Opinion | The perpetual Korean crisis

By Tom Fowdy

It was 6:40 am in Seoul. I was awoken by the loud blare of a government emergency alert on my phone. These alerts are commonplace, albeit often a nuisance by overemphasizing trivial matters. But this time, it claimed that North Korea had launched a missile, and urged people to evacuate and take shelter. Every single person within Seoul got one, provoking a mass panic. Sure enough, the DPRK had indeed launched a missile, having made it very clear over the past few days that it was preparing for a space launch, and not of course a random attack on Seoul.

Despite this, the test failed anyway and appeared to explode in the atmosphere, with even North Korea publicly admitting that it was not successful. South Korea's Ministry of the Interior later claimed that the evacuation alerts had been sent out in "mistake", but I really beg to differ. My opinion is that it constitutes an explicit act of political manipulation by Yoon Seok Yeol, who is otherwise determined to raise tensions on the Korean peninsula and provoke public fear amidst his party's rock-bottom approval ratings, copying a similar tactic from his much-admired Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan.

Beginning in 2023, Yoon Seok Yeol has been pivoting South Korea's foreign policy towards the United States and Japan in an extraordinarily subservient way. He not only visited Tokyo himself and absconded the controversy over wartime forced labor and comfort women, but subsequently invited Fumio Kishida to Seoul as well, having also visited the United States. In doing so, he also made provocative comments on Taiwan, initiated his own "Indo-Pacific" strategy, and of course more directly has dismantled any attempt to make peace with Pyongyang, which was the legacy of his predecessor Moon Jae-in.

North Korea serves as a politically acceptable guise for South Korea to strengthen its military relationship with the United States in the view to indirectly targeting China. For this purpose, the United States has deliberately sought to obstruct any peace process between the two Koreas, knowing that it undermines the legitimacy of their presence on the peninsula, and therefore their wider regional strategy. For the US, only the complete capitulation of the DPRK to American terms and preferences, or a maintaining of status-quo tensions, is an acceptable outcome, hence why any attempts to compromise with Pyongyang during the Trump administration were undermined.

Therefore, upon Yoon's visit to the US, the two countries agreed to station a US nuclear ballistic missile submarine in South Korea, the first deployment of its kind since the Cold War. This is a huge provocation for both China and the DPRK, which of course will only encourage Kim Jong Un to pursue more ballistic missile tests, creating a nuclear arms race on the Korean peninsula which of course, plays into US hands. Yoon Seok Yeol seems perfectly content for such a scenario to happen, not least because South Korean conservatives overtly borrow from the Japanese playbook, which is the constant ratcheting up of tensions and the weaponization of anti-Communist fear in order to stay perpetually in power.

The subsequent use of "emergency alerts" is a big part of this strategy, that is because they can deliberately incite fear and have a "real" impact on people's lives, which makes them overtly conscious of North Korea's activities, rather than just a few pictures on television. The use of alerts in respect to DPRK missile launches is a new phenomenon in South Korea, but has been used for years in Japan, where typically they are utilized for every single test. Tokyo has also gone further, including disrupting news broadcasting for breaking news coverage of the tests, as well as even halting the Tokyo subway. This, coinciding with opportunistically timed elections, has allowed the LDP to win over and over again on the basis of stoking up fear against North Korea.

Although the Yoon Seok Yeol government faces a far less favorable environment domestically to pursue such fearmongering campaigns successfully than Japan does, it is obvious he has already taken this path. North Korea will be used as a bogeyman to justify militarisation in the name of American "Indo-Pacific goals", with Kim Jong Un likely taking the bait to escalate in tandem. Despite the fact the latest space launch was a failure, Pyongyang has already stated its intention to try again soon. This inevitably means this whole cycle will repeat itself again, with more emergency alerts, likely US-South Korea military exercises, and then back to square one. It's the perpetual Korean crisis. The ultimate point? Peace is detrimental to the interests of the United States and its puppets.

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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