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North Korea nuclear crisis
Opinion

Why China is best-placed to cool the war rhetoric between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump

John Barry Kotch says third-party diplomacy offers the best hope after the US and North Korean leaders ramped up their missile threats

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Having called on “all the relevant parties to avoid remarks and actions that may escalate the conflict”, Beijing should follow up with a proposal for a three- to six-month cooling-off period. No missile or nuclear tests, no military exercises. Illustration: Craig Stephens
John Barry Kotch

In his landmark study, The Origins of the Korean War, historian Bruce Cumings reflected on the “strange fate [which] had brought a one-time farm boy from Golconda, Illinois, Lt Gen John Hodge, to rule over the fortunes of 15 million Koreans”.

A three-star combat veteran of the Pacific war, Hodge arrived in Korea in September 1945 as commander of the XXIV Corps, to plant the American flag on the peninsula as well as staunch the flow south of Colonel General Ivan Chistyakov’s 25th Red Army at the 38th parallel: the start of a three-year US military occupation of South Korea that eventually set the stage for the Korean war.

It is an even more “strange fate” today that North Korean missiles risk bringing that war back to the American heartland, along with the American Pacific outposts of Guam and Hawaii, as well as Washington’s closest East Asian allies, South Korea and Japan.
History has much to teach about crises, and miscalculation in confronting them
History has much to teach about crises, and miscalculation in confronting them, most recently in Iraq in 2003, where both protagonists miscalculated the impact of weapons of mass destruction on the outcome. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein miscalculated by relying on ambiguity, only feeding US determination for certainty; George W. Bush miscalculated in unleashing “shock and awe” on the basis of a murky UN mandate, finding no weapons of mass destruction, as well as underestimating the difficulty of occupying post-war Iraq and reconstituting a functioning Iraqi government, given the existing Sunni/Shiite political divide.
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The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, albeit a bystander, was also directly affected. Marked out by the Bush administration as a charter member of an “Axis of Evil” of potential nuclear outliers, Kim fled Pyongyang for the hinterland, fearful of being in caught in the cross-hairs of an American attack. And while he probably did not hide in a rabbit hole like Saddam, the experience undoubtedly rubbed off on his son and current North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.

Watch: George W Bush reveals the ‘Axis of Evil’

Dwight Eisenhower, the five-star US general who became president, noted that “every war will surprise you” – and the Korean war was no exception.

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