CiK reviews

Crisis in Korea: America, China, and the Risk of War
Tim Beal

Reviews

Crisis in Korea
Review by Paul Bellamy
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (the DPRK or North Korea) has received much publicity, often negative, during recent years. Heightened tensions with the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea), the death of its leader Kim Jong-il and succession of his youngest son Kim Jong-un, along with the 100th anniversary of founder Kim Il-sung’s birth, have all contributed to this publicity. With such interest in North Korea, and the Korean Peninsula, Tim Beal’s new book on Korea is a timely and provocative contribution to the study of this major international issue.
Beal’s book provides an interesting critique of common arguments and assumptions, whilst at the same time raising questions that highlight the importance peacefully, and the region’s unpredictable future are rightly recognised. However, some is ROK-US aggression in contrast to a North which seeks peace and only wishes to preserve itself. This approach fails adequately to recognise the North’s long record of hostile actions, which help to explain the ROK-US position. Indeed Beal refers to the North’s initiation of the Korean War as a “mainstream Western interpretation” (p. understanding of the NLL is debatable, while evidence supporting the theory that the South planted the torpedo linked to the Cheonan’s sinking, and that President Lee has captured the Korea policy of a declining US, is tenuous.
New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 14, 1 (June 2012)
Paul Bellamy is a researcher for the New Zealand Government, working at the Parliamentary Library. He also occasionally works for the South Korean Government
A contrived and avoidable crisis?
Tim Beal’s re-visioning of North Korea is an eye-opener
By Stephen Hoadley
Tim Beal is New Zealand’s, and probably Australasia’s, leading expert on North Korea. His latest book Crisis in Korea: America, China and the Risk of War, is a sequel to his 2005 monograph, North Korea: The Struggle against American Power, both of which blame the United States for inter-Korean tensions. America-sceptics will find much to agree with. The America-tolerant will be bemused, even affronted. All will be better informed.
The Listener, Auckland, April 14-20, p. 42
Associate Professor Stephen Hoadley teaches politics at the University of Auckland
Crisis in Korea: America, China, and the Risk of War
After presenting a historical account of the north–south divide on the Korean peninsula, Beal examines controversies surrounding the sinking of the South Korean ship Cheonan. He considers the implications of international reaction to that incident and looks at scenarios for the potential outbreak of hostilities in the region.
Global Politics and Strategy Vol 54 No 1, Feb-March 2012; [Brief reviews]
International Institute for Strategic Studies, London
Korea's key role in the great power game
Review by Christer Lundgren (in Swedish) in Korea-Information 4.2011 published by the Swedish-Korean Association.
Tim Beal’s book is a sober and sharp analysis of the tension in a region increasingly central in world politics. The risks he points to be taken at a large earnest. They should also have implications for Sweden's conduct in the Korea conflict.
Review in English by machine translation
Sources on North Korea: Beal’s Crisis in Korea
by Stephan Haggard | November 19th, 2011 | 06:37 am
Tim Beal, recently retired from the University of Victoria in New Zealand, has long maintained a contrarian website with substantial North Korean content. He has recently renamed it Asian Geopolitics. We disagree with some core premises of his new book, Crisis in Korea: America, China, and the Risk of War, but he was nice enough to send us a copy. Given that we are appropriately modest about what anyone knows, we leave it up to you.
The first part of the book provides an historical overview from the colonial times to the present, and includes chapters titled “The Rise of China and the Decline of America” and “Obama’s Strategic Paralysis.” But Beal’s real preoccupation is the Cheonan. Beal catalogues in some detail all the possible doubts about the LMB investigation, from political motives to the various anomalies that are bound to crop up in any investigation of a complex event. He puts particular weight on the Russian investigation team that was finally allowed partial access in May, after the Korean investigation had essentially been completed. That report has to our knowledge never been published but it was skeptical. Beal holds to the possibility that the incident could have resulted from the ship running aground or even from friendly fire. We are reminded of Seunghun Lee (Department of Physics, University of Virginia) and J.J. Suh (SAIS) who also went long with the theory that the LMB investigation was flawed.
The last part of the book is particularly alarmist. Beal believes that the current vogue of “collapsism,” about which we are also skeptical, could lead the US and Korea to take risky military steps or even launch a wholesale invasion. Militaries are in the business of contingency planning, but even the most hawkish of the hawks doesn’t see this as a likely eventuality.
We were reminded strongly of John Feffer’s work, and particularly his North Korea/South Korea: US Policy and the Korean Peninsula. As we always say: caveat emptor.
[Tim Beal comments:
The Russian report was not merely sceptical, it was damning, and the fact that it was not published, just leaked, gives it a centrality in any discussion of the sinking of the Cheonan as I discuss in the book.
As for the book being ‘alarmist’ by pointing out there is a danger of war on the Korean peninsula, and that that this would almost certainly lead to some sort of Sino-American clash, then I am in good ‘mainstream’ company.
In October the RAND corporation published a report Conflict with China: Prospects, Consequences, and Strategies for Deterrence which suggested that in the event of ‘A North Korean collapse ‘China meanwhile would view the insertion of U.S. and Republic of Korea (ROK) forces north of the DMZ with concern, and might move its own forces in, if it had not already begun to do so, both to contain the disorder and preempt a ROK/U.S. takeover of the entire country….The likelihood of confrontations, accidental or otherwise, between U.S. and Chinese forces is high, with significant potential for escalation..’
The report added ‘U.S. involvement in large-scale land warfare anywhere in East Asia other than Korea is especially improbable”
Meanwhile, also from RAND, Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Lind(from Dartmouth)have been talking about their recent article in International Security with 38 North in Washington. An earlier version of this is discussed in the book. The interview The Security Challenges of North Korean Collapse: A Conversation with Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Lind makes for interesting reading. They calculate that an invasion of North Korea would require upwards of 300,000 troops, based on their assumption that ‘North Korean elite [would] generally accept a ROK-led unification’. A little bit of resistance (as in 1950-3) would push that figure up. They nonchalantly think that China could be persuaded to accept this little bit of American expansion but do admit that might not quite happen: ‘Imagine the Chinese People’s Liberation Army racing south, while American and South Korean soldiers are racing north. China is a nuclear-armed country with which we have challenging relations—accidental conflict and subsequent escalation could be catastrophic’.
Alarmist? No, downright alarming
Not sure where Haggard gets the comforting thought that ‘even the most hawkish of the hawks doesn’t see this as a likely eventuality’]
Crisis in Korea
Dougal at Nae Hauf-way Hoose
…Tim Beal’s important new book, then, Crisis in Korea: America, China, and the Risk of War, is especially welcome. This book is insightful, careful, and considered – rare enough qualities in commentary on Korean affairs – and I have learnt a good deal from reading it. For some decades now Beal and a small group of co-thinkers have been compiling reports, documents and analysis trying to give a sober view of the dynamics of the Korean Peninsula, and this latest book is an intervention into a situation Beal sees, convincingly in my view, as extremely dangerous..
This book – like his North Korea: the Struggle Against American Power – makes for difficult reading. In part this is due to the subject matter, which is complicated in upsetting ways and full of examples of useless suffering and the needless waste of empire. Beal’s a pedestrian stylist at best, too; what makes the book so difficult, though, is also what makes it important. He has set himself the task of generating a kind of anti-narrative, unpacking the assumed wisdom and detail of the mainstream reports of the DPRK, insisting on the complexity and context underneath all the fervid speculation about Kim Jong-Il’s consumption tastes or fairy tales about a rogue state set on world war. Where other books might be breezier and easier to follow, Beal’s work insists on stray details, difficult or unsatisfactory explanations, and complex motives. If, at times, this feels like reading a book of marginal glosses and commentaries, that may be no bad thing: if the conventional account has this many inconsistencies and problems, what does this tell us about the standard of mainstream reporting?...
…… This book is an essential resource for those who want to understand, and argue against, that state of affairs. It’s in imagining the alternatives to the present, though, that I’m in least agreement with Beal. He taught for many years in a business school, and this current work – deeply informed, useful, and scholarly – reflects that background in good ways as well as bad….
In Beal’s conclusion from his last book, though, a conclusion this latest book only reinforces, I’m in full agreement: We can hope that peace, and prosperity, will prevail, but we cannot be confident. All we can be sure of is that the decision will be made in Washington. Not without outside constraints and influences, to be sure, but ultimately the power for Korean peace or war, for continued privation or for economic growth and transformation, lies with the United States. And that is where the responsibility rests as well.
Commentary by Rod Alley
(Dr Rod Ally gave a brief commentary at the Wellington launch on 24 November 2011)
This book locates the Korean situation in its appropriate historical setting: the colonial legacy, the huge impact of both the 1950-53 war and its Cold War leitmotiv, and subsequent prolongation of territorial division. Often noted in the book is the huge impact that the collapse of the Soviet Union had upon North Korea.
Against this background it is argued, I believe convincingly, that the division has continued to serve the purposes of continued United States militarisation. SIPRI data is quoted – considering the top 21 countries in terms of military expenditure, the US and its allies now account for some 75% of total military expenditure. From that we can gauge the importance to the Americans of the alliance with South Korea and Japan, not to mention its military links with Taiwan….
The book also undertakes some salutary detective work on the March 2010 sinking of the South Korean corvette the Cheonan. Just what did occur over this sinking and why? As one chapter heading puts it, this seemed a case of going from smoking gun to rusty torpedo. For the book ' 'the debate over whether the vessel was sunk by grounding, by a mine or by a torpedo could be construed to reflect differences of opinion expressed in good faith. But the fabrication of evidence takes us into different territory – in particular how something fished out of the water after 50 days was both freshly painted with North Korean markings but showed corrosion which, according to the Russian experts, indicated that it had been under water for more than six months…..
My reading of this study which I am happy to launch today reinforces arguments that there is no substitute for the detailed, independent evaluation of conditions on the ground as they actually exist. Failure to do so brought the Americans to grief over Vietnam and will now do so again in Afghanistan. The danger in Korea is less one of another quagmire of military intervention so much as a failure to change a mindset seen as justifying such engagement. Doing so requires a debate about Korea that is critical, objective and informed. This book provides just such an incentive to do so.
Korea opportunities – will China make Pyongyang safe for Market Leninism?
Crisis in Korea: America, China and the Risk of War by Tim Beal Pluto Press, Ł19.99
by Glyn Ford
Sunday, November 6th, 2011 [TribuneMagazine.co.uk]
This is Tim Beal’s second book on North Korea. Beal, a retired academic from New Zealand who has written extensively on Asia, published North Korea: The Struggle Against American Power in 2004 arguing that Pyongyang was badly misunderstood and mistreated by accident and design. Crisis in Korea paints a similar, albeit updated, picture over a wider canvas. It seeks to explain the Cheonan incident – when a South Korean corvette was sunk by a mysterious explosion in March 2010 – and the shelling of South Korea’s fortress island Yeonpyeong by North Korea the following November. Beal’s main thesis is that South Korea’s hard line leader Lee Myung-bak is heading towards a Second Korean Civil War during which he can achieve his predecessor Syngman Rhee’s ambition to “march North” and reunite the country by force. Aided and abetted by neo-conservatives in the United States keen to promote regime change and a Barack Obama administration that has taken its eye off the ball distracted as it is by Afghanistan and Iraq.
Beal challenges head on the conventional wisdom in the West about Pyongyang…..
The Cheonan was in these disputed waters when it was hit by an explosion that resulted in the death of 46 of its crew. Beal doesn’t just explain the incident, he exonerates Pyongyang, saying the explosion was not the responsibility of the North, but a conspiracy against it. Yet the circumstantial evidence is strong. The South’s joint investigation group sexed up the dossier but the best one can claim for the North is the Scottish verdict of not proven.
Yet Pyongyang won’t go quietly. And anyone who thinks that Beijing will stand by and let the US march its troops up to the Yalu River should stop watching Fox News……..
[Tim Beal comments: I don’t suggest that the sinking of the Cheonan was a conspiracy. I too say that the cause of the sinking is ‘unproven’ but I tend towards the Russian hypothesis that it accidentally activated a South Korean mine. The official South Korean investigation blaming the North went beyond ‘sexing up’. It is important to note that Russia, China, and a substantial proportion of the South Korean public do not accept the South Korean verdict.]
Ben Chacko, Morning Star, London
In Crisis in Korea Tim Beal attempts to cut through the web of propaganda and analyse the real tensions on the peninsula, the relative strength of the involved parties and the risk of war breaking out.
The author uncovers serious problems with the evidence and the whole report which, on their own, make the book worth reading.
Yet Crisis In Korea is not always an easy read. Beal is clearly a fan of acronyms, and sentences like "The PSI is in many ways similar to the NLL" occur far too frequently.
But the book explains well the dynamics of a poorly understood conflict. It could, in light of the growing rivalry between the United States and China, become a flashpoint with devastating consequences.
[Tim Beal comments: Fair enough. Acronyms are a necessary evil, but one loses track. I will post a list of them in the supplementary material]
Picking your way through a field of murdered truths
Ankie Hoogvelt
To write about North Korea in a manner that respects historical fact is like picking your way through a field of murdered truths. You poke and inspect the bodies one by one but you want to walk away hoping that history will just quietly bury them for you. Most academics do just that. Walk away.
They may have to be forgiven considering the conundrum they face. .For they are caught between a rock and a hard place. On one side there is the rock of imperial American power rolling down the hill, crushing fact and spewing fictions that are instantly repeated and relayed by the globe-girdling digital speed of slothful media juggernauts. The digital age has made our broadcasters lazy and our correspondents ‘cut and pasters’. It is so much easier to just repeat the lies than dig out the facts. Power is truth and truth itself is powerless.
On the other side there is the hard place of the North Korean regime, by most accounts a repugnant, tyrannical, and petulant dwarf, screaming abuse in a language of bygone days and waving a nuclear stick . Sixty years of cowering in the international doghouse has made it few friends. As misinformation mounts and confrontation on the Korean peninsular edges closer, one wonders what is the point of trying to set the record straight.
In his earlier book, North Korea, the struggle against American Power, (2005) Tim Beal painstakingly dragged, drained and deconstructed the flotsam of misinformation that washed ashore on the peninsula in the period since the Clinton negotiated “Agreed Framework” of 1994. …..