By Simone Chun | September 30, 2024 | Originally published in Counterpunch
In her closing speech during the 2024 Democratic National Convention, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris presented the most openly militaristic take on Washington’s Korea policy “since the GOP convention that nominated [Senator Barry] Goldwater in 1964”. Harris’s hawkish view all but discards diplomacy to focus on herding South Korea and Japan together to form a US-led military triad to confront Chinese interests in East Asia. The candidate’s stance, echoed by the majority of the democratic party, raises what has been called a “truly baffling” prospect of a “Democratic president more aggressive towards [North Korea] than her Republican counterpart.”
This comes at a time when the virtually nonstop US-led war drills in South Korea have achieved a level of scope and intensity that far exceeds even that of the Cold War. Taking place in the heavily militarized Korean Peninsula and ostensibly directed at the ubiquitous “North Korean threat,” these exercises are in fact a preparation for a future US-led war against China as part of Washington’s bold new Indo-Pacific strategy.
Case in point:“Ulchi Freedom Shield” (UFS), the latest escalation in the litany of US-led military exercises in the Korean Peninsula. Executed on an unprecedented scale and spanning nearly two weeks, these maneuvers involved more than 19,000 South Korean and an undisclosed number of US troops, weeklong, some 2000 combat and strategic bombing flight drills, 48 combined field training exercises (nearly 5x more than last year), and the first-time application of Operation Plan 2022 (OPLAN 2022), which calls for simulated attacks on North Korean infrastructure as well as nationwide South Korean evacuation drills affecting over a half-million civilians. These events were followed immediately by the largest US-led amphibious landing war drills to date, held in conjunction with a supporting contingent of British Royal Marines.
These momentous developments cap two years of virtually unabated military maneuvers at North Korea’s doorstep, beginning in 2023 with:
+ 250+ days of US and South Korean joint war drills
+ 21 instances in which US strategic assets, including nuclear-capable weapon platforms, were deployed to South Korea
+ 10+ UN Command joint military maneuvers
From January 1 to August 10, 2024 there have been:
+ 180 days of US and South Korean joint war drills
+ 17 instances in which US strategic assets, including nuclear-capable weapon platforms, were deployed to South Korea
The 2023 US-led Japan-Korea Trilateral Alliance dubbed the Axis of War has driven this exponential increase of trilateral joint military exercises. Between June 27- 29, the first US-led Japan-South Korea trilateral multi-domain war game, “Freedom Edge,” was held in the strategically critical northern waters of the East China Sea by the 9th US Carrier Strike Group, with Japanese and Korean military naval and air forces in tow.
Following the conclusion of Freedom Edge, the US, Japan and South Korea signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MOC) on the Trilateral Security Cooperation Framework (TAD), ostensibly to promote “peace and security of the Korean Peninsula, the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.” Separately, the US led Japan in inaugurating the most significant upgrade to their joint security pact in over 60 years by establishing an integrated military command infrastructure to counter China.
In essence, this new arrangement recasts the Japanese Self-Defense Forces as a full-fledged invasion force capable of taking part in a future US-led war of aggression. Japan’s defense budget, on its way to being the 3rd largest in the world by 2027, is fueling the growth of what is now the world’s 5th largest military. The Japanese islands host the most extensive overseas deployment of US stealth fighters as part of a sea-air combat force of over 900 warplanes and some 68 naval attack craft. These augment a permanent US military garrison of more than 54,000 personnel. The Japanese Defense Force itself has evolved into a major component of the US global anti-China front, having recently adopted a counter-strike doctrine enabling it to use its rapidly expanding resources to launch attacks on “enemy bases in China and Russia as well as North Korea” According to Gavan McCormack, these developments represent a global underpinning of U.S. strategy wherein:
The US insists on its own `full-spectrum dominance,’ meaning global economic, technological, and military hegemony, and to the extent that it challenges or appears to challenge that prerogative, China `threatens’ the US. Consequently, over and under the East China Sea, battleships and aircraft carriers, missile and counter-missile system, fighter jets and submarines–not only Japanese and American, but also British, French, Australian, Canadian, and German–rehearse a possible future war between a US-led coalition of the willing and China.
Korea is being enlisted in a US-led preparation for war against China
As Washington veers ever further into its collision course with China, it has recast South Korea as a “linchpin of the US-China strategy in Northeast Asia”; deepening the integration of US assets with South Korean conventional forces and inducting local troops to serve under US command as cannon fodder for a brewing regional war far beyond the confines of the Korean Peninsula. Three vital points merit particular mention in this context:
First, Washington is enlisting South Korea as a regional military proxy to use in hemming in China. One of the primary objectives of the trilateral “Freedom Edge” exercise was to improve US Command and Control over the two vassal militaries under its control in the lead-up to war: Over 625,000 South Korean troops and 3.1 million reservists are under US wartime command, and will be joined by nearly 300,000 Japanese troops.
These would augment an already considerable force of nearly 90,000 US troops based across South Korea and Japan, who would form the apex of an integrated hierarchical joint force controlled by the US with massive military manpower consisting primarily of local troops–essentially an Asian version of NATO aimed against North Korea, China and Russia.
Second, the US considers tensions in the Korean Peninsula necessary to justify its forward position in East Asia, which is underpinned by the garrisons it maintains in South Korea and Japan and solidified by its de facto control over the nominally independent military forces of these states. The US has been attempting to prod Beijing into a conflict over Taiwan in the same manner as it has provoked Russia into war over the Ukraine. One consequence of this strategy is that Washington’s hostility towards North Korea is becoming ever more entrenched in US foreign policy, with the US provoking South Korea, a US client state that lacks strategic independence, to escalate tensions with Pyongyang as a prelude to instigating a regional conflict with China. Under the pretext of deterring North Korea, the US is forcing South Korea into a brewing confrontation with China, in which the primary role of the South Korean military would be to tie down vital Chinese forces in a bloody inter-Korean conflict, giving the US a freer hand in the broader theater of operations.
To help cement its hold over South Korea at this crucial juncture in Washington’s grand Indo-Pacific strategy, the Biden administration has propped up the authoritarian and deeply unpopular President Yoon Seok-yeol, whose signature foreign policy platform is a steadfast commitment to allowing his nation to be dragooned into the brewing US war with China. According to the latest opinion survey, more than 66% of South Koreans think that Yoon’s subordination to the US Indo-Pacific strategy makes Korea less safe.
A recent New York Times article provides important context for the increasing risks of Washington’s planned multi-front nuclear conflict in the Korean Peninsula. According to the report, the new nuclear guidance established by the Biden Administration “reorients America’s deterrent strategy” to meet “the need to deter Russia, the PRC (China) and North Korea simultaneously”–a tacit acknowledgement of what has been de facto US policy for the past twenty years. This shift in strategy is part of US “threat inflation” with respect to China, which according to K.J. Noh, has the potential of “normalizing nuclear strikes on Korea.”
The US has steadily stepped up regional provocations designed to elicit a response from North Korea and ratchet up tensions with China. Last year, Washingtons deployed a nuclear-armed submarine to South Korea for the first time since the 1980s, to which Pyongyang responded by testing a solid-fueled ballistic missile and deploying an unmanned nuclear-capable submersible.
On July 11, the US and South Korea signed a new set of “Nuclear Operation Guidelines” which call for the incorporation of South Korea’s conventional forces with US nuclear forces under US command. Subsequently, Washington inaugurated “Iron Mace 24”, the first regional US-led nuclear warfare simulations held in conjunction with South Korean forces.
Based on this trend, it is reasonable to assume that theater-level nuclear field exercises of a kind hitherto unseen would soon be in order for the Korean Peninsula. The US, which first introduced nuclear weapons to South Korea in 1958 and kept them there until 1991–decades prior to the existence of the North’s nuclear program–is now threatening the use of an “integrated extended nuclear deterrence” doctrine to subjugate North Korea. According to Jae-jung Suh:
The original “extended deterrence” [doctrine] involved the US annihilating the North Korean regime with strategic nuclear weapons in the event of a nuclear attack on South Korea by Pyongyang….[under the revised] “integrated extended deterrence system,” South Korea offers its troops to aid the US strategic arsenal in achieving this objective. In the event of an imminent strike by North Korea, the ROK Strategic Command will [respond] by launching a preemptive strike against the North’s nuclear weapons and operational command centers…The US would then launch a nuclear retaliation on North Korea from its command centers in the continental US.
These developments have legitimized a potential integrated nuclear-conventional war scenario in the Korean Peninsula that normalizes pre-emptive nuclear strikes and places South Korean troops in the front lines of a US-led nuclear holocaust.
North Korea does not pose a threat to the United States
The “North Korean threat” has long served as the justification for the increasingly formidable US forward military position in Asia, but how much of a threat does North Korea actually pose to the US?
North Korea spends only $4 billion annually on defense while the US annual defense budget is close to $900 billion. For North Korea to engage in the offensive use of its military against the US would be little short of suicide. In addition to this basic fact, the commander of US Forces Korea himself, Gen. Paul LaCamera, has openly stated that North Korea’s military posture and policy is to establish deterrence and defend its sovereignty, and has characterized Kim Jong-un’s top priorities as “regime survivability” and “preparing to defend his nation.” Kim himself has repeatedly stated that North Korea: “will never unilaterally unleash a war.” As Gregory Elich points out, Kim’s most urgent priority has been economic development under the “Regional Development 20×10 Policy,” an ambitious 10-year-plan to provide badly-needed improvements to civilian infrastructure and services for ordinary North Koreans.
In spite of the relentlessly “manufactured image of a war-mad Kim Jong-un,” recent opinion polls show that only 2% of Americans named North Korea as a threat to the US, apparently evincing the common-sense realization that a weak country’s deterrent posture is not regarded as a real threat to the United States.
The prospect of a negotiated peace with North Korea all but vanished with the ultimate collapse of the modest confidence-building agreement in 2018 between Seoul and Pyongyang and South Korea, and with the advent of the Biden administration, Washington’s North Korea policy shifted to empowering South Korea’s autocratic Yoon administration to spearhead the “end of the North Korean regime” while the US steadily incorporates Korean military potential into its anti–China front.
Moreover, in an election year, both US parties are competing to outdo one another with hawkish rhetoric on the Korean Peninsula, leaning heavily into the strategy of confrontation with China through the US-South Korea-Japan tripartite alliance; a flawed vision that threatens to “erupt into a regional war, a full-scale war, or even a nuclear war.”
Coexistence is an overlooked option
As discussed earlier, current US policy in the Korean peninsula is an extension of its Indo-Pacific doctrine, and relies on coupling economic warfare with military and political pressure against Pyongyang to maintain the level of tension required for the continued deployment of US forward assets against China. But what if relations with the North were treated as an inter-Korean or even a purely regional issue, and were decoupled from Washington’s broader anti-China strategy? The prospect of coexistence with the North possesses immense potential for stability and prosperity in the region.
A North Korea free of US-led sanctions and unburdened by an overriding drive to shore up national defense could arguably be a regional economic powerhouse. Given that North Korea has been vigorously pushing for ambitious economic development since its last nuclear weapons test in 2017, analysts foresee the North achieving meaningful economic development under the right conditions:
If geopolitical conditions evolve to the point where some initial meaningful economic engagement becomes possible for the US and South Korea, Kim’s domestic agenda offers important benchmarks for collaboration and support that should be a starting point for helping him achieve success on improvements in the lives of the North Korean people.
An economically integrated Korean peninsula in a multipolar Northeast Asia has the potential to be the “world’s next epicenter of change,” placing the combined economy of the Korean peninsula second only to China, the US, and India, with the North accounting for approximately one-fourth of this total economic potential.
Arguably, a fundamental geopolitical shift with respect to North Korean economic integration is already underway: namely, the gradual erosion of US economic isolation as the North strengthens its ties with the two of the world’s largest economies: Russia and China. These developments occur at a critical historical juncture shaped by an increasing trend toward multipolarity coupled with the shifting geopolitical balance of power in Northeast Asia. America’s long-term strategic interest lies in unlocking the potential domestic benefits to the US of opening up the North Korean economy rather than attempting to maintain its hegemony through the relentless pursuit of regional destabilization in preparation for a future Sino-American conflict. Washington should instead work to reduce regional tensions by halting the increasingly provocative nuclear-conventional war games in the Korean Peninsula and putting US-North Korea normalization at the center of US foreign policy.
Simone Chun is a researcher and activist focusing on inter-Korean relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula. She currently serves on the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors and the advisory board for CODEPINK. She has over 20 years of teaching and research experience in the United States and has been a central contributor to the creation of a number of interdisciplinary Asian and Korean Studies degree programs. She has served as an assistant professor at Suffolk University, an associate-in-research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute, and a lecturer at Northeastern University. Follow her on Twitter at@simonechun.
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