WASHINGTON — Seoul should be ready to deal with threats beyond North Korea as Beijing’s belligerence toward Taiwan and Pyongyang’s threats to South Korea keep growing, analysts said.
South Korea’s military readiness has long been directed to the north, as was displayed in a parade of its modern military hardware through Seoul on Tuesday to mark the 75th Armed Forces Day commemorating the founding of the country’s armed forces.
The route marched through the main commercial and business district and ended at the Gwanghwamun area, which is the gate into the heart of Seoul. North Korea conducts military parades several times a year, but it was Seoul’s first since 2013.
Speaking at Seoul Air Base in Seongnam before the parade, President Yoon Suk Yeol said South Korea would bolster the country’s defense industry and warned North Korea its regime would be “brought to an end by an overwhelming response” if it used nuclear weapons.
South Korea manufactures arms, such as the tanks, drones and ballistic missiles featured in the parade, to defend against its main adversary, North Korea.
North Korea has been conducting a series of missile launches this year, including several intercontinental ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and satellites that failed to take off.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said at a key parliamentary meeting that the regime’s “nuclear force-building policy has been made permanent as the basic law of the state,” according to the country’s state-run KCNA on Thursday. Kim also blamed the “triangular military alliance” among the U.S., South Korea and Japan for elevating threats by forming an “Asian-version NATO.”
Analysts say that while South Korea is taking a stronger military posture against North Korea, its defense strategies must also deal with threats from China, especially as a possibility exists for a two-front conflict initiated by the two autocratic states.
“South Korea absolutely should prepare to deal with threats beyond North Korea,” said Markus Garlauskas, former national intelligence officer for North Korea on the National Intelligence Council at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He’s now director of the Indo-Pacific Initiative of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.
“It’s clear from South Korea’s defense white papers and its defense acquisitions that Seoul has already begun to prepare to deal with threats beyond North Korea,” Garlauskas said. “But Seoul has been understandably reluctant to be too explicit about what countries it finds threatening. However, this reluctance is slowly fading. China poses an increasingly clear threat to the security interests of South Korea, and I do expect that, over time, Seoul will be more willing to directly acknowledge and confront this threat.”
Garlauskas wrote in a paper published in August about the possibility of a two-front nuclear war breaking out in East Asia – one initiated by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and the other by a North Korean attack on the South.
“The U.S. and its allies can no longer think about conflicts with the PRC and North Korea in isolation from each other” but “must take urgent action to prepare for the possibility of facing limited nuclear attacks in an East Asia conflict scenario,” he said in the paper.
Source : VOA News
