts were just the latest, but would not be the last, in the Lee administration’s lamentable and puzzling chronic mishandling of personnel appointments.

Flood aid for Sinuiju

Turning to inter-Korean relations specifically, it is hard to recall that a quarter which ended so abysmally had begun more optimistically; a fact that might offer some hope that today’s stormy seas could, malgré tout, grow calmer in 2011. Despite serious tensions over the sinking of the Cheonan – for which North Korea continued to deny any responsibility, most recently in a lengthy and vitriolic document circulated at the UN in November – by early October both Koreas appeared to be seeking a way to mend fences, at least in part.

As mentioned last time, the catalyst for a thaw was the latest of the natural disasters which hit the North almost every summer. This year it was flooding in the northwest, including the city of Sinuiju. The modest Southern aid agreed in September was sent on Oct. 26, a day later than planned, delayed by stormy seas. A ship carrying 5,000 tons of rice – the first from Seoul for two years, if only 1 percent of the half a million tons that used to be sent every year in the ‘sunshine’ era – left Gunsan for Dandong in China, just across the Yalu river (Amnok, to Koreans) from Sinuiju. Another ship sailed from Incheon to Dandong with 3 million packets of instant noodles. ROK Red Cross officials flew to Dandong to supervise delivery. The rice was in 5 kg packs, each marked “Donation from the Republic of Korea.”

September’s aid agreement opened the way for wider talks. Not all were successful. The first military talks (at colonel-level) for two years, held at Panmunjom on Sept. 30, foundered on the wreck of the Cheonan. The South insisted on an admission and apology, while the North still demanded to send its own inspectors to examine the wreckage. Pyongyang wanted to hold further talks, but Seoul demurred unless there was first a confession for the Cheonan.

Family reunions resume

By contrast, a day later the two sides’ Red Cross bodies, meeting for a third time after initial talks in September, agreed to hold a fresh round of reunions of separated families – the first such for over a year – at the end of October, and also to discuss doing this on a regular basis, as the South would like. So, the world once again witnessed – insofar as it noticed – a by now familiar sorry spectacle. On Oct. 30, 435 South Koreans, ranging in age from 12 to 96, were bussed along a road less travelled these days, across the eastern end of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to the North’s Mt. Kumgang resort to meet 97 elderly North Korean kin – husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children – of whom they had seen or heard nothing for over half a century, since the end of the Korean War in 1953. They came home on Nov. 1. Two days later, another 96 aged South Koreans crossed the border to be similarly and briefly reunited with 207 of their long-lost relatives living in the North.

Why “a sorry spectacle”? For at least three reasons oft rehearsed in these pages before. First, these events are not nearly frequent enough. This latest was the 18th since 2000, but only the second since Lee Myung-bak took office in Feb. 2008. KBS, the South’s main broadcaster, summarized the statistics as of Oct. 27: so far 3,573 families and about 17,100 individuals have participated, half each from the North and South. Yet, in South Korea alone, a total of 128,232 people have applied to the program, of which 44,940 or 35 percent have since died. Of those still living, 5 percent are over 90, 35 percent are over 80 and 36 percent over 70. (For the North, of course, we know no overall numbers.) At this snail’s pace, with meetings few and far between, most are doomed to die disappointed and un-reunited.

Even the lucky few who do get to meet face two further problems. What should be a deeply private encounter is played out in part in public, as a kind of reality TV show awash in tears. The families do get just one day to themselves, but both their first meetings the day before, and fond farewells as they leave, are in full view of the cameras. And then that is it. Cruelly, they are allowed no further contact of any kind, not even letter, phone or email, much less to meet again in the flesh and hold each other close. Does brief joy outweigh renewed sorrow?

No more regular tourism

A complicating factor this time was the venue’s status. Expensively developed by Hyundai, Mt. Kumgang used to be a thriving resort. Over a decade, 1.9 million South Korean tourists crossed the once-impermeable DMZ for a brief taste of a (stylized and sanitized) North. That stopped abruptly in July 2008 when the KPA shot and killed a middle-aged female tourist, Park Wang-ja, and refused to let a Southern team come and investigate. The Lee Myung-bak government suspended tours and there have been none since. Pressure – typically perverse – from Pyongyang to have this cash cow resume culminated in April with formal confiscation of Southern-owned assets at Mt. Kumgang, including the ROK government’s new purpose-built family reunion center costing over $50 million, hardly ever used as yet. Seoul insisted that this be the venue for the latest reunions and Pyongyang reluctantly agreed.

Seoul rejects aid linkage

In November the North kept pressing for regular tourism to resume, but the South insisted that the asset confiscation must first be rescinded. Then came the shelling, which means that tourism – or even talks about it – will not soon resume. The same doubtless goes for family reunions. Even before this, indeed before the latest reunion itself, the two sides had failed to agree on holding such events regularly. Talks to that end on Oct. 27 stalled on two issues. The South would like to vary the venue – instead of always going North, it proposed its own border town of Munsan. The North, as ever, wants to be paid.  It demanded resumption of the half a million tons of rice and 300,000 tons of fertilizer aid that Seoul used to send each year during the sunshine era. Seoul refused this linkage, or rather reversed it. On Nov. 4 Vice Unification Minister Um Jong-sik said regular reunions of separated families would be “conducive to creating public sentiment [in the South] for aid provision to the North.”

Unwillingly Northern, formerly Southern

A different kind of problem is that, not for the first time, the North produced four old men as DPRK citizens who are in fact ex-ROK prisoners of war (POWs), captured during the Korean War and illegally held ever since while the South thought they were dead (and paid pensions to their grieving families accordingly). This is the tip of a large iceberg. The Korean Institute for National Unification (KINU, a state think-tank under the Unification Ministry, MOU) in its latest and always invaluable annual White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea 2010 (available online at http://www.kinu.or.kr/eng/pub/pub_04_01.jsp?category=2672) states that no less than 41,971 ROK soldiers were missing in action (MIA) after the Korean War. Of these 22,562 were later classified as killed in action (KIA), while the fate of the remaining 19,409 remains unclear.

Although Seoul has named 510 whom it believes to be still alive in the North, Pyongyang resolutely refuses to discuss the issue, insisting that it holds no one involuntarily. It likewise denies the status of the oddly similar number (506) of post war abductees whom the South has listed as being detained in the North – mostly fishermen seized at sea up to the 1970s; nowadays they are usually returned – by claiming that they have all embraced the socialist motherland on their own free will. Since 1994 a total of 79 ex-POWs, with 197 of their new Northern family members, and 8 abductees have managed to flee the North and make their way back to the South. (At least some of these returning POWs have not been officially reclassified, so that pensions can continue to be paid to their relatives.) After the latest four came back from the dead at the Mt. Kumgang reunions, the ROK Defense Ministry (MND) said it will make a new study on the number of POWs still held in the North, although it admitted that without Northern cooperation this would inevitably remain incomplete.

Yet there is an even larger can of worms. Dwarfing these figures are the thousands whom the DPRK marched North in 1950, when the KPA twice briefly captured Seoul and for a few months occupied most of the South. Estimates vary wildly, but the most recent study, by an association of relatives of the missing, lists 96,013; others put the total at over 100,000. None ever came back, and some may have gone voluntarily. A great many – perhaps most – must now be dead of natural or other causes, though most were young when they were taken; 21,000 were 20 or younger, and another 51,000 under 30. It is thought that the North took them because of shortages of skilled and other labor, not to mention soldiers. (More details are in the KINU White Paper.)

Unlike POWs and post-war abductees, this earliest and largest group of victims had barely featured on the formal inter-Korean agenda in modern times. On Dec. 13 the ROK launched an official committee, chaired by the premier and also including the unification, foreign and defense ministers, to clarify names and numbers involved. At a meeting to inaugurate this, Unification Minister Hyun In-taek declared that, “The issue of abductions is no past issue. It is part of the reality of the inter-Korean relations.” Even absent Yeonpyeong, the chances of any cooperation with Pyongyang on this matter would be zero. While Seoul has every right to raise it, choosing to do so now – and at such a senior level – is but one sign among many that the Lee government no longer has any serious expectation of dialogue with the North.

Suffer the little children

A decade ago, the UN World Food Program (WFP) had its largest operation anywhere in the world in North Korea. The need remains, but others’ willingness to meet it has shrivelled. WFP head Josette Sheeran visited Seoul on Oct. 28 en route to Pyongyang and appealed for support for the agency’s work in North Korea. WFP is currently feeding 671,000 hungry children in 65 DPRK counties. Its plan to supply 75,000 tons of food to 2.5 million needy children, costing $45 million, is only 20 percent funded.

This is hardly megabucks. Altruism apart, an ROK government concerned for the quality of human capital in a future united Korea might deem it a sound investment. Or there is a pair of billionaire brothers for whom this is loose change. But neither the carmaker Chung Mong-koo, nor his shipbuilder/politician sibling Chung Mong-joon, cares about the North like their late father (who was born there), the Hyundai group founder Chung Ju-yung – whose generosity Pyongyang milked to the full. So North Korea’s innocent children will remain hungry and cold this winter, and will not grow and thrive as they deserve to.

Wikileaks adds to Hyundai’s woes

Speaking of Hyundai, which once rivaled Samsung as the biggest chaebol (conglomerate), it is only a shadow of its old self since the best bits, like auto- and ship-making, were spun off amid rivalry among Chung Ju-yung’s many sons. The rump Hyundai includes Hyundai Asan – vehicle of Chung’s costly forays into North Korea, and bleeding red ink from Seoul’s ban on tourism to its Mt. Kumgang resort since July 2008. It is headed by Hyun Jeong-eun: widow of former chairman Chung Mong-hun, the founder’s favorite son, who killed himself in 2003 when under investigation in Seoul for illicit payments to Pyongyang.

Hyundai and Hyun now face embarrassment from WikiLeaks. On Jan. 4 the Chosun Ilbo reported a cable describing a breakfast meeting between US Ambassador Kathleen Stephens and Hyundai’s chairwoman on Aug. 25, 2009, soon after Hyun returned from an eight-day visit to North Korea where she met Kim Jong Il. Hyun allegedly complained (Hyundai now says that this report contains many errors; well, they would) that “she faced more obstacles in South Korea than in the North.” Kim Jong Il, interestingly and astutely, remarked that MOU “had lost the driver’s seat” in handling unification to the Foreign Ministry (MOFAT), which Kim said “did not understand” the North. A tad disingenuously, he also wondered why the Lee administration did not “better utilize” officials from previous administrations with ample experience in dealing with the DPRK and said that the main problem is a lack of trust.

Kim also asked why more chaebol do not invest in Kaesong. Hyun’s reply, that this would get them into trouble with the US, is at best a half-truth. The real reason is that having seen how greedily the North exploited Chung Ju-yung’s goodwill and deep pockets, no other big Korean firm – including Chung’s surviving sons – wants to touch it with a bargepole. That was true even in the sunshine era, let alone with North-South relations at their current nadir.

Sea shells

But to the main event. After a quite quiet autumn, in late November the peninsula’s weather changed with a vengeance as North Korea made headlines twice over on successive days. On Nov. 22, Siegfried Hecker, a leading US nuclear scientist and regular visitor to the DPRK, reported seeing facilities which suggest that Pyongyang has got much further in enriching uranium than had been thought.

As if that were not bombshell enough, next day KPA artillery suddenly shelled military and civilian targets on Yeonpyeong – one of five South Korean islands in the West (Yellow) Sea, close to North Korea. Two marines and two civilians were killed, 18 persons were injured, and fire damage to property and trees from suspected thermobaric shells was substantial. The targets included not only military bases but also a restaurant and a health centre elsewhere. (For two thoroughly detailed accounts of this episode, see the ICG report mentioned above, and also a study by Joe Bermudez in his KPA Journal, discussed below.)

South Korean forces on the island returned fire, but the South did not escalate its retaliation. Most of the island’s population was evacuated over the next few days. The South Korean won fell and stock markets wobbled, locally and globally. Markets in Seoul remained volatile for the rest of the week, but did not plummet. The financial effects did not last; some brokerages even suggested that investors consider this brief dip as a buying opportunity. A lower won, especially against the yen, also helps South Korean exporters, who have had a record year.

Anger and disarray in Seoul

The political fallout, by contrast, went much deeper. There was fury – not least in President Lee Myung-bak’s conservative ruling Grand National Party (GNP) – that the South yet again seemed impotent against Northern aggression. All this had an air of déjà vu, six months after Seoul accused Pyongyang of torpedoing its corvette Cheonan in nearby waters on March 28. Then as now the South threatened to strike back – next time. Always next time.

While some South Koreans query the official version regarding the Cheonan, this time there was near-unanimity. Even the left-wing daily Hankyoreh Shinmun, a noted skeptic as regard the ship sinking, wrote an editorial harshly critical of Northern aggression – and printed a map showing how most of the North’s shells had fallen on non-military targets. The longer-term political impact remains to be seen. Though Lee as president took the flak for now, incidents like this do not help the center-left opposition Democratic Party (DP), which wants to return to the former ‘sunshine’ policy of engaging the North. However no elections are due in South Korea until 2012, when voters will pick a new president and national assembly.

With reports that the radar and some howitzers on Yeonpyeong had not worked, Defense Minister Kim Tae-yong, who had offered his resignation in May over the Cheonan, suddenly found it accepted on Nov. 25. Even replacing him was a shambles. First reports were that President Lee had appointed his top security adviser, Lee Hee-won. As of Jan. 7, 2011 the semi-official Yonhap newsagency is still carrying that ‘news,’ complete with a photo of Lee: http://app.yonhapnews.co.kr/yna/basic/ArticleEnglish/ArticlePhoto/YIBW_showArticlePhotoPopup.aspx?contents_id=PYH20101126018300341

The BBC and other media duly announced this. But in fact the new defense minister is Kim Kwan-jin, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If personnel and communications in Seoul are such a mess, one must hope the nation’s defenses are in better shape. (They may not be; on Nov. 28 an ROK howitzer was fired by mistake, sending a shell flying 10 miles northward toward – but fortunately not across – the DMZ. The South swiftly sent a phone message to the North that this was an accident; so at least the hotlines are still in use.)

US sends gunboats

In a show of force and solidarity in response to the Yeonpyeong shelling, the aircraft carrier USS George Washington and other vessels sailed from US bases in Japan to hold four days of joint exercises with ROK forces in the Yellow Sea, starting Nov. 28. Some feared this would ratchet up tensions rather than ease them; yet to do nothing would suggest weakness. Prudently, these war games were held well south of the disputed sea border.

Pyongyang’s predictable rhetorical riposte to these moves could be summarized as “Bring it on!” Belying its name, the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea (CPRK) on Nov. 26 warned that “Gone are the days when verbal warnings are served only.” A day earlier, the North’s military had declared that “the Korean People’s Army will deal without hesitation the second and third strong physical retaliatory blow if the south Korean puppet warmongers commit another reckless military provocation out of all reason.” There were reports that the North had readied surface-to-surface missile batteries on its west coast.

China waves a dead rabbit

By contrast, China’s response this time was more muted than after the Cheonan. Then, its fierce opposition to US-ROK naval maneuvers in the Yellow Sea, supposedly too close to its own coast for comfort, caused the allies rather ignominiously to retreat to waters on the other side of the peninsula. No such deference was in the cards a second time, as Beijing grasped. Its own response showed elements of disarray. China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechie abruptly cancelled an already planned trip to Seoul. As over the Cheonan, Chinese media did not blame the North but reproduced its feeble excuses, on which more below.

By the weekend this low-key approach seemed inadequate. On Nov. 27, as the USS George Washington sailed toward the Asian mainland, State Councilor Dai Bingguo, who outranks Yang Jiechie, flew to Seoul and met Lee Myung-bak for two hours. In a chilly if restrained tone, the Blue House reported that Lee “asked China to play a role to match its new status in dealing with inter-Korean relations to pursue coexistence and peace in the 21st century after the end of the Cold War,” and urged Beijing to “act in a fairer and more responsible way in dealing with South-North Korea relations and contribute to peace on the Korean Peninsula.”

Next day China’s Foreign Ministry called a press conference in Beijing. Hopes were dashed when they produced a dead rabbit from the hat by merely proposing an emergency session of the Six-Party Talks (6PT), stalled since 2008. South Korea and its allies were underwhelmed. They want and need more; though what exactly – in the realms of the feasible – is unclear.

Escalation, with no provocation

Much ink has been spilled over exactly why North Korea shelled Yeonpyeong. Unlike with the Cheonan, Pyongyang did not plead innocent, but its pretext did not convince. It claimed to be reacting to the South’s having first fired live artillery shells into ‘Northern’ waters, and said it had warned Seoul to desist before shooting back. But this is entirely specious.

The background here – as rehearsed often in these pages before, after previous incidents – is that the North has never accepted the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de facto marine border set by the United Nations Command (UNC) after the Korean War. Instead it claims a line of its own, extending the land-based Military Demarcation Line (MDL) westward. This would put Yeonpyeong and other islands – including Baengnyeong, off which the Cheonan sank – in Northern waters. Naturally that is unacceptable to the South. (Ironically, as its name hints, the NLL was originally drawn to stop provocations from the South. The then ROK President Syngman Rhee refused to sign the 1953 Armistice; the NLL was set to hold him in check.)

In practice the North has mostly respected the NLL, with intermittent challenges. The waters near Yeonpyeong saw two brief but fatal firefights between patrol boats, in 1999 and 2002. The last such clash occurred in November 2009 near Daecheong, another island in this area. Then in Jan. and Feb. this year on several occasions KPA artillery shot volleys of shells into the sea north of the NLL. The South at first riposted, firing (again within their own waters) before deciding these were routine Northern winter maneuvers. Not so. The veteran military analyst Joseph S Bermudez Jr, in a detailed two-part study of the Yeonpyeong incident in his online journal http://www.kpajournal.com/ (issues 11 and 12), has suggested that this month-long exercise was in fact used successfully to test new tactics, including synchronized “time on target” firing from various locations and using different weapons systems (rockets and artillery). This tactic would later be used to rain down coordinated fire on Yeonpyeong.

The North claims it was provoked, but in fact both Koreas hold regular military drills. In this case, the South and the US were engaged in their regular Hoguk joint exercise, held every year. The North complained as it does about all such war games, claiming they are a prelude to invasion. Separately, but again as normal, ROK marines on Yeonpyeong carried out their monthly live-fire exercise, as always to the southwest of the island, on the opposite side from the DPRK coast. All this was routine. For the analyst, the key question is whether either side ups the ante and provokes the other by doing something that is out of the ordinary. There is no evidence that the ROK-US side did anything this time, nor did Pyongyang accuse them of doing so. The North did not even claim that any of its ships were a target or in the vicinity, merely that Yeonpyeong’s coastal waters were somehow its own – “There is in the West Sea of Korea only the maritime military demarcation line set by the DPRK.”

Mixed motives

This attack – said to be the first shelling of South Korean civilians since the 1953 Armistice – was thus a dramatic and deliberate escalation by North Korea. As with the Cheonan, this prompted much speculation on Kim Jong Il’s motives, and the likely mix between domestic and external goals. The former might include boosting the prestige of Kim’s third son and successor Kim Jong Un among a military that may well remain skeptical of this untried youth, despite his implausible promotion in September to the rank of a four-star general. Significantly, as noted above, both Kims were in the vicinity on the day of the attack.

Yet in foreign policy terms it is hard to see what Pyongyang hoped to gain. It had already achieved far more, less aggressively and more subtly, with a quite different story that broke a day before the shelling. Siegfried Hecker, a leading US physicist, reported that earlier in November he had been shown a hitherto unsuspected ultra-modern plant for enriching uranium, with up to 2,000 centrifuges, which suggests the North is much further down a second route to potentially producing nuclear weapons – via highly enriched uranium (HEU), rather than plutonium – than was supposed. This already sufficed for President Obama to hastily dispatch his (part-time) special adviser on North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, for consultations in Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing; so he was in the region when Yeonpyeong was shelled. On its own, this revelation would surely have pressured all three allies to rethink their reluctance to return to the 6PT absent a change of heart by the DPRK. Robert Gates, the US secretary of defense, had famously said that US will not buy the same horse twice. In that sense Kim Jong Il was showing off a fresh thoroughbred, or at least a frisky colt.

By contrast, the attack on Yeonpyeong makes resumption of dialogue more difficult, at least in the short run. So why do both? There are at least two hypotheses, and both may be true. One is that the shelling enabled North Korea to swiftly change the agenda, from the nuclear issue in particular to tensions on the peninsula more generally. This has bought it more time – several months at least – to press on with enriching uranium rather than being summoned urgently to fresh talks and told to stop, as would otherwise likely have happened

Or one can come at all this from another angle. North Korea’s philosophy of juche is often translated as self-reliance, but that is misleading. Right from the outset the DPRK has always needed, demanded, and taken other people’s money. Rather, its abiding aim is to do this while at the same time remain unbeholden to and unbiddable by anyone. Squaring that circle gets no easier, but Pyongyang is adept at finding and exploiting whatever wiggle room it can.

Calculated, calibrated

Its provocations are thus carefully calculated and calibrated. Even as Kim Jong Il draws ever closer to China, he needs to signal that he is not about to go quietly; despite a still delicate and incomplete succession, nobody messes with the DPRK or takes it for granted. In that context, the fallout from the Cheonan – or rather the lack of any – may have been read in Pyongyang as a licence to provoke further. Now, as then, the gamble is that South Koreans have no stomach for a fight and Lee Myung-bak dare not upset financial markets, much less risk a robust retaliation that might rain down artillery fire and missiles on Seoul itself. In short, the KPA shelled Yeonpyeong because they knew they could get away with it – again. What fun to watch Lee flail and squirm. Give it a few months, and they may well try again.

Needless to add, this raises risk on the peninsula. Nor is Pyongyang the only Korean capital where the current game plan is hard to read. While by no means positing an equivalence of aggressor and victim, and granted that the North has placed President Lee in an unenviable position, even so it is hard to fathom his thinking at the moment. Perhaps Lee had no option but to mount a show of force, but the several successive exercises held in December in and around Yeonpyeong brought fierce verbal reaction from Pyongyang. All this had the world, and the markets, worried for several days. But this time the North’s bark was worse than its bite, as usual. Talk is cheap, and in truth the KPA like lightning was hardly going to strike twice in the same place – especially at a time when its foes were on full alert for any move.

A democracy of course, unlike a dictatorship has to cope with public opinion, and the mood in the South has certainly hardened since the shelling (more so than over the Cheonan). The risk is that if the North is unwise enough to provoke for a third time, it would be politically all but impossible for Lee not to strike back militarily. Yet it is a huge challenge – no doubt one being furiously mulled in Seoul – to find a way to do this which is targeted and finite; a blow that is firm and effective, yet which does not risk further escalation and the nightmare of all-out war. Short of that, even a single hit on a Seoul skyscraper or apartment block by one of the KPA’s thousands of heavy artillery or multiple rocket launchers along the DMZ would cause far greater casualties and take the peninsula into uncharted, perilous territory.

Talking peace, on and off

Perhaps both sides peered into the abyss, breathed deeply and thought twice. Or maybe such a hope is to clutch at straws. Either way the New Year brought mixed messages from each. The DPRK’s customary New Year joint editorial called for peace – but it always does. The day before, Kim Jong Il inspected a crack tank division, named Seoul because it was the first KPA unit to roll into the Southern capital in June 1950. That hardly signals peaceful intent.

More striking was the North’s offer on Jan. 5 to “meet anyone anytime and anywhere” for “wide-ranging dialogue and negotiations.” Seoul was sniffy, yet two days earlier President Lee had similarly assured the North that “the door for dialogue is still open.” But as ever he set conditions: “nuclear weapons and military adventurism must be discarded.” Lee even compared the Yeonpyeong shelling to the 9/11 attacks on the US, which if intended as a serious comparison suggests a serious lack of judgment or of any sense of proportion.

Other remarks could only set alarm bells ringing in Pyongyang. To call for “endeavors to engage our North Korean brethren in the long journey toward freedom and prosperity,” like other statements during the last month – for further examples, see the Chronology – tends to suggest that Seoul has given up on Kim Jong Il. Early December found Lee in messianic mode: “I feel that reunification is drawing near.” Regime change is the clear subtext here.

And it will happen – but probably sooner in the South, thanks to the electoral cycle. Lee cannot run again, but his successor will be elected less than two years from now in December 2012. Despite the present mood which may pass, not everyone in the ruling GNP supports Lee’s hard line. Polls suggest that the front-runner is his rival and nemesis Park Geun-hye, daughter of the late dictator Park Chung-hee. No less conservative than Lee overall, in 2002 Ms Park visited Pyongyang and dined à deux with Kim Jong Il. The weather vane could yet turn again on the peninsula, and any direction is better than risking war.