Looming Korean nuclear crisis shows world’s need for deep thinking like George Yeo’s
- North Korea’s nuclear development and South Korea’s interest in its own nuclear weapons programme bode ill for hopes of denuclearising the peninsula
- Bringing China and the US together to make the world safer requires sharp observations like those of Singapore’s former foreign minister
Geopolitical commentary can be invaluable, but not all analyses return good payback for your time and attention. Commentary that is done quick on the draw can lack perspective and twist in the wind; even those drawn from deeper wells can take too long to surface. Then there is a brand that says it knows what it thinks without knowing much at all.
These diplomats are respected across a global range of geopolitics and ideologies. Western journalists with the desire to want to know what Asians think would learn more from this quartet than from the usual sources.
Yeo, educated at Cambridge and Harvard, stitches his wide-ranging musings into a rich tapestry of conversational observations about people, places and policies which gives lie to the stereotype of little Singapore as some state asylum of mental provincials. His writings reflect almost everything under the sun with which his Singapore was involved during his career, which, as it turns out, was just about everything out there worth reflection.
The calibration of China’s own game comes across especially well in Yeo’s musings about the Korean peninsula. He begins by stating China’s default view – “no war, no instability, no nuclear weapons”.
There is no future for South Korea, not to mention North Korea, in taking the anti-China line any more than, for example, Canada becoming noxiously anti-American. Asian nations must live with China as a gigantic neighbour that cannot be trifled with.
Is China’s ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy in retreat?
In terms of missile capabilities, Beijing is closer to Pyongyang than Washington. The US approach towards North Korea for many years has aimed at achieving denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula but has failed to deliver. Meanwhile, Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme has continued to develop and no one – not even a pair of supposed superpowers – can seem to stop it.
North Korea has established itself as one of the world’s few states capable of nuclear warfare. South Korea is much further along economically – its GDP rivals that of Russia’s – yet it lives under the US nuclear umbrella, and this has emerged as a big issue.
This would make for a bleak future. As I follow Yeo’s passage across Asia, I see the disarmament of the Korean peninsula only beginning if China and the US can put aside their fighting and astonish the world – not to mention themselves – with a transcendent joint commitment to take the steam out of nuclear proliferation.
Who else can do the job? That is my view rather than Yeo’s, but I might not have come to it without the former foreign minister’s musings. Deep thinking is vital.
Tom Plate, Pacific Century Institute vice-president, is the distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University and the author, among a dozen other books, of Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew, in the Giants of Asia series