Afghanistan is not America’s longest war, Korea is.
As American — and Australian troops — pull out of Afghanistan and the Taliban claims victory and emerges resurgent, nearly thirty thousand US troops remain on the Korean Peninsula.
It is nearly 70 years since the armistice was signed in the Korean War but there is no peace treaty.
The guns have never fallen silent. Hostilities have regularly broken out, casualties have continued to mount and the two Koreas — north and south — remain divided by a demilitarized zone.
Australia supported the US through the United Nations Command to defend South Korea.(AP)
Reporting from North Korea, as I have, is a reminder that the region remains on a war footing. Troops that I spoke to told me how they embody the “real Korean” spirit and would die for their country.
North Korea’s million-strong army — the fourth biggest in the world — is nuclear armed with long-range missile capacity that can strike as far as the US or Australia.
And it regularly threatens to use them.
From inside the Hermit Kingdom
The Kim family regime has defied war, isolation, sanctions, devastating famine and the presence of the most powerful military force in the world right on their border and yet remains entrenched in power.
It is brutal and repressive, locking the country away from the world. Not for nothing is it called the Hermit Kingdom.
Defectors provide a window into his secretive world. This week I spoke to one of them, Park Yeonmi, who was born into a privileged family in North Korea, yet lived in constant fear as her father was sent to a prison camp.
“Disappearance of neighbors was a daily thing,” she said.
Yeonmi said she was forced to watch public executions and like millions of others faced starvation in the great famine of the ’90s.
Finally, she and her mother fled across the border into China.
North Korean defector Park Yeonmi said she was forced to watch public executions and endured starvation during the great famine of the 90s.(AAP: Yonhap Agency)
“I was able to see the lights coming from China,” she said. “If maybe I could go where the lights are I could find something to eat, that’s why I escaped.”
In China, Yeonmi and her mother were kidnapped by human traffickers and sold into slavery.
Eventually, she made it out and wrote about her experiences. Critics call her a “celebrity defector” and some have cast doubt on aspects of her story.
But Yeonmi counters by asking how can every defector who tells a similar tale be wrong?
A calculating and shrewd regime
What is undoubted is that people in North Korea have endured enormous suffering and the regime rules with an iron fist.
Harsh penalties have recently been announced for anyone caught watching a foreign film, having a “western-style” haircut, or wearing skinny jeans.
It almost sounds comical, yet the West has made the mistake of underestimating or lampooning the eccentric Kim family. The wacky exterior masks a calculating and shrewd regime.
Writer and Korea watcher Gavin Jacobson said: “No regime survives for 70 years — isolated and in dire financial straits — without a hardened backbone of logic supporting it.”
In endless rounds of negotiations with foreign powers North Korea has mastered the art of “bait and switch”, offering concessions, doing a deal, then walking away.
Each twist and turn buy it more time to build its nuclear arsenal. Right now, it is estimated North Korea could have as many as 60 nuclear weapons.
The bomb has given North Korea a seat at the table; it is what separates North Korea from other rogue states.
The youthful leader, Kim Jong Un, has always known this. It is a lesson he learned from his father, Kim Jong Il, who learned it from his father before him, the eternal President Kim Il Sung.
American Korea watcher Victor Cha has recounted a conversation with a North Korean envoy during nuclear negotiations a decade ago. The envoy reportedly said:
A powerful ally
North Korea has the bomb and a close and powerful friend in China, its biggest supporter. At times the relationship between the two countries has been described as being as “close as lips and teeth”.
Former US President Donald Trump meets North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the demilitarized zone in 2019. (Reuters: Kevin Lamarque)
Relations have occasionally cooled but the ties forged in the Korean War when China intervened to support the North and their friendship has proved unbreakable.
The Kim regime has seen off successive American presidents. Donald Trump — after belittling Kim as “little rocket man” — tried a one-on-one approach but despite much fanfare and theatrics, it achieved little.
In recent weeks there has been renewed speculation that the North Korean regime is under strain, a new famine looming. Kim has warned people to prepare for the worst ever situation.
There is even speculation Kim may seek to reopen negations with the US.
President Joe Biden would well know the lessons of history. For the Kim regime, survival is everything even if that survival means an unending state of war.
