Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
defended their actions; demanding a special meeting; or boycotting Panmunjom altogether. As Nixon considered the options, Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, balanced the need to maintain Panmunjom as a channel with the need to avoid transforming it into a stage for North Korean propaganda.8 In the end, American officials walked out of the meeting after the North Korean representative condemned the unarmed plane’s flight as a “brigandish aggressive act.”
Nixon’s decision not to retaliate militarily had emboldened the North.9 Over the next four months, a period in which there were no talks, North Korean soldiers attacked United Nations Command guard posts and personnel, and North Korean saboteurs attempted to infiltrate South Korea by sea four times. Then, four days after the two sides met so that the Americans could formally issue their litany of complaints, North Korean forces shot down an unarmed American helicopter that had strayed into North Korean airspace while on a training mission along the DMZ. Kim Il Sung calculated that with more than 150,000 American troops embroiled in Vietnam, the chance of American retaliation for his actions was slight.
North Korean authorities demanded that the United States acknowledge its criminality and apologize. For Kim Il Sung, it was irrelevant that helicopters patrolling the border often strayed across mountainous terrain in foggy conditions. He wanted a propaganda victory, not an explanation. Kim counted on the fact that the American public had little patience for Americans being held hostage.10 Certainly, the West’s lack of strategic patience is a lesson that other rogue leaders leveraged to their benefit, be it the Iranians through several hostage crises, or the Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi, who threatened to execute five Bulgarian nurses on false charges that they had infected Libyan children with HIV.
Even as Kissinger moved to warm up relations with Beijing, America’s relationship with North Korea remained frozen.11 What little dialogue Kim Il Sung engaged in consisted of alternating bellicosity and outreach. For example, after telling the New York Times that he was preparing for war,12 he sent the U.S. Congress an open letter requesting negotiation,13 but then launched a military campaign to seize five South Korean islands off the North Korean coast. Between October and December 1973, North Korean military vessels crossed the maritime boundary around the islands almost every other day; then, in February 1974, they seized one South Korean fishing vessel and sank another.14 True to form, once Kim Il Sung brought the peninsula to the brink of new conflict, he sent a proposal for talks to the U.S. Congress. No senators took the bait. The North’s proposal to forbid foreign troops in South Korea would have left that country defenseless.15
That North Korea would make such an outlandish proposal should not be a surprise, given that Kim Il Sung thought he was engaging the United States from a position of strength. After all, the White House had agreed to withdraw from Vietnam, and North Korea’s naval probing demonstrated that the United States was not serious about its commitment to defend South Korea. Kim Il Sung believed he could act without consequence. Over the following year, the North Korean navy grew increasingly aggressive. A conciliatory American approach had encouraged Pyongyang to push harder.
In August 1976, with the Ford administration in its final months, North Korea struck at Americans in the DMZ. A work crew supervised by Captain Arthur Bonifas was trimming a tree that obstructed an American observation post. When North Korean soldiers demanded that they stop, Bonifas refused. Some twenty North Korean soldiers then knocked him and Lieutenant Mark Barrett to the ground and hacked them to death with axes. The murders shocked Washington, but for North Korea they topped off a propaganda campaign that Pyongyang had initiated months before.
While the North Korean regime sought diplomatic advantage, blaming violence on the American presence, the brutality of the axe murders repulsed the international community. North Korea’s traditional allies stayed quiet. If the murders were a gambit to damage America, the net effect was the opposite.
The United States did not offer a humiliating apology for Pyongyang to broadcast repeatedly, nor did it bomb North Korea as Kissinger proposed. Instead, the United States launched Operation Paul Bunyan to cut down the tree with the backing of U.S. Army engineers, combat troops, and South Korean special forces, along with squadrons of jet fighters, B-52 bombers, and the USS Midway strike group on full alert. Military bluster might not be American style, but Washington was playing by Pyongyang rules. It worked. Not only did North Korea stand down, but Kim Il Sung offered regrets.16
Carter’s New Approach
Jimmy Carter rejected the lessons his predecessors had learned in blood. On January 16, 1975, shortly after declaring his candidacy for president, he announced his intent to withdraw American forces from Korea, although he later amended his pledge to include only ground forces and only on a timeline determined in consultation with Seoul.17 A devout Christian, Carter was deeply committed to peace. If his proposals were initially ignored, it was because he was considered a longshot candidate. He would not remain so.
Carter clawed his way to the top and won his party’s nomination. The Democratic National Convention adopted his platform calling for the gradual withdrawal of U.S. ground forces and nuclear weapons from South Korea, to be replaced with reliance on tactical air and naval forces.18 Many diplomats shared Carter’s ambivalence if not antipathy toward Park Chung Hee, South Korea’s president, whose human rights record was appalling.
Carter’s goodwill toward North Korea trumped strategic wisdom. American allies in Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei saw his plan as dangerous.19 They knew Kim Il Sung’s mind. An aide to the Japanese prime minister saw Carter’s announcement as a sign that America might abandon Asia, especially since it came so soon after the withdrawal from Vietnam.20 Regional experts noted that Carter’s logic fell flat when translated from theory to reality. “We should consider also the ripple effect of a round, shiny pebble from Washington suddenly tossed into a still Asian pond, causing undulations far beyond the point of impact,” wrote Frank Gibney, an East Asia specialist, in Foreign Affairs.21
It was for this reason that Carter’s more worldly advisors tried to rein him in. The secretary of defense, Harold Brown, who had served in senior Pentagon positions during the Johnson administration, advised the president against withdrawal, especially as the intelligence community noted the North’s military buildup.22
Believing his opponent hopelessly naïve, Kim Il Sung wasted no time in offering diplomacy. Shortly after Carter’s inauguration, Kim sent a letter to the president-elect proposing to replace the 1953 armistice agreement with a peace treaty. The North Korean foreign minister followed suit in a letter to Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state. Carter expressed interest, so long as South Korea might also participate. Kim Il Sung rejected that condition.23 He was willing to embrace dialogue only if it did not require North Korean compromise.
Kim Il Sung sought to lull Carter into complacency. The DMZ enjoyed the longest pause in provocations since the armistice, and when North Korea downed an American helicopter that had strayed across the border, Kim released the bodies of those killed and the lone survivor within days. But while he wanted a quiet DMZ, Kim remained as belligerent as ever toward South Korea and Japan. Violence escalated in the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, and the Joint Security Area.24 Most abductions of Japanese citizens occurred between 1977 and 1983. These provocations followed Pyongyang’s traditional pattern of matching conciliation toward one country with provocation toward its ally.
Kim’s attempts to drive a wedge between the United States and its Asian allies did not work. When Carter shelved his withdrawal plan, Kim reacted bitterly, accusing the U.S. president of aiming to “deceive the world.”25
Carter never gave up hope that he might broker peace on the Korean Peninsula. He had uncritical trust in his own power of persuasion. If past diplomacy had failed, it had to be the fault of his predecessors, not America’s adversaries. Carter believed that if he was able to bring the two Korean leaders together in a Camp David–like setting, he could achieve peace. Fortunately, his aides and the U.S. ambassador in Seoul talked the president out of a “flaky” proposal to invite both leaders to the DMZ.26
Next, Carter proposed tripartite talks with American diplomats