Oil Upon Korean Waters

Washington has wisely rejected a call from South Korea’s defense ministry to reactivate joint military exercises, suspended two years ago as a good-faith gesture toward improving relations with North Korea. The ministry had sought resumption of the annual war games, called Team Spirit, in the wake of last week’s incursion by a North Korean submarine into South Korea’s eastern coastal waters. More than a score of armed sailors and commandos came ashore from the vessel.

Most of the infiltrators were killed, though a number remain at large. The defense ministry has meanwhile come under sharp criticism for failing to detect the sub, which was abandoned after getting stuck on a reef about 75 miles south of the demilitarized zone. South Korea’s military has from the beginning been deeply suspicious about North Korea’s hinting at a more accommodating line. Now it also has been deeply embarrassed by its failure to prevent a major incursion.

A key U.S. objective now is to ease anxieties raised in South Korea by the most serious violation of the armistice agreement in many years. At the same time, while avoiding provocative acts, it must make clear to Pyongyang that the submarine incident inevitably undercuts its claims to be interested in easing regional tensions.

Sabotaging the efforts being made to reduce tensions may be exactly what motivated North Korean hawks to order the submarine into South Korean waters. Virtually nothing is known about how power is currently apportioned and exercised in Pyongyang. A reasonable inference is that the enfeebled Communist regime is divided between pragmatists favoring some minimum of detente with the United States and South Korea and hard-liners who insist on continued militant confrontation.

It of course makes no sense for a country desperately seeking international aid in the face of massive food shortages and even widespread starvation to further poison attitudes against it. What the bizarre submarine incident underscores once again is that rationality may have little to do with Pyongyang’s behavior.