By David K. Shipler
The camera
angle was perfect, and it was surely no accident. Caught in the same frame,
diagonally in the row behind an unsmiling Vice President Mike Pence, sat Kim
Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, at the opening of the
Olympics in South Korea. Neither, it seemed, dared to look at the other,
exchange words, or shake hands.
One
interpretation is that Mr. Pence wants to stay alive politically, and that Ms.
Kim wants to stay alive, period. Although she’s rumored to be a close and
trusted adviser to her older brother, he has shown no compunction in
terminating high-ranking individuals, including relatives, who present a threat
to his power or deviate from the prescribed path. And Mr. Pence has thinly
disguised presidential aspirations; the last thing he needs is a picture of
himself shaking hands with the avowed enemy.
It is a
peculiar tradition in international relations that showing basic courtesy to
your adversary is regarded as a concession, as if a hello or a handshake—not to
mention actual conversation—were a grand reward to be conferred only in
exchange for some prize from the other side. This kind of thinking has
prevented the start of many negotiations where one party or the other demands
that certain preconditions be met before talks can begin. Sometimes that works,
but often it produces silence and misunderstanding.
The “messages”
sent by military actions or visual gestures are usually brittle and dogmatic,
lacking the nuance essential to sophisticated approaches across the gulfs of
hostility. Whenever the US suspended bombing North Vietnam during a discreet
outreach toward launching peace talks, for example, Hanoi interpreted the
cessation as pure propaganda aimed at making a warlike America appear
conciliatory. When the outreach failed and bombing resumed, the North was
convinced it had been right.
Similarly,
North Korea’s joint appearance with South Korean athletes in these Winter Games
has been dismissed by the Trump administration as propaganda, aimed at driving
a wedge between Seoul and Washington and undermining Washington’s campaign to
isolate the North further for its threatening nuclear and missile program. It
couldn’t also be that the North Korean leader, Mr. Kim, emboldened militarily,
is looking not for domination but for security?
Watching
the VIP section at the Olympic ceremony was like gleaning policy by studying the lineup of Soviet Politburo members atop the
Lenin Mausoleum, and counting the missiles marching past in a parade through
Red Square. (Soon, for President Trump’s entertainment, we’ll get to count
American missiles rolling along Constitution Avenue.)
As the Korean teams marched
together under the neutral flag symbolizing a unified Korean Peninsula, Mr.
Pence and his wife remained seated, a technique he copied from the pro football
players so vilified by President Trump. Too bad Mr. Pence didn’t take a knee.
How will
his defiant gesture be interpreted? As a rebuff to North Korea? As a rebuff to
both Koreas? As a statement of opposition to reunification—or to peace on the
peninsula? Take your choice. But you can bet that North Korea will see it differently
from what the United States may have meant.
As later
histories often reveal, misunderstandings during acute tension can lead to
absurd miscalculations that look comical in retrospect—or highly dangerous. Several
episodes during the Vietnam War were revealed at a joint
1997 conference in Hanoi of former US and North Vietnamese officials.
Comparing
notes, they discovered what a pivotal mistake Washington had made in reading elaborate
meaning into a coincidence more than three decades earlier. On Feb. 7, 1965,
several months before US ground troops were deployed to South Vietnam, North
Vietnamese forces attacked an American advisers’ compound and airfield at
Pleiku, killing eight Americans and wounding numerous others. On that day,
McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, happened to be in Saigon assessing
the military situation for President Lyndon B. Johnson. And on the same day,
the Soviet Premier, Aleksei Kosygin, was visiting Hanoi.
It was the first attack directly on
Americans, and since it coincided with the Bundy and Kosygin visits, Washington
read it as a calculated policy move by Hanoi. In retaliation, the US began
bombing North Vietnam.
Americans at the conference asked
why Hanoi had made the assault then. Across the table, Lieut Gen. Dang Vu Hiep,
a former deputy of the North Vietnamese Army’s political department, then
stationed near Pleiku, explained: “This was a spontaneous attack by the local
commander,” he said, who had acted under general orders to do it when ready. The
assault by 30 commandos had been planned long in advance; the timing was
coincidental. “We did not know Bundy was in Saigon. We were just attacking,” said
General Hiep. He told me during a recess that Kosygin “was not pleased” but
apparently didn’t feel free to say so publicly.
This came as a revelation to Robert
McNamara, defense secretary at the time, who had led the way in organizing the
1997 conference. Had he known about the accident of timing, he said, “I think
we’d have put less weight on it and put less interpretation on it as indicative
of North Vietnam’s aggressiveness.”
Mutual suspicion is a lens through
which innocent mistakes can be distorted into assumptions of malice. As one effort
to get negotiations going, for example, the American Ambassador to Poland, John
Gronouski, was scheduled to meet with the North Vietnamese Ambassador on Dec.
6, 1966 to receive a reply to a proposal for talks. Gronouski waited in the
office of the Polish Foreign Minister, Adam Rapacki, but the Vietnamese envoy
did not show up. For 30 years this had been interpreted as a rebuff.
But at the conference, a retired
Vietnamese diplomat, Nguyen Dinh Phuong, gave another version. He had been
dispatched from Hanoi to Warsaw for the meeting, he said. He had arrived on
Dec. 3 (a day that bombing was resumed) and waited with his ambassador at the
North Vietnamese Embassy on Dec. 6. ''We waited the whole day,'' he said, ''but
the US Ambassador did not show up. On the 7th, the US bombed more forcefully in
downtown Hanoi. We concluded that the U.S. did not want to have negotiations.''
Today it would be wishful thinking
to imagine that North Korea wants negotiations that might lead to a reduction
or elimination of its nuclear arsenal, which is clearly regarded as a deterrent
against an American attack. But at the brink of war, amid mutual vilification,
the chance of miscalculation is high. If there were ever a moment for direct
dialogue to reduce the probability of military accident, this would be it. At
least South Korean President Moon Jae-in has been invited by Ms. Kim, at the
behest of her brother, to visit Pyongyang, where even fruitless talks might ease
tensions.
As for the US and North Korea, perhaps
secret communications are ongoing, although no such indication could be seen in
Mr. Pence’s frosty demeanor in the vicinity of Ms. Kim. Contacts wouldn’t be technically
hard to arrange. North Korea has a delegation in New York at the UN, and both
countries have embassies in third countries, where their ambassadors or other
staff could converse—provided they didn’t get confused about where they were
supposed to meet.
