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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is going as far as possible without going to war. He is showing what he might do if sufficiently threatened by his enemies, the South Koreans under the conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol buttressed by their American ally. And he’s got his armed forces promising “sustained, resolute and overwhelming practical military measures,” unspecified but intended to be taken seriously.
Similarly, the U.S. and South Korea have put on a show of their own defensive/aggressive capabilities. Like the North Koreans, they stopped short of attacking North Korean facilities while demonstrating their tremendous fire power and prowess with missiles in response to the North’s daily tests.
On both sides, this entire display, the U.S.-South Korea exercises and the North Korean missile and artillery tests, completely ignored the mourning proclaimed by Yoon. There’s been no mention in any of the rhetoric of the terrible sadness of the deaths of 156 kids, including 101 women and 55 men, suffocated in the crush on a narrow downhill alley in Seoul’s Itaewon district. Once the playground of GIs, mostly from the nearby sprawling base that until four years ago was the headquarters for U.S. troops in Korea, Itaewon was a magnet for about 100,000 young people on Halloween.
Yoon has had to go back and forth, visiting memorials, expressing his own deep sadness, blaming the police for their failure to anticipate the impact of the huge crowds on Halloween, compounded by their failure to act swiftly after getting the first desperate calls of trouble. Almost simultaneously, Yoon had to issue statements vowing to stand up to the North Koreans, to avenge provocations. The North Koreans, as the American and South Korean planes took off, warned of the grave punishment that awaited them.
They’re all going to the brink, seeing how close they can come to opening fire, to risking a second Korean War. It’s a costly game of one-upmanship, and it carries the serious danger of stepping over the edge, opening a conflict in which North Korea’s Chinese and Russian friends surely would get involved. Similarly, friends of the U.S. and South Korea, including Japan and Australia, might also join a war they are still managing to avoid.
