Anti-Americanism is a dangerous force

From The Australian, 12oct06, by Greg Sheridan:

.... South Korea's comprehensive success as a society is probably as disturbing to the North's already warped psyche as any action taken by the US.... Why are North and South Korea such contrasts? South Korea has a per capita income of about $US20,000 ($27,000) a year, North Korea one-twentieth of that. South Korea is a free democracy. North Korea is the most Stalinist state on earth. Somewhere between 500,000 and two million North Koreans starved to death in the 1990s from state-induced famines.

North Koreans who attempt to flee to China but are returned at the border routinely have metal rods inserted into their flesh to keep hold of them. Though North Korea is sexually the most prudish of societies, young girls of clear complexion are conscripted into "joy brigades" for the use of senior officers and partyleaders. A convincing analysis has North Korea most usefully seen as a theocratic state, in which worship of the ruling family of Kim Jong-il is both the state religion and the state ideology.

Yet both North and South have the same Korean cultural roots. So why the difference? After World War II, South Korea fell under the influence and tutelage of the US; North Korea fell under the sway of the Soviet Union. While of course all credit goes to the South Koreans themselves, the creation of modern-day South Korea is one of the grand historical projects of the US after World War II. Those legions of commentators and academics who regard US foreign policy as either hypocritical or downright evil should just consider the results of a nation hooking up with the US - it ends up looking like South Korea. Nations that bathe themselves in ideologies of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism and the rest end up looking like North Korea, or Cuba, or Zimbabwe.

Anti-Americanism has become a dangerous force in the world because it is one of the factors preventing nations from reacting effectively to challenges such as that laid down by a nuclear-armed North Korea. For all that US power is vast, international co-operation is central to the world having any chance of containing North Korea's nuclear challenge.

There is no military solution to North Korea. Anyone who has travelled to South Korea can see why. Just 40km north of Seoul, a short, pleasant drive, is the inter-Korean border. It bristles with that distinctive North Korean combination of menace and farce. The main North Korean building on the border looks impressive from the south but has almost no function because it is all facade and no depth. A 272kg North Korean flag, another triumph of socialist engineering, is so heavy it can only fly in a gale-force wind.

Just beyond the border on the northern side is a low range of deceptively gentle looking hills. Dug deep into those hills are thousands of artillery pieces that could pulverise Seoul and kill perhaps millions of South Koreans in a day. Nor does Western intelligence know where the North Koreans have stored most of their fissionable material, nor even where they conduct their highly enriched uranium program.

But all the indications are that the world will do nothing effective about North Korea. Much of the Western commentariat insanely blamed either the Bush administration, or sometimes, even more bizarrely, the Japanese, for Pyongyang's actions.

In fact it is clear that when George Bush five years ago called Iraq, Iran and North Korea an "axis of evil" he was speaking the literal truth, just as when Ronald Reagan earlier called the Soviet Union "an evil empire".

A typical and hugely disappointing reaction came from Paul Keating who said his chief worry from the North Korean test was that Japan would use it as a pretext to gain nuclear weapons itself and that this would "affront and confront" China. So let's get this straight. Communist North Korea, using technology that it originally got from China, and which has long been a Chinese strategic client, conducts a nuclear test and the first reaction is we must beware the nefarious Japanese?

This kind of reaction will give anti-Americanism and rampant Sinophilia a bad name. It seems to echo North Korea's official newspaper Minju Joson, which accused the US of planning to use Japan "as a shock brigade in its plan to dominate the Asia Pacific". The way that former Labor prime ministers Keating and Bob Hawke have become so anti-American and so pervasively and reflexively pro-Beijing at every point, is one of the distorting features of our debate today.

For at the end of the day the North Korean situation is deadly serious. There is a vast literature, and overwhelming evidence, of the most intimate nuclear and missile co-operation between North Korea, Iran and Pakistan. The danger of North Korea, which makes most of its money by counterfeiting US currency and selling drugs, deciding to sell nuclear technology or material to al-Qa'ida or like groups is real, incorrigible and deadly dangerous.

The Bush administration is not the problem here; it's essential to any hope of containing the problem. Whichever way you cut it, North Korea has this week made the world a vastly more dangerous place.