Loser In the Game of Chicken

When I was reading news reports on North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s return to Pyongyang from his visit to China early last month, a faded image of a small Korean boy resurfaced in my memory out of half a century of oblivion.

The boy was one of my classmates at the elementary school in a remote village in South Korea nearly 70 years ago.

The North Korean dictator somehow reminded me of the obnoxious little kid who was disliked and avoided like a leech by everyone in our class. He was not unusually big or strong but managed to bully everyone because he had a big brother who was four years older than us.

His family, I remember, was extremely poor and yet he always was in possession of a pocketful of candies and marbles that he had “confiscated” from us. He even forced us to give up our lunch boxes so that he didn’t have to skip a meal. Luckily for us, his family moved out of our village a couple of years later, and the memory of that awful boy soon faded away.

As we all know, Kim Jong-il visited China shortly after a South Korean navy ship was attacked and sank in the West (Yellow) Sea. A month-long, meticulous investigation by South Koreans aided by a team of foreign experts established—based on undeniable and watertight evidence—that the North Koreans had perpetrated the crime.

Outraged and angry at the latest in North Korea’s unending series of terrorist acts against them, South Koreans vowed to retaliate. President Lee Myung-bak’s government declared it would force the impoverished but belligerent North to pay a price for the unprovoked attack.

South Korea and its ally, the United States, also announced that they would hold a joint naval exercise as part of demonstrations to show their determination to confront possible further provocation from the North. In addition, Seoul moved to have the United Nations condemn North Korea for the attack and tighten its existing economic sanctions against Pyongyang as punishment.

The North Koreans, as usual, resorted to their well-worn tactics, claiming that it was South Korea itself that had “staged” the incident and sank its own navy ship. It even threatened to launch an all-out war against the South if Seoul tries to retaliate against them.

Although Kim Jong-il and his running dogs in Pyongyang barked loudly, they must have been scared nonetheless over a possible military action by the South against them. For, Kim dragged his ailing body to Beijing apparently to seek Chinese reassurance that they would continue to stand by their North Korean puppets no matter what happens.

In the ensuing game of chicken between the North and South, it is Seoul, it seems, that has blinked and let Kim Jong-il get away with murders once again. South Korea and the United States postponed their announced naval exercise indefinitely while the United Nations has not taken any action against North Korea as of early June.
The Seoul government even issued a statement saying it would refrain from taking any step that could provoke North Korea.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did visit Beijing but was unable, obviously, to exert any effective influence over the Chinese leadership. Judging by the action—or rather, inaction—of Beijing, China’s role of big brother for the North seems to be unchanged, if not strengthened.

Thus, like the obnoxious kid that my classmates and I had to put up with in our elementary school days, that cruel and insufferable dictator Kim Jong-il, riding piggyback on his big brother, will keep terrorizing and murdering South Koreans with impunity as China continues to expand and wield its power and influence over its neighbors.

Kim Jong-il knows, no doubt, that right now, the United States can’t do anything much for South Korea not only because it has its hands full with two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—but also because it is suffering serious financial difficulties that include an enormous debt to China. It has been reported that Beijing has dragged its feet on the U.S. request for Chinese efforts to help maintain peace in the Korean Peninsula.

One only hopes that the overconfident Kim Jong-il will not take any more rash and miscalculated action against the South that could easily trigger another all-out war that would surely reduce the two Koreas to one huge heap of rubble.
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