See and raise
Nuclear poker with North Korea
Elliott Brown
If, sometime in the next decade, simultaneous nuclear explosions destroyed Tokyo and Jerusalem, they would likely have more in common than bad luck and unseasonable heat. In all likelihood, the warheads creating the explosions would share a striking familial resemblance. The missiles that delivered them would be nearly identical, and those responsible for their launching would both be members of the “Axis of Evil.”
Iran and North Korea are not part of the Axis by accident. When U.S. President George W. Bush used the phrase “Axis of Evil” — originally coined by his former speechwriter David Frum as the “Axis of Hatred”— he was connecting the dots between seemingly disparate threats to American security. Whatever the validity of the “Axis of Evil” argument vis-à-vis Iraq, the connections between the other two members are clear and disturbing.
Iran and North Korea both shopped for parts and advice from the nuclear bazaar of Pakistani A.Q. Khan, and the two are known to have collaborated on missile development, including the short-range Rodong and likely the longer-range Taepodong.
However, some on the Axis are more evil than others. To call North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), would imply acceptance of several untruths: that there is a functioning state government in North Korea, that the actions of that “government” serve in any sense the interests of its subjects, and that a state that executes its citizens for accidentally sitting on newspaper images of its past or present political leaders is plausibly democratic.
For all of its proclaimed self-reliance, or juche, North Korea has always depended upon outside aid to survive. Despite early successes with central planning, North Korea began falling behind its Southern sibling in the 1970s. In response, Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s “Great Leader,” undertook massive foreign loans, on which he promptly defaulted. Then, rather than reform and diminish his own power, the elder Kim allowed inertia and aid from China and the Soviet Union to carry his regime through the 1980s.
After the Cold War, Russian aid dried up and Chinese aid dwindled, as did North Korea’s heavily-subsidized trade with its neighbours. Cast upon its own resources and left in the hands of the Great Leader’s laconic son, Kim Jong Il (the “Dear Leader”), North Korea’s state-run economy simply failed, shrinking by about half from 1990 to 1998. While the economy atrophied, the North Korean military — the fifth largest in the world — did not, and the share of North Korea’s GDP that went to military expenditures rose from about a quarter to perhaps more than half. The result was mass-starvation.
This necessitated a new strategy: blackmail.
First in 1994, and again in 2002, North Korea threatened to develop nuclear weapons to secure foreign aid. And so, it seems, the “Axis of Evil” obscures another very important difference between Iran and North Korea. While Iran has denied that it seeks nuclear weaponry when it probably does, North Korea has claimed that it has nuclear weapons when it probably does not (at least not of the easily deliverable sort). In short, Iran does not want to provoke the United States and its allies. Kim Jong Il’s regime, by contrast, must be as provocative as possible in order to survive.
Clearly, Kim will never undertake reforms any more than he will disarm, because both courses of action threaten his survival. Providing North Korea with food and energy aid preserves only the military, while engaging Pyongyong in talks on its terms provides a forum for blackmail, not for a negotiated settlement.
So far the six-party talks, with China and South Korea playing both sides, have served Kim’s interests. However, the United States is still in a position of strength, buttressed by its own conventional and nuclear deterrents, and soon by its missile defence system. Kim would never survive any attempt to use his putative nukes, and he knows it.
In this context, recurrent threats to submerge North Korea’s enemies in a “sea of fire” are not just lines from lacklustre haiku composed by bored Pyongyang bureaucrats. They are an integral part of North Korean foreign policy. Without its military, the Kim regime is little more than an irrelevant aberration, a fossil of the Cold War presiding over a de-industrialised quasi-state.
Without foreign aid to divert, the regime would continue to disintegrate, and the wretched peasants of the “hermit kingdom,” left to themselves, would continue to discover their nascent sense of independence, born of the famine and the realisation that the state is as irrelevant to them as it is to outsiders.
Indeed, how seriously must we take North Korea? How seriously can we take any government where the corpse of the former head of state still signs decrees? The answer becomes clear when one considers the regime’s recent insistence that its citizens “trim [their] hair in accordance with socialist lifestyle” in order to reduce the needless expenditure of calories and help conserve the food supply. That such a policy would be promulgated indicates more than the abominable cretinism that prevails in Pyongyang. It is a previously unthinkable admission that North Korea cannot even get subsistence agriculture right.
Not that Kim Jong Il, with his luxurious bouffant, trademark tracksuit and four-inch heels, is looking any thinner than usual. The continued existence of this hereditary kleptocracy is as absurd as it is abhorrent, and the sooner the Kim regime is eradicated, the better for all concerned. Dislodging Kim will be a difficult task, but it is clear that appeasing him will not work. It’s a game of nuclear poker. Kim is playing up the only card in his hand, and he’s likely bluffing. As Kurt Campbell has written, “Korea is the land of lousy options.” For the United States, folding is not one of them.
Elliot Brown is pursuing a master’s degree in political studies.
