Breaking free

South Korea tries to assert its sovereignty in the matter of operational control of its military, at its latest summit with the U.S.

P. S. SURYANARAYANA in Singapore

BY agreeing that the future issue of "operational control" over South Korea's military forces should not be turned into a political dispute, U.S. President George W. Bush and his South Korean counterpart Roh Moo-hyun have sought to paper over the fissures in the long-time alliance between their countries. However, the understanding, announced after their summit in Washington on September 14, cannot camouflage the reality that the issue has already acquired political overtones. Roh has said that South Korea's sovereignty would remain vacuous as long as its military forces remain under U.S. command in all but name.

At stake is the "wartime control" over South Korean military units on that country's territory itself. At present, the U.S. and South Korea do, in a technical sense, share such control under the rubric of the Combined Forces Command (CFC). But, as Seoul keeps pointing out, the U.S., by far the senior partner and superior force in their military alliance that dates back to the 1950-53 Korean War, holds the much-vaunted "wartime control".

In any case, Seoul already holds "peacetime control" over the South Korean troops. And, it is not an idle political pastime to talk of "wartime control", which is but the chain of command during a period of any actual warfare involving North Korea as the probable adversary. The reason is not far to seek. Tensions between North Korea on one side and the U.S. on the other side remain dangerously close to a warlike eruption. But South Korea, which cherishes its ethnic fraternity with North Korea despite their "ideological" divide, is keen to avoid any such conflagration. And, weaving a subtle political spin, Roh has said that Seoul could, if allowed by the U.S., put the "wartime control" to good use and initiate military-related confidence-building measures for closer ties between the two Koreas. The reasoning is that war is not a precondition for exercising "wartime control".

It is in this sense that Bush has referred to "operational control" over South Korea's military as the real issue.

Relevant to the current U.S.-South Korea shadow-boxing is the plurality of commands. The U.S.-led United Nations Command (UNC), a legacy of the Korean War, is still in existence; the conflict had ended in 1953 with an armistice accord (as different from a peace settlement) and firmed up the existence of two Koreas. Independent of the UNC, the U.S. retains its own tight chain of command over its forces, now numbering nearly 30,000. There is, in addition, the U.S.-South Korean CFC. What Seoul wants is to split this CFC so that the U.S. would relinquish all manner of control over South Korean troops. And, according to Roh, any such South Korean autonomy would not necessarily sound a death-knell for Seoul's military alliance with Washington.

During the run-up to his September 14 summit with Bush, Roh noted that "wartime operational control is the soul of self-defence and self-defence is the core of a self-reliant country". Not unaware of such a definitive assertion of sovereignty, Bush said, after the meeting, that the U.S. would adopt a "consultative" approach towards resolving the puzzle of control over South Korean troops at an "appropriate" time and in a suitable manner.

The issue, traceable entirely to a revival of South Korean nationalism and its growing resonance with the emotive kinship between the two Koreas, can yet break the latest political truce between Seoul and Washington. The revival of nationalism in South Korea is in some ways the result of its economic growth under the military wings of the U.S. itself since the end of the Korean War. However, the U.S.-South Korean military alliance has been, right from the beginning, just a marriage of convenience. And this should account for Roh's now-strident assertion of sovereignty.

The latest Bush-Roh accord, being just a political ceasefire and not a final settlement, can still unravel the U.S.-South Korean matrix of military ties and no-bottom-line political bonding.

In a sense, the possibility of such a denouement has been hastened by the South Korean people's perceptions about U.S. arrogance and vested interests. Outwardly, Pyongyang flayed Seoul for the mid-September summit and the Bush-Roh call for a resumption of the stalled six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear-weapons programme. But in reality, the new drift in the U.S.-South Korea alliance suits Pyongyang.

The new uncertainties in the triangular equation involving the two Koreas and the U.S. can have a larger impact on the relations among major powers in regard to the East Asian theatre. Both the U.S. and China are powers with nuclear arsenals, while North Korea's atomic weapons programme has already brought Japan in the neighbourhood to the brink of considering a revision of the pacifist Japanese Constitution, another artefact of the U.S. sleight of hand at the end of the Second World War.

As Major General Zhu Chenghu of the Chinese People's Liberation Army and Commandant of its College of Defence Studies recently told this correspondent, any war among nuclear powers in the current post-Cold War era would only prove to be a "zero-zero" encounter and "no zero-sum" game. However, perspectives of this kind are not at a premium across East Asia, as Washington, despite its current travails of a fundamental nature in West Asia, has not shown signs of wanting to give up what critics of the U.S. see as its entrenched military "occupation" of strategic pockets in East Asia.

It is in this situation that the emerging political cross-currents of the military kind on the Korean peninsula acquire importance beyond that domain. Roh has already signalled in no uncertain terms that South Korea is willing to veer off its orbit around the U.S. The question is whether this may reshape the military-strategic landscape across East Asia. A definitive answer is still in the making, given that the U.S., now distracted by deep worries in West Asia, has either postponed or given up the idea of a big fight with China, should Washington still see that as inevitable.