Morton H. Halperin
JEJU ― Recent calls from the U.S. Congress for the redeployment of tactical nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula stems from Republicans’ “romance” with them, a former senior Washington official said, dismissing its possibility.
“The Republican Party has always had a romance with tactical nuclear weapons. They have always seen them as a way to reduce the need for manpower and to reduce the size of the budget,” Morton H. Halperin, former U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, told The Korea Herald last week.
“It is a foolish idea. I don’t think there is any chance that this administration will do it, and I don’t think there is any chance any future administrations will do. Remember? It was George Bush who took the nuclear weapons out of not only Korea, but all of Asia.”
Halperin, currently a senior advisor at the Open Society Foundations, was here last week to attend the 7th Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity on the southern resort island. The three-day international forum ended on Saturday.
As North Korea has been pursuing nuclear warheads and delivery capabilities, a debate here over the need to draw up measures against it has been reignited.
One of them was to revise a Seoul-Washington agreement that bans Korea from developing a ballistic missile with a range of longer than 300 kilometers. Halperin said the range extension will not be easy.
“It is going to be difficult. I think the issue of Korea deciding that it uses a nuclear option to deal with North Korea is a potentially most explosive issue in the relationship between the U.S. and Korea,” he said. “I think we need to find a creative way to deal with it including continuing to make efforts to persuade North Korea to denuclearize.”
Asked whether Korea’s military should also pay more attention to potential threats from neighboring states such as China and Japan given it has focused primarily on deterring North Korea, Halperin said that those states will not pose any military threat to Korea.
As China and Japan have constantly challenged Korea’s sovereignty to Ieodo, south of Jeju Island, and its easternmost islets of Dokdo, respectively, security experts here have called for strengthening naval defense.
“It is quite startling how intensely nations fight about trivial pieces of land when they have much larger pieces of land. I think South Korea should focus its military efforts on containing North Korea. I don’t think they will pose a military threat to Korea in any time,” he said.
For such belief, he underscored that power in this modern world comes from economic capability, not from military power.
“It is true that the Chinese military capability has been growing because it has more economic power. But the fact is that China had a nuclear weapon a very long time ago, and nobody paid the slightest attention to it,” he said.
“It (China) was seen to be a great power and becoming a great power when it developed economic capability to influence things around the world through its assistance programs, through its trade through its investment, that is where power is now, it is not in military force.”
He also dismissed concerns that the U.S. could be reluctant to get engaged in another war in Asia, possibly on the Korean Peninsula, due to public fatigue over a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I think people said the same thing at the end of the Vietnam War. They said the U.S. will never go to war again on the Asian continent. That even turned out not to be accurate. American people get over this quite quickly,” he said.
The U.S. has reportedly abandoned its long-held strategy to fight two wars at the same time and adopted the so-called “one plus strategy” in which it fights a war while deterring another. This has triggered concerns over peninsular security.
“I think people see an enormous difference between situations of insurgency warfare in a not very developed country with a worry about the commitment of the people to the government they were supporting. They worry about whether there is a viable political structure in it,” he said.
“That is not at all in the case of Korea. I don’t have any doubt that if there was a war on the Korean Peninsula, which I think is extraordinarily unlikely, that the U.S. will stand with South Korea.”
Asked if he agrees that Korea will become one of the most endangered states should the U.S. security commitment become unreliable amid China’s possible regional preeminence, he said it is unlikely.
In his latest book, “Strategic Vision,” Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, listed South Korea as one of the “geographically most endangered states” along with Georgia, Taiwan, Belarus and several others.
“I think that is thinking that comes out of a different century and a different generation. I don’t think the world works that way any more. I think the behavior of state is much more affected by its own people and by its domestic political situation, particularly in a country like Korea, which is now firmly, clearly a democratic state,” he said.
“Moreover, I think that China, for a very long time, will remain focused. I think it has been since the current regime came to power, on its own internal economic development. China is still a very poor country and I don’t think it will seek to dominate the Republic of Korea.”
By Song Sang-ho
(
sshluck@heraldcorp.com)
(단독) 美 전술핵 재배치 '어리석은 생각'
전 미국 국방정책담당 차관 몰튼 핼퍼린은 최근 미 하원의 한반도 전술핵 재배치 주장에 대해 “어리석은 생각”이며 워싱턴 정부가 이와 같은 주장을 받아들일 가능성은 현재, 그리고 앞으로도 희박하다고 말했다.
그는 코리아 헤럴드와의 단독 인터뷰에서 이와 같은 주장은 미 공화당의 전술핵에 대한 “로맨스” 때문이라고 일축했다. 그는 공화당이 전술핵을 통해서 군 인력과 예산을 줄일 수 있다고 주장해왔다고 설명했다.
그는 또한 한국국방이 지나치게 북한에 초점을 맞추는 것에서 벗어나 지역 내 잠재적 위협에도 관심을 가져야 하지 않겠냐는 기자의 질문에 중국이나 일본은 한국에게 군사적 위협이 되지 않을 것이라고 말했다.
특히 오늘날의 권력은 군사력보다는 경제력에서 나오는 것이라며, 중국은 그간 경제력을 바탕으로 국제사회에 영향력을 행사할 수 있었다고 주장했다.
미국의 국방예산 삭감으로 인한 한반도 안보 공약 약화의 우려에 대해서는, 한반도의 전략적 가치로 볼 때 그럴 가능성은 매우 낮다고 말했다.
최근 보도에 따르면 미국은 두 개의 동시전쟁 전략을 포기하는 새로운 정책을 채택하였고 이것은 한반도 안보에 관한 우려를 불러 일으켰다.
핼퍼린은 현재 오픈 소사이어티 연구소 선임 연구원이며 존슨, 닉슨, 클린턴 행정부에서 국방관련 주요 직책을 맡은바 있다.
(코리아 헤럴드 송상호 기자)