Overthrowing Kim: A Capitalist Manifesto (Part 1)by Joshua Stanton
Within the next 48 hours, South Korea is expected to announce that North Korea torpedoed and sank the warship Cheonan and killed 46 of her crew. Among the evidence the multinational investigation will cite will be the North Korean serial number on the torpedo’s propeller, recovered from the ocean floor. The sinking of the Cheonan may be the most serious North Korean provocation since 1968 — unless you think its recent nuclear proliferation to Syria still is — and yet the conventional wisdom is at a loss for how to respond and deter the next provocation.
The sinking of the Cheonan and North Korea’s recent attempt to assassinate a high-ranking defector inside South Korea suggest that we’ve entered a dangerous new phase of the dormant Korean War. This unstable dormancy began with a 1953 cease fire, which North Korea unilaterally renounced last year. North Korea appears to have chosen a strategy of provocation like the one it pursued in the late 196o’s, when it seized the U.S.S. Pueblo, killed several American soldiers and dozens of South Koreans in cross-DMZ raids, sent a team of commandos to Seoul kill the President of South Korea, and shot down an American surveillance aircraft, killing all 31 members of its crew.
This precedent suggests that Presidents Lee and Obama will soon face greater tests. The question of how to respond to the sinking of the Cheonan may be only the first of these. The last-minute cancellation of U.S. Forces Korea’s annual Noncombatant Evacuation Operation exercise, ostensibly to avoid the appearance of panic, suggest that both governments understand the gravity of the danger. No one wants the people of Korea to hear “White Christmas” in May.
I’ve already explained why a direct military response would create an unacceptable risk of a catastrophic war and, most likely, would be precisely what Kim Jong Il needs to reconsolidate his rule and bequeath it to his unaccomplished son, Kim Jong Eun, at a time of rising discontent. Just about everyone agrees that a military response would be a bad idea. Here, the agreement ends. The same foreign policy clique that has long advocated (as Christopher Badeaux has brilliantly put it) “managing” Kim Jong Il out of headlines, inevitably by paying him until he provokes us again, is now extending the argument that we lack good military options into the false contention that we have no options at all, except the one to which they are inextricably wedded: appeasement.
In an editorial for the leftist South Korean daily The Hankyoreh, former Washington Post correspondent and oft-quoted North Korea “expert” Selig Harrison, argues that the attack is really South Korea’s fault, and that its President, Lee Myung Bak, “invited retaliation by repudiating the commitment to coexistence and eventual confederation enshrined in the two summit declarations negotiated with Kim Dae Jang (sic) and Roh Moo Hyun.” The argument is so repulsive that it makes Harrison’s misspelling of Kim Dae Jung’s name seem like a trivial error. In his misbegotten career as the closest thing Kim Jong Il has to an ambassador to the United States, Selig Harrison has managed to be wrong about so many things — from North Korea’s uranium program, to its supposed interest in economic reform, to the sincerity of its commitments to disarmament, to the health of Kim Il Sung just days before his death — that one wonders why newspapers still bother to quote him at all, aside from the frequency with which he carries messages back from his friends in Pyongyang.
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By comparison, the argument of former Los Angeles Times editor Tom Plate is merely vapid, though he still manages to be smug and cruel at the same time. Just as thousands of South Korean mothers, wives, and children grieved at the funerals 46 young sailors stolen from them in an unprovoked attack, Plate saw the silver lining in it all. By now, you suspect me of putting words in his mouth:
There thus may be a silver lining in the Cheonan cloud. In a timely public briefing by the Korean Studies Institute of the University of Southern California, a major private university here in Los Angeles, a pair of teamed experts argue that even if the North is found definitively culpable, the South has few military options. And so, conclude USC’s Prof. David C. Kang and Leif-Eric Easley, a visiting scholar from Harvard, we need to accept that yet more of the same back-and-forth military and diplomatic counter-punching will get us nowhere. They write: “We believe that such a ’status quo’ is unsustainable for North Korea ― there are simply too many factors coming to a head in the near future. South Korea and the United States, working closely with Japan and China, need to press hard for a deal with North Korea, before more costly scenarios unfold.”
They are right. No other course takes either side anywhere rational. The time now is as propitious as it will ever be. For if in fact the North did the nasty deed, the cruel incident may yet be but another example of an infantile North Korea throwing its rattle out of its playpen, as if in desperate cry for help. What else makes sense?
Before I answer the question that Mr. Plate can’t, let’s acknowledge what will be obvious to more serious thinkers: Kim Jong Il is a democidal despot and with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and one of the world’s largest standing armies. Only a fool analyzes a problem so complex and so dangerous by infantilizing it. Only a recidivist fool continues to argue for a policy that has been as demonstrable a failure as the appeasement of Kim Jong Il. I will leave it to others to explain the kind of mind that blames an attack like this on its victims.
It is true, however, that many factors are indeed “coming to a head” in North Korea. Kim Jong Il’s health is visibly declining, and this is forcing him to transfer power to a son with no military accomplishments to legitimize his rule. Generous and unconditional aid from previous leftist South Korean administrations helped compensate for the continuing decline of North Korea’s official economy, but now, South Korea’s left is out of power and President Lee has put sensible conditions on aid that North Korea refused to meet. Most significantly, and as I will explain in greater detail in the next installments of this essay, North Korea’s political and economic systems are disintegrating from the bottom up. This means that Kim Jong Il needs conflict to divert the attention of his people toward foreign enemies, to give his son the legitimacy of wartime leadership, and to extract more extortion from his neighbors. The Kims desperately need to show their people that only they possess the brazenness to deliver extortion from foreign enemies. Clearly, what is needed now is the restoration of deterrence, not escalation, not panic, and not more incentives for extortion.
Yet what Harrison and Plate inexplicably continue to advocate meets Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. For decades, America and South Korea spent billions of dollars in aid and investment in North Korea in a futile effort to build cultural and economic links to its society. The problem with this idea, best exemplified by South Korea’s Sunshine Policy, is that the North Korean regime would never tolerate significant outside contact or influence. Consequently, South Korea has nothing to show for this gargantuan expenditure today but the graves of its dead and the red ink on its investors‘ balance sheets. North Korea always kept South Korea’s investments hermetically sealed from all but its most loyal subjects, and is now well into the process of confiscating what remains of them. South Korea’s money hasn’t made North Korea any less isolated, brutal, or dangerous. It merely extended Kim Jong Il’s misrule for another decade or two.
America’s “management” of North Korea has been an even more consequential failure. Two agreed frameworks, both of them backed by the collective naivete of much of our foreign policy brain trust, accomplished little more than confirming to Iran that it, too, could get away with going nuclear. During the second of these agreed frameworks, extracted from a beaten-down second-term President Bush, our diplomats plowed blithely along as North Korea obfuscated its way out of every element of meaningful disarmament, and even as it was was caught red-handed selling a nuclear reactor to Syria. (Israel, thankfully, was less indulgent.)
Since President Obama’s inauguration, North Korea has tested an ICBM and a nuclear weapon, has frequently used its official state media to threaten the cities and airliners of its neighbors, and has repeatedly been caught selling arms to Iran, for the probable use of its terrorist clients. In response, President Obama declined to restore North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Even those of us who disagree with the current structure of America’s forces in South Korea cannot deny that North Korea’s proliferation represents a threat to the United States itself, and that this is a dangerous time to show weakness. Proliferation must have consequences, and so must outrages like the sinking of the Cheonan. As Christian Whiton argues in The Wall Street Journal, to do nothing invites more of the same provocations that, when sufficiently escalated, have always paid off for Kim Jong Il.
In the immediate term, we need a deterrent against the next escalation, a deterrent that is at once restrained and credible. The answer is not to let ourselves be extorted again, or to be baited into escalating a direct military conflict. It is to take decisive and patient action to exploit the economic and political weaknesses of Kim Jong Il’s regime, action that restores short-term deterrence and offers a long-term solution to the proliferation threat North Korea represents.
Tomorrow, I will begin to propose another approach to North Korea that serves both of these objectives.
Joshua Stanton blogs at OneFreeKorea.
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