Liberate Okinawa From a ‘Rogue Superpower’

The three-day summit meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea and the agreement they signed in Pyongyang June 15 are as significant developments in international relations as President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China or the 1989 breaching of the Berlin Wall. All these events heralded the onset of momentous political changes and realignments.

The only people who seem not to be aware of this are those in the U.S. Congress and the Pentagon and their counterparts in Japan. The Americans are not merely cautious but downright surly. The Defense Department has reiterated U.S. intentions to keep troops in South Korea indefinitely, and the Clinton administration has reasserted its determination to proceed with plans for a theater missile defense because North Korea remains a “state of concern” (also known as a “rogue state”) capable, it alleges, of destroying not just South Korea and Japan but even the United States itself.

The United States has not been paying attention. Changes in both Koreas have been in the works for a long time. One of the most significant figures accompanying President Kim Dae Jung to Pyongyang was Lim Dong Won, head of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. North Korea asked that he attend. Lim played a major role in behind-the-scenes negotiations with the North prior to the summit. China was the midwife in preparing for these changes, and the success of the summit also is a major victory for Chinese foreign policy. As straws in the wind, two of the United States’ closest allies--Italy and Australia--recognized the North Korean government several months ago.

The so-called North Korean missile threat is almost entirely the product of Republican congressional imaginations, inspired by supporters in the intelligence agencies and the military-industrial complex. A missile defense is both untested and strategically unsound, but defense contractors want to go ahead with it anyway because of the huge profits it will generate.

The reality is that North Korea, in its entire history, has tested only four missiles, the last two in 1993 and 1998. The missiles all have been based on obsolescent Soviet technology and probably can’t be aimed. Facing them are more than 7,000 deployed nuclear warheads, the 7th Fleet, the 2nd Army Division in Korea and a South Korea that is twice as populous and 25 times richer.

The implications for Japan of a Korean detente are substantial. Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed, Japan has justified the presence of more than 50,000 American troops on its territory by invoking a threat from North Korea. The people of Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture and where more than 75% of the American forces are stationed, have for 55 years pleaded for their departure. The issue came to a head in 1995, when two U.S. Marines and a sailor beat and raped a 12-year-old schoolgirl. Rather than reconsidering the issue of ground forces in Okinawa, the U.S. government has endlessly spun the rape incident, arguing that it was not typical of what happens when you locate 39 American military bases among 1.3 million inhabitants. It has also tried to divide the Okinawan people by making false promises to close some bases while opening others elsewhere in Okinawa.

It would be premature to start taking our forces out of South Korea until the Koreans ask us to. But the Pentagon should do three things quickly: Withdraw the 3rd Marine Division from Okinawa and probably demobilize it; return Futenma Marine Corps Air Station to Okinawa as President Clinton promised in 1996; and cancel plans to build a new military airfield at Nago in northern Okinawa. If these things aren’t done, the United States and Japan are certain to be humiliated at the G8 summit meeting to be held in Okinawa next month.

Koreans themselves are ending the Cold War in the Pacific without any help from the superpowers that originally divided their country and fought over it during the Korean War. The main security problem for northeastern Asia today is not a rogue state in its midst but a rogue superpower across the Pacific.