North Korea: On second thought, we won't respond to South Korea drills

The good news: North Korea has now reversed itself and announced that it would not respond to South Korea’s live-fire drills with military retaliation.  The bad news: it’s still North Korea.  Can anyone trust them to keep their word?

South Korea’s government remained on emergency alert Monday night for possible retaliation by Pyongyang after the South staged more than an hour of live artillery exercises on an island that North Korea shelled last month.

The approximately 90 minutes of South Korean artillery fire from Yeonpyeong Island, just some seven miles off North Korea’s coastline, continued the rise of tensions on the Korean Peninsula that are widely seen as being at their most dangerous levels in decades.

While North Korea released an official statement on Monday evening saying it would not respond, Pyongyang’s history of erratic and contradictory behavior made it impossible to evaluate how long that position would last. As recently as Saturday, North Korea had promised to bring “decisive and merciless punishment” should the South hold the drills.

The brinksmanship came the same day as reports saying that the North Korean government is now willing to allow the return of United Nations nuclear inspectors and to sell some 12,000 plutonium fuel rods to the South.

Consider this a bluff called.  Pyongyan wanted to see how far it could push Seoul without getting a push back in return.  South Korea refused to allow Kim Jong-il to dictate their military policy and essentially dared Pyongyang to deliver its “decisive and merciless punishment.”

It was an empty threat, not a result of erratic and contradictory behavior.  Kim’s actions aren’t irrational at all.  He wants to wield power for as long as possible and then hand it off to his youngest son at the last minute, and the best way to do that is to keep his military too busy to depose him or interfere with his transfer of power.  Kim has to show that he can force enemies of his regime to buckle to his will in order to look too strong to depose, or at the very least appear to be manipulating events towards his own ends.

That’s why Seoul’s insistence on the military drills were important.  It forced Kim to either go to war or retreat, and a war is the last thing Kim needs for his goal of continuing the hereditary rule in the DPRK for another generation.  His military would almost certainly depose Kim if he provoked another peninsular war and the collapse of what little strength actually remains in the north.  With any luck, this retreat will weaken Kim and increase pressure on those in the north looking to end the six-decade stalemate.