This morning in Tokyo diplomats and military officers were pictured on television running to their posts in the emergency task force set up in the office of Junichiro Koizumi, the Prime Minister. Newspapers ran headlines such as “Shock to the international community” and “Frightening: it really happened”. And diplomats shuttled across the world to devise a response to the incident. But what actually happened that generated such a sense of crisis?
Yesterday six medium-range missiles were fired from North Korea to land harmlessly in the sea hundreds of miles offshore, a test that the North Koreans have carried out repeatedly before. One longer-range rocket, apparently the new intercontinental Taepodong 2, was also fired and either failed or was destroyed remotely over a similarly out-of-the-way stretch of ocean.
The launches caused no physical damage and did not violate international law, which permits sovereign nations to test fire missiles. Why such outrage, then, at the kind of drill that has become routine among military powers all over the world? What motivated North Korea, and its leader, Kim Jong Il, to take such a step? And what, if anything, can the rest of the world do about it?
The conventional answer is that there is no rational reason — that Kim Jong Il is a uniquely dangerous leader, whose unpredictability verges on insanity. And from the perspective of safe, rich, comfortable Japan, uneasily conscious of its proximity to North Korea, this is indeed how it feels.
“Many Japanese went to bed, expecting the launch of the US space shuttle on July 4,” a commentator wrote the Yomiuri newspaper. “Instead when we turned on TV this morning, there were North Korean missiles flying through the sky . . . I am speechless at the stupidity of the North Korean leader. He must have lost his mind.”
Mr Koizumi expressed a similar view of the missile tests. “Whatever its intention,” he said, “I must stress that there is no advantage for North Korea in launching these missiles.”
But from the perspective of Pyongyang, the world looks very different. Kim Jong Il may be a cruel dictator, but he is not a lunatic. The missile launch reveals as much about the inadequacy of Western policy towards North Korea as it does about the country and its leader.
It is almost eight years since North Korea fired a long-range missile high above northern Japan, in August 1998, and in that time North Korean circumstances have changed dramatically. The country has gone through a devastating famine and come the closest it has ever been to genuine rapprochement with the West. In 2000, Kim Jong Il shook hands for the first time with his counterpart from the democratic South Korea, Kim Dae Jung, the former President, as well as with Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State. But the so-called Sunshine Policy of tolerant engagement with North Korea came to an abrupt end with the election of President Bush.
In his famous State of the Union speech in 2002, Mr Bush named North Korea as part of the “axis of evil”. One year later Kim Jong Il watched as Saddam Hussein, a fellow member of the axis, was invaded and deposed. The US, meanwhile, had accused North Korea of operating a clandestine programme of uranium enrichment with the potential to create nuclear weapons material and pulled the plug on an international agreement to buy out North Korea’s existing nuclear reactors. North Korea responded by restarting the reactors, withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and starting a plutonium production line that may have produced a dozen or more nuclear warheads.
North Korea said that it would talk directly only with the Americans. The US insisted that to do so would be to reward North Korea’s bad behaviour and that any negotiations must be multilateral. Several rounds of the so-called Six Party Talks, including China, South Korea, Russia and Japan, have been held but the North has made no concessions. And it has become increasingly clear that, however much it resists the idea of direct talks, the US has little leverage over the troublesome Mr Kim.
Military force is out of the question, for now at least, because of the devastating destruction that North Korean artillery could inflict upon South Korea. North Korea’s only ally, China, so far chooses not to apply forceful pressure to its neighbour.
From a rational point of view the missile tests may be no more than a form of revenge for US interference with its financial rackets. The timing of the tests, on July 4, almost simultaneous with the launch of the space shuttle, make it look very much like a two-fingered salute to the US.
The test will no doubt gratify the powerful and proud North Korean military, without whose support Mr Kim could not survive. And more broadly it benefits him by sowing confusion and alarm, thus keeping North Korea’s enemies on their back foot.
It also underlines how few options the rest of the world has. As it stuttered through its shock, Japan made a great show of announcing “sanctions” against the North. They amounted to a bar on visits by North Korean officials and a six-month ban on a ferry that sails to and from North Korea. Then it emerged that the ship was just offshore, carrying anxious children returning from a school trip, so it was allowed to dock after all.
Over the next few days Government of Mr Koizumi may announce a block on banking remittances from Tokyo to Pyongyang in an effort to cut off funds sent by North Korean businessmen in Japan, but it will be a simple matter to channel these through indirect routes. The US could reimpose prohibitions on doing business with North Korea, lifted by the Clinton Administration, but these would have limited effect. It is not easy to impose economic sanctions on a country whose economy collapsed years ago.
Any concerted effort, such as a shipping embargo, would almost certainly be opposed by China. As UN Security Council ambassadors debate the matter over the next few days the attitude of the Chinese will be crucial. But given North Korea’s small size, extreme isolation and the acuteness of its economic crisis, it is remarkable how few viable options there are.
Perhaps this explains the panic that the missile test inspired yesterday: not that they were menacing in themselves, but that there is almost nothing that we can do about them.
