Tensions are higher between the two Koreas. A protest in South Korea before the North’s rocket launching.

By CHOE SANG-HUN


Before North Korea launched on April 5 what it called a rocket carrying a communications satellite but Washington called an intercontinental ballistic missile, President Obama and his South Korean counterpart, Lee Myung-bak, agreed on the need for a“stern, united”international response.

But with two American journalists detained in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, the United States watched the launching with interest.

After reviewing detailed tracking data, military and civilian experts said that the missile and payload had fallen into the sea. But North Korea portrayed the launching as a success, and the effort was the government’s latest of a string of attempts at negotiating by provocation.

“We will surely win,”the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, said during his recent birthday party, according to the March 28 edition of Rodong Sinmun, Pyongyang’s main state-run newspaper. Rodong then explained Mr.Kim’s tactic:“If our sworn enemies come at us with a dagger, he brandishes a sword. If they train a rifle at us, he responds with a cannon.”

Among North Korea watchers, Mr.Kim’s tactic is known as“brinkmanship.”It is a term they often use to explain politics behind the North’s rocket launching and its detention and impending indictment of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, both reporters of San Franciscobased Current TV, who were arrested by North Korean soldiers at the border with China on March 17.

The collapse of the Communist bloc in the early 1990s left North Korea with few friends. Since then, North Korea, a dictatorship well armed but unable to feed its own people without foreign aid, has specialized in provoking the international community for survival.

Whenever it failed to get concessions in negotiations or there were changes of governments abroad, the North raised tensions, wangling an invitation to talks and extracting fresh aid while never giving up its nuclear weapons program.

That is what it did when it withdrew from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in 1993 and began stockpiling plutonium; when it tested its first ballistic missile over Japan in 1998; when its warships clashed with the South Korean Navy in 1999 and 2002; and when it tested its first nuclear device in 2006.

These movements forced reluctant governments in Washington and Seoul to the negotiating table for talks that often resulted in more aid to North Korea. In return, North Korea agreed to work toward ending its nuclear program - a promise it quickly stalled or reversed. It had to, experts say, because the program is its only major bargaining chip.

North Korea was forced to recalibrate its strategy again after Mr.Lee, a conservative, came to power in Seoul a year ago, ending a decade of aid without conditions from the South. Meanwhile, Mr.Obama took office in Washington in January, giving Mr.Kim a reason to grab Washington’s attention anew.

Since last year, the North has called Mr.Lee a“traitor”and his aides“malicious confrontational maniacs.”It has cut off dialogue with Seoul and stalled six-nation nuclear disarmament talks. A month ago, it began assembling what Washington believes is its Taepodong-2 missile at a launching pad on its northeast coast.

Then an unexpected bonanza for the Pyongyang government rolled in in the persons of Ms.Ling and Ms.Lee. The regime is now preparing to put them on trial on charges of“hostile acts”against the Communist state, a crime punishable by up to 10 years of hard labor in one of the North’s notorious prison camps.

“The journalists considerably weakened their government’s leverage against the North,”said Kim Tae-woo, a North Korea expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis in Seoul.

Washington said that the launching was a provocative test of a ballistic missile with the potential of carrying a warhead to the United States, and that it violated a United Nations resolution that bans the North from all such tests. But an American effort to punish the North at the Security Council will mean sparring with China, the closest the North has to an ally, over whether the North is entitled to launch a satellite, analysts said.

Any such move by the United States, North Korea warns, will also compel it to quit six-party talks on ending its nuclear weapons program - Washington’s top goal in dealing with North Korea.

South Korea, too, has few ways to pressure the North, except perhaps reducing the $1.8 billion worth of annual trade, the second largest volume of trade the isolated country has after China. But the South is divided between those who want to discipline the North and those who fear such a tactic would only worsen its isolation and add to the deprivation of their relatives still living there.

Tokyo has made the fate of a dozen Japanese kidnapped by North Korea a priority in dealing with the North. Although popular, that policy has seriously curtailed Tokyo’s flexibility to engage the North.

Mr.Kim is said to have suffered a stroke last August. By confronting the United States and Japan, he wants to enhance his credentials as a military leader , analysts say.

“North Korea has little to lose in this game,”said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul.“It’s a repeating pattern: Once again, North Korea’s brinkmanship is working.”