North Korea today threatened military action against South Korea if it did not end its propaganda broadcasts along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) within 48 hours. The broadcasts against the North are being systematically blared by loudspeakers over the border.   

South Korea resumed the broadcasts earlier this week after an 11-year hiatus, in retaliation for North Korea’s planting landmines just outside a South Korean DMZ guard post that crippled two South Korean soldiers on Aug. 4.

David Straub, associate director of the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and a former Korean affairs director at the U.S. Department of State, offers insights on the situation. Straub also spoke on PRI's "The World" radioshow on Aug. 20, the audioclip and summary can be accessed by clicking here.

What’s behind the current tensions on the Korean Peninsula?

Fundamentally, the current situation is just another symptom of the underlying problem, which is the division of Korea into two competing states, with one of them—North Korea—having a Stalinist totalitarian system and a Maoist-style cult of personality. Since North Korea can’t compete with the South economically and diplomatically, it uses the threat of force or the actual use of it to try to intimidate South Korea. The North Koreans know that South Korea tends to “blink first” and step back because it is democratic and its leaders are concerned about civilian casualties.

The current situation is also related to the leadership transition in North Korea, with leader Kim Jong Un succeeding his father Kim Jong Il three years ago. Kim Jong Un still feels insecure, which is clearly evidenced by his execution of his powerful uncle Jang Seong-taek in 2013 and many other leaders there as well. To solidify support for his rule, he also manufactures a South Korean threat to rally his people behind him.

What does North Korea want?

North Korea’s immediate demand is that South Korea stop its propaganda broadcasts across the DMZ. The South Korean broadcasts criticize the North Korean system and its leaders, which is something that the North, with its cult of personality, can’t accept. But the South resumed the broadcasts only because the North Koreans recently snuck into the South Korean side of the DMZ and viciously planted landmines just outside a South Korean guard post. These were clearly intended to maim South Korean soldiers. They did just that, blowing the legs off two young men.

The North Korean regime’s long-term aim is not just to survive but also to get the upper hand on South Korea, and eventually try again to reunify the peninsula on its own terms. That explains why North Korea behaves as it does, rather than reform its system and reconcile with the South.

The North also demands an end to all U.S. and South Korean military exercises on the peninsula—even though the North has a much larger military than the South and U.S. forces there combined and is developing nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Ultimately, the North wants to end the U.S.-South Korean alliance and see U.S. forces withdrawn from the peninsula, in the belief that it will open the way to eventual victory over the South.

Why did the South resume the broadcasts? Was it a good idea?

South Korea resumed the loudspeaker broadcasts in retaliation for the maiming of two of its soldiers on August 4th. Rather than retaliate by attacking militarily, the South resumed the loudspeaker broadcasts because the South Korean military knows that North Korean leaders hate them.

The South Korean military believes that North Korean leaders hate the broadcasts because they are effective in educating young North Korean soldiers and civilians in earshot about the nature of the regime and its leaders. The South Korean military seems to assume that the broadcasts are effective in that regard because they anger the North Korean leaders so much. But I think the reason the broadcasts anger the North Korean leaders is due to the cult of personality. The North Korean system can’t accept the idea of its leaders being criticized.

So I don’t think it was necessarily a wise step on the part of the South Korean military to resume the broadcasts. On the other hand, politically, by crippling two South Korean soldiers, the North Koreans had left South Korea with no option but to respond in some way. After the North Koreans killed fifty South Koreans in two separate sneak attacks five years ago, the South Korean government warned that it was not going to sit back the next time. The resumption of the broadcasts has further raised tensions but, frankly, given the danger of war on the peninsula, the South doesn’t have a lot of good ways to respond to North Korean provocations.

How serious is the situation?

North Korea has now threatened military action in 48 hours if South Korea doesn’t end the propaganda broadcasts. The North often makes threats. Usually, it doesn’t carry them out, but sometimes it does.

The United States and South Korea are conducting an annual military exercise together in the South until the end of August—something else that the North Koreans are demanding an end to. Most experts feel that the North is unlikely to launch a major provocation while the American presence is bolstered and the U.S. and South Korean militaries are paying full attention. The North Korean leaders know they are weaker than our side, so they usually avoid frontal assaults and instead engage in sneak attacks, at times and places and in ways of their own choosing.

There is more uncertainty in recent years because of the aggressive and threatening behavior thus far of Kim Jong Un, who is young and inexperienced. He seems anxious about his position in the North and prepared to take risks to bolster it, including rallying the people behind him by raising tensions with the South. We also don’t know if the North feels freer to engage in major provocations because it has developed at least a handful of nuclear devices since its first nuclear test in 2006.

So I myself wouldn’t be afraid to visit Seoul now but the situation bears even closer watching than usual.

Riding around on the back of a motorcycle in 2009, Jeremy Menchik snapped photos of hundreds of Indonesian campaign posters. That number has now grown to over 5000 images, which Menchik and Colm Fox have painstakingly coded and analyzed to better understand the politics of identity in Indonesia. The initial results of their research reveal similarities between the United States and Indonesia, and shed light on the transitional democracies of the Arab Spring.

Menchik is a 2011–12 Shorenstein Fellow at Stanford University, and will take up a position as an assistant professor in international relations at Boston University in 2013.

Fox is a doctoral student at the George Washington University’s Department of Political Science.

How important is political identity in Indonesia? Why?

Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, and one of the most diverse. But what we found was that rather than being unique, Indonesian politicians behave remarkably similar to American politicians in using a variety of regional, religious, and ethnic identity symbols to court voters.

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What is an important factor in determining a candidate’s use of identity symbols?

What we found is that the election rules matter, a lot. Candidates are far more likely to use religious and ethnic symbols in a plurality (“winner-take-all”) system like the United States than in a proportional representation system (PR) like Indonesia. This is an important finding, because tinkering with election rules is one of the tools that international relations practitioners can use to reduce ethnic and sectarian violence. And what we are saying is that it works. Changing election rules can change the types and levels of identities that are politicized. And that is an important lesson for conflict resolution.

What are some of the most surprising results to come out of your research?

The first is how badly the dominant explanations for identity politics—modernization theory and secularization theory—fared when they were tested on a large dataset. We are at an interesting juncture in time, where our theories of religion and politics have not caught up with the way the world works.

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During last year’s Arab Spring, the ideal of democracy was celebrated throughout the world. How might your research shed light on understanding the complexities of these transitioning democracies?

Well this research has clear implications for the Arab Spring, particularly for understanding the future of Egypt. Just because religious parties like the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafist Nour party come into office does not mean that democracy is doomed, or that religious minorities are going to suffer. As long as secular Muslims, Christians, liberals, and other groups have a stake in elections, we are likely to see cross-ethnic and cross-religious coalitions emerge. This is a very good thing. One obvious difference, however, is that we did not see a lot of overt military participation in politics in Indonesia after 1999. The military was largely absent. And that is one way that Egypt is very different from Indonesia. If there is a big threat to democracy in Egypt, it is not coming from the politicization of identity—it is coming from the suppression of the people's voice by the military.

Two Stanford graduates with close ties to FSI’s centers have been named 2012 Rhodes Scholars. A third was selected as a Mitchell Scholar.

Anand Habib was a graduate of the 2011 CISAC honors program in international security studies and a 2010 Dachs undergraduate intern. Habib and Katherine Niehaus – who is now a research assistant for a CHP/PCOR project evaluating whether HIV medication increases the risk of cardiovascular disease – will study at the University of Oxford in England under the Rhodes program. 

Philippe de Koning, who will study in Ireland as a Mitchell fellow, wrote a manuscript about Japan’s defense and financial crisis with Shorenstein APARC faculty member Phillip Lipscy. Lipscy, a political scientist, was de Koning’s advisor through his undergraduate career and also advised him on his senior thesis. De Koning was also a 2010 CISAC honors student.

More about the scholars:

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Habib is working on community health programs at St. Joseph's Clinic in Thomassique, Haiti, under a one-year global health fellowship awarded by Medical Missionaries. The nonprofit organization is a volunteer group of more than 200 doctors, nurses, dentists, and others who work to improve the health of the poor in the United States and throughout the world.

In 2011, he won a Deans' Award for Academic Accomplishment, which honors extraordinary undergraduate students for "exceptional, tangible" intellectual achievements. One of the professors who nominated him for the award described him as a "superb critical thinker" whose work is characterized by "creative genius" and "mature insights," adding that he "exemplifies exactly the kind of deeply informed, pragmatic and caring leadership that the world needs and Stanford enables."

As a Stanford student, Habib worked on behalf of politically and medically disenfranchised people in India, Mexico and Guatemala. His field research internship in Guatemala’s indigenous region during summer 2010 was carried out under the supervision of Paul Wise, professor of pediatrics and FSI senior fellow, as part of FSI’s Dachs mentored undergraduate research program.  On campus, he turned the Stanford tradition of the annual Dance Marathon into a vehicle dedicated to addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic by engaging not only Stanford students but also local communities and corporations, raising more than $100,000. His exceptional work was recognized by his participation in the Clinton Global Initiative University Conference in April, 2011.

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She plans to pursue a doctorate of philosophy in systems approaches to biomedical science at Oxford.

At Stanford, Niehaus captained Stanford's varsity track and cross country teams, won the Pac-10 5,000 meters, and won Academic-All American status. She also served as a mentor and tutor for students in low-income families.

Working with faculty in the Center for Health Policy, Kate led a project to evaluate how well newer HIV antiretroviral drugs work compared with older drugs.  Her work was among the first to evaluate comprehensively all of the trials of new drugs in treatment of experienced patients, and showed that these drugs have substantial benefits.

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He is a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at the Nuclear Threat Initiative in Washington, D.C. The nongovernmental organization works to prevent nuclear, chemical, and biological threats from materializing. De Koning is researching nuclear materials security and the U.S.-China dialogue on nuclear issues.

De Koning, who earlier was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, spent the 2010-2011 academic year at Hiroshima University in Japan. He examined various components of Japanese security policy, with emphasis on current evolution of Japanese Self-Defense Forces, policies on nuclear issues and approaches toward peacekeeping.

In 2009, he was a member of the Stanford delegation to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

The coming to power of a new party in Japan, with a strong mandate to rule, is unprecedented in the postwar era. In the aftermath of the Japanese elections in August of this year, there has been much discussion, particularly in the Japanese media, about the foreign policy orientation of the new Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)-led administration. Some commentators see an “anti-American” tilt—evidenced by differing views on the relocation of U.S. bases in Okinawa and the renewal of Japanese naval refueling operations in the Indian Ocean.

This viewpoint misses the foreign policy forest for its trees. The paradigm-shifting potential of this change lies much more in the DPJ’s desire to re-center Japan’s foreign policy on Asia. Across the spectrum of the DPJ, from former socialists on the left to those who came out of the conservative Liberal Democratio Party (LDP), there is broad agreement on the need to put much greater emphasis on Japan’s ties to the rest of Asia, particularly to China and South Korea.

The new Asianism in Japanese foreign policy was on display at the October 10 triangular summit of the Chinese, South Korean, and Japanese leaders, held in Beijing. It was only the second time these three have met on their own and the meeting was substantive, covering everything from coordinating on North Korea and economic stimulus policy to taking initial steps toward formation of a new East Asian Community. “Until now, we have tended to be too reliant on the United States,” Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama told reporters after the meeting, adding that “The Japan-U.S. alliance remains important, but as a member of Asia, I would like to develop policies that focus more on Asia.”

The dominant foreign policy camp in Japan has been what Hitoshi Tanaka, a former senior foreign ministry official and close advisor to the DPJ, calls “alliance traditionalists,” whom he defines as those who “place the maintenance of a robust alliance with the United States above all other foreign policy priorities.” In the view of some DPJ policy advisors, the previous conservative governments mistakenly tried to cope with the challenge of a rising China by getting as close to the United States as possible. The decision to send troops to Iraq and the Indian Ocean was prompted not by any deep support for those causes but rather by the belief that this would ensure U.S. support in any tensions with China, and with North Korea.

All this took place as Sino-Japanese relations descended into their most troubled phase in the postwar period, prompted by former Prime Minister Koizumi’s provocative visits to Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead. High-level contacts with China were frozen, tensions rose over territorial issues in the East China Sea, and rising nationalism on both sides culminated in the outbreak of government-sanctioned anti-Japanese riots in 2005 and a Chinese campaign to block Japan’s permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council.

There was an attempt by Koizumi’s conservative successors to roll back some of these tensions. But those signals were always mixed with the persistence of anti-Chinese views and the powerful camp of rightwing nationalists in and around the LDP who cling to a revisionist view of Japan’s wartime role, some even indulging in a vigorous defense of Japanese imperialism.

In the view of DPJ policy advisers, this pseudo-containment strategy is doomed to failure. Given the increasing economic interdependence between the United States and China, and their overlapping strategic interests, the United States will never form an anti-China front. Japan cannot rely solely, these advisers argue, on the U.S.-Japan security alliance to deal with China’s bid for regional hegemony.

Nor can Japan afford to indulge fantasies of confrontation with China, given its own extensive ties to its economy and society. Rather, the greater threat, in the view of many Japanese analysts, is being abandoned by the United States through the formation of a U.S.-China “Group of Two” that effectively excludes Japan, or relegates it to second-level status in the region.

Japan, those policymakers argue, needs to preempt that threat by engaging Asia on its own—not only China, but the entire region, from India back to Korea. The DPJ’s own policy vision, articulated by Prime Minister Hatoyama, Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, and party strongman Ichiro Ozawa, remains vaguely defined but has three clear elements:

• The U.S.-Japan security alliance remains the cornerstone, but with limits.
• Japan plays a leadership role in East Asian regionalism.
• The “history” question must be resolved.

What does this mean? There should be little question, particularly after the initial meetings between the new government and the Obama administration, that the DPJ seeks to back away from the security alliance. Over the past fifteen years, the DPJ leadership has not only supported, but even led, the expansion of Japan’s security role, beginning with the passage of the 1992 law permitting Japanese participation
in peacekeeping operations and including the initial dispatch of naval forces to the Indian Ocean in response to 9/11. Though the DPJ has made commitments to reduce the U.S. presence in Okinawa, it is already realizing how difficult that is to accomplish; some kind of compromise on this issue is imminent. Similarly, Foreign Minister Okada’s visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan demonstrated a willingness to contribute, mostly through economic aid, to the security effort in both countries.

Prime Minister Hatoyama presented his somewhat romantic desire to reproduce the European experience to create an East Asian Community in September before the United Nations General Assembly. Hatoyama has indicated that he understands this is a long process, and has been careful to make clear that Japan has no intention of excluding the United States’ role in the region, nor the use of the dollar as a reserve currency. As Hatoyama put in his UN address:

Today, there is no way that Japan can develop without deeply involving itself in Asia and the Pacific region. Reducing the region’s security risks and sharing each other’s economic dynamism based on the principle of “open regionalism” will result in tremendous benefits not only for Japan but also for the region and the international community.

Given the historical circumstances arising from its mistaken actions in the past, Japan has hesitated to play a proactive role in this region. It is my hope that the new Japan can overcome this history and become a “bridge” among the countries of Asia.

I look forward to an East Asian community taking shape as an extension of the accumulated cooperation built up step by step among partners who have the capacity to work together, starting with fields in which we can cooperate—free frade agreements, finance, currency, energy, environment, disaster relief and more. Of course, Rome was not built in a day, so let us seek to move forward steadily on this, even if at a moderate pace.

DPJ policymakers advocate pursuit of an East Asian community as only one of a nest of regional structures, including a regional security system that might grow out of the Six Party talks on North Korea. They also embrace the idea of a Japan-U.S.-China strategic dialogue, based on their own perception that without the combined muscle of the United States and Japan, they cannot bring China to the table on a range of issues from energy to intellectual property.

The last element of the DPJ’s policy vision is to take another major step in clearing away the legacy of the wartime past. Hatoyama personally reaffirmed his government’s adherence to the statement on war responsibility issued by then Prime Minister Murayama in 1995, at the time of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war.

Hatoyama, Ozawa and others in the DPJ leadership are determined to confront the history issue in a way that eases tensions with China and South Korea and also closes doors backward. They will not only refuse to go to the Yasukuni Shrine but also want to remove the Class A war criminals whose “souls” are enshrined there by decision of the shrine authorities, to the consternation of the Emperor, among others. The DPJ led the hue and cry over the unapologetic revisionism of former Japanese air force chief of staff, General Toshio Tamogami, who wrote an essay justifying Japan’s colonialism and wartime aggression, including the attack on Pearl Harbor. Foreign Minister Okada has backed the creation of a joint history textbook by China, Japan and South Korea, based on the model followed by France and Germany. These are stances the LDP has been historically incapable of taking.

The DPJ draws some inspiration from the anti-imperial form of Asianism—“Small Nipponism”—championed by the late Tanzan Ishibashi, who served briefly as premier in the mid-1950s and who was allied to Hatoyama’s beloved grandfather, and former premier, Ichiro Hatoyama.

In the coming months, the Hatoyama government will have numerous opportunities to develop its new policies, particularly in the run-up to Japan’s hosting of the APEC summit next year. Undoubtedly, it will be difficult to implement in practice, but this new Asianism marks a clear turning point in Japan’s postwar foreign policy.