Congress visits the DMZ: GOP Rep. warns of ‘nightmare scenario’ on Korean Peninsula
Jerry Dunleavy
Video Embed
Demilitarized Zone, SOUTH KOREA — A bipartisan group of congressmen led by the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee visited the Korean DMZ on Wednesday, expressing concern that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un could take advantage of a possible China-Taiwan conflict.
The bipartisan House members, led by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, visited the Korean Demilitarized Zone as part of their two-day visit to South Korea following a stop in Japan earlier this week. The Washington Examiner accompanied the delegation on its rainy morning visit. There are roughly 28,000 U.S. troops stationed across South Korea.
The Wednesday visit included a tightly controlled U.S. military bus tour of Panmunjom and parts of the Joint Security Area operated by the United States and South Korea. The House members, who often huddled under umbrellas to avoid the torrential downpour, also went on a small tour of some of the overlook points into North Korea and into one of the famous peace negotiation buildings located right on the Military Demarcation Line dividing both countries.
Members of the delegation said the zone and its echoes of the past are especially relevant given the threat of a nuclear North Korea, rising tensions with China, and the conflict in Ukraine.
“I do worry about a Taiwan Strait conflict where Kim Jong Un sees an opportunity and tries to take advantage of it,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) told the Washington Examiner. “That would just be a nightmare scenario for the world.
“The bigger picture is that the threat from North Korea and its backers aren’t just a South Korea problem. It’s an East Asia problem. It’s a regional problem. It’s a global problem at this point. And now Kim Jong Un has operational ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles] — if they can reach Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., then they can reach Paris, they can reach Moscow, Beijing — really anywhere in the world.”
Waltz added: “Here at the DMZ is an appreciation that the Korean War just didn’t end in 1953. It wasn’t just an armistice and it’s over. The American soldiers and the South Korean soldiers here are in harm’s way day in and day out, whether it’s land mines, whether it’s attacks from the North Koreans — anything can spark off a conflict up here. And we just have to appreciate the men and women that are up here keeping this situation stable and keeping the world safe.”
The Republican congressman said he worried “that it’s a little too up in the air what our allies are going to do in a Taiwan Strait scenario” and argued that “the way to keep the peace is to show resolve.”
He said the goal should be to “provide a united front” to Chinese leader Xi Jinping and that the message should be that the U.S., South Korea, Japan, and other East Asian allies “all will resist him invading the democracy that Taiwan is.”
North Korea has also assisted Russia militarily during the invasion of Ukraine, and China has provided the Kremlin with rhetorical, financial, economic, and, at minimum, nonlethal military support.
“It just shows how desperate Putin has become … so he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel,” Waltz said. “But at the same time, if China opens up its arsenals, if North Korea opens up its arsenals, particularly in artillery, that could be a real game-changer, in my view, because everyone’s stocks are starting to run low. … And so I think the Biden administration needs to set some really clear red lines and stick to them.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessed in February this year that North Korea has recently “timed its missile launches and military demonstrations to counter U.S.-South Korea exercises probably to attempt to coerce the United States and South Korea to change their behavior and counteract South Korean President Yoon’s hardline policies toward the North.”
ODNI added that Kim “is continuing efforts to enhance North Korea’s nuclear and conventional capabilities targeting” the U.S. and its allies.
The U.S. and South Korean military resumed large-scale military drills in November 2022 after the joint exercises were suspended by former President Donald Trump in 2018 as part of his unsuccessful negotiations with North Korea’s leader, which failed to convince the North Koreans to give up their nuclear weapons program.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Trump was also the first sitting American president to cross the DMZ into North Korea when he briefly did so in June 2019. Although other U.S. presidents have visited the observation post overlooking the DMZ, Trump became the first to meet a North Korean leader at the DMZ.
A potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and the U.S. response to it, inevitably revives memories of the Korean War, because the U.S. and Communist Party-led China first met on the battlefield in Korea.
The war began when the Soviet Union-allied North Koreans invaded South Korea in 1950. The U.S.-led United Nations Command was, at first, pushed back to the southern tip of South Korea, but the daring Incheon landing allowed the U.S. and international forces, joined by South Koreans, to hammer the North Koreans.
Yet the CCP military’s invasion of North Korea and, soon, of South Korea that year eventually turned the war into a bloody stalemate near what is now the DMZ. The new Wall of Remembrance on the U.S. National Mall lists the names of 36,574 U.S. service members who died in the war, as well as the names of the more than 7,200 South Koreans who were killed augmenting the U.S. Army. South Korea lost 58,217 soldiers during the war, according to the U.S. Army’s Military Review, while North Korean and Chinese forces losses “remained unclear, with estimations as high as 1.5 million.” The Chinese government officially acknowledges that nearly 200,000 Chinese troops were killed, but the real death toll is believed to be significantly higher.