Why US shy of no-war pact

The last non-aggression pact to be signed was in 1939 between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. For both the deal was a feint that crumbled into one of the bloodiest battles of modern history, destroying the cream of the German Army and leaving battlefields piled with the bodies of millions of Soviet dead.

Apart from the risk that such pacts are made to be broken, the intricacies of diplomacy make it virtually impossible for the US to sign a treaty, or grant more official recognition to the secretive Communist state, without infuriating almost everyone else involved.

A non-aggression clause could be part of an overall diplomatic normalisation agreement, said Choi Choon-Heum, a N Korea analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification. ‘‘But if the US accepts North Korea’s demand for a non-aggression pact, that will affect the US military presence in South Korea and raise questions over how to manage the armistice,’’ he said.

And therein lies the rub. The 1950-53 Korean war ended only with an armistice, a peace treaty has never been signed, and 37,000 US troops are stationed in South Korea as a guarantee against any repeat of such a conflict.

It would be tricky for the US to explain how it could sign a non-aggression pact, or a normalisation agreement, with Pyongyang, and at the same time find a way to maintain those troops in South Korea.

Seoul may be engaged in a ‘‘sunshine policy’’ of reconciliation with North Korea, but it would certainly not be amused by what could be seen as a US betrayal.

Washington knows Pyongyang wants it to confront just such a dilemma that would undermine its half-century alliance with South Korea. And any move towards legitimising Pyongyang would have repercussions at home at the idea of the world’s only superpower signing such a deal with an isolated Communist state the size of Minnesota whose people don’t have enough to eat.

But the US may have to do something, even if it is just to talk to North Korea as part of a multilateral international strategy to persuade it to reverse its withdrawal last week from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

A US Military official in Seoul said the demand for a non-aggression treaty is part of an old North Korean strategy to undermine the armistice and dissolve the UN Command under which US troops help defend the South. (Reuters)