Korean Peninsula

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege and an honour to follow the noble and gallant Lord. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for having, over these many years, tracked the North Korean situation very closely, and for bringing it to our attention. I shall not talk about the human rights record, which he is very much more capable of, but shall follow the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, in talking about security aspects. I will take what he said as my starting point so that I can work further on it.

The problem is that, in one sense, the world gave up any worry about nuclear proliferation 20 or 30 years ago. We have many more nuclear nations now than was the case when the Cuban missile crisis confrontation took place. I think it was partly the Cuban missile confrontation that removed the fear of nuclear weapons. We thought, “We can handle this; we can handle Armageddon and we do not have to worry about it”. I was a young graduate student in America at that time, watching it on television, and I thought, “Either this is the end of the world or it is not; I have no choice in the matter”. Luckily, it was not, but since then we have nuclear arms in India and Pakistan and God knows where else, so I think it will not be possible to denuclearise North Korea. Nobody—neither China nor the USA—has either the military or the diplomatic strength to denuclearise Kim Jong-un.

It is remarkable for me as an economist. Economics textbooks start with a peculiar diagram about the choice between guns and butter. Kim Jong-un has taken the view, “Forget about butter, I only want guns”. And for a relatively poor country, he has an extremely high level of military sophistication. Weapons are cheap. That is the issue. Weapons are not expensive. Anybody can get them. It will not persuade him if we say, “If you do not do this your people could have a much better life”. He would be worried about that. If his people had a better life, they could have other ideas about why he was there—so it is in his interest to keep the people as they are, to dazzle them with weapons but not to let them have bread.

So what is to be done? My view is that first of all one has to bring to a conclusion the Korean War—which has not been brought to a close, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, pointed out. We only have an armistice. We have not got an end to the war. This is not entirely my own idea; it has been around in the literature. First, we have to say that the Korean War is over and that the division of Korea is permanent. We must have no idealistic dreams about uniting Korea, because that would really alarm the poor man as he would lose his empire. One has to pacify the situation by saying, “Yes, we honour your sovereignty, we confirm that North Korea is a separate republic”—or country, or whatever it is—“and we want some sort of settlement across the 42nd parallel”—or whatever it is—“so that we can demilitarise the border”. We need to give him an assurance that we are not interested in removing him, killing him or de-fanging him.

Any attempt to attack him militarily—as I have often said, I do not have much realistic knowledge of this, but I can guess—to destroy his weapons or whatever it is will leave him with enough weapons to attack Japan and South Korea. It is not a risk worth taking, so we have to let him have his weapons but persuade him not to use them. That requires freezing the current situation in a more peaceful direction. Give him recognition, negotiate with him, give him status and make quite sure that he does not attack either of his neighbours—Japan or South Korea.

I agree with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, that China has absolutely no interest in playing our game. We want China to do such and such, but we have no kind of sanction on China—and why would China want to do it, because basically China is more worried about Japan and South Korea militarising themselves, or America offering them considerable amounts of weapons, than about what trouble Kim Jong-un can make for it? He is not going to make any trouble for China. So we have to assume that this is our problem and that, while we need China’s co-operation, we have to tackle it diplomatically.

We will not get everything. North Korea will not become a liberal democracy—forget it—and its human rights situation may still be very peculiar. But the priority right now is to get away from a nuclear winter, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, described it, because that way lies the deaths of millions of people. We ought to go very carefully and very diplomatically, in a combined effort of the US, the UK and other NATO powers, and make quite sure that, whatever we do, we do not incite him into any kind of action. Let him keep his toys, but do not let him play with them.