Since I published the first installment in this series yesterday, the South Korean government has released a multinational report of investigation, concluding that the ROKS Cheonan was sunk by a North Korean Yeono-class submarine firing a CHT-02D acoustic homing torpedo. The White House has issued a statement supporting the findings of the investigation and condemning North Korea for the attack. South Korea’s President is vowing to retaliate. North Korea, which denies the allegations, says any retaliation or sanctions will mean war.
If the obvious implication of North Korea’s October 2006 and May 2009 nuclear tests was the failure of diplomacy, the obvious implication of the sinking of the Cheonan is the failure of deterrence. If Kim Jong Il really feared a U.S. or South Korean military response, he would not have ordered this attack. (It is both useless and groundless to speculate that some “rogue element” ordered an operation that would have required months of detailed planning.) Conventional deterrence is failing because Kim Jong Il knows our low tolerance for risk and loss of life, limitations that he does not share. The sine qua non of deterrence is a credible threat. But Kim Jong Il no longer fears the U.S. Air Force; he only fears the people of North Korea. Specifically, he fears that they’ll do to him what the Romanians did to Nicolae Ceausescu.
Restoring deterrence still won’t disarm Kim Jong Il or prevent him from continuing to proliferate nuclear materials and technology. The only way to do that is to bring his misrule to an end at the lowest possible cost in human lives. Our challenge here is to deny Kim Jong Il the resources, the means, and the time to miniaturize, export, or launch a nuclear weapon.
To achieve this requires us to contain, constrict, and collapse Kim Jong Il’s regime through a combination of economic strangulation and political subversion.
First, contain: Allied military forces must be sufficient to deter further North Korean escalation, and to intercept the proliferation of weapons and technologies banned by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874.
Second, constrict: President Obama should build on his initial successes at constricting the flow of finance for Kim Jong Il’s regime, with the specific objective of denying him the means to pay his party officials and security forces. As I have noted, there is much more that President Obama could do to increase this pressure.
Third, collapse: The available evidence suggests that the North Korean people are deeply discontented with the regime, but have no means to organize against it. We assume this regime to be invincible to the will of its people, but last year, we learned that it isn’t. At last, an institution has risen that not even Kim Jong Il can destroy: the free market. His recent failure to suppress North Korea’s underground market economy shows us how much control he has lost over the distribution of goods and ideas. The North Korean people have shown us how to solve the most difficult problem, the logistics of contraband in the world’s most closed society. A coordinated and well-funded program of broadcasting, smuggling, and support for a political underground could quickly overload the regime’s capacity to suppress dissent, and thus create the conditions for an opposition movement to challenge it — initially in small ways, but later, for the control of villages, factories, towns, and regions.
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Of these three “C’s,” the first and the second are largely questions of will. The tools needed to constrict and contain are mostly in place now. But to collapse the Kim Dynasty will require a fundamental shift in how we view a crisis that can’t be managed away. It will require new thinking from a foreign policy establishment trapped in a loveless marriage with diplomacy for diplomacy’s sake, and a weary political establishment that sees the deployment of mechanized infantry as the only alternative. Instead, America must embrace its lost love of beneficent anarchy and learn to see the subjects of totalitarianism as friends we’ve overlooked for too long.
To deter and dethrone Kim Jong Il without instigating war, our subversion must be gradual and incremental. It must always leave open the offer of a negotiable exit. Even as Kim Jong Il’s grip on North Korea weakens, at each moment, he must see it as less risky to try to ride out the storm or accept a standing offer of safe passage to China than to provoke all-out war. That is why good diplomacy still matters.
Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Daniel Blumenthal and Leslie Forgach entitled, “Let the Kim Regime Collapse.” Abstinence from error is always a good beginning, but “let” implies passivity and beseeches the deities of maktoub to take the place of the influence it abdicates. This could be the epitaph for a generation of American policy. For the last 20 years, we have wandered in a desert between two endlessly receding horizons. One is the Agreed Framework that North Korea never quite keeps, and the other is the spontaneous regime collapse that never quite happens. Wendy Sherman, a dovish ex-adviser to President Clinton, was waiting for this collapse in 1994, two agreed frameworks and two million dead ago: “Everyone was so overwhelmed that a million or two million people were dying of starvation…. We just thought all that would bring about the collapse of the North Korean government within two or three years.” Sure, the army has guns and might eventually pull off a coup, but waiting for the unknowable isn’t a policy, and you don’t have to be a scholar or a visionary to merely talk about the weather.
I do not mean to condescend to my betters here. For years after I volunteered to serve in South Korea as a young Army officer in 1997, I also subscribed to the capitalist crisis theory that the North Korean system would collapse under the weight of its inherent contradictions. At the time, North Korea was then at the height of The Great Famine. (For those who want to gain a better understanding of this time, Barbara Demick’s new book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea is a must-read.) While Kim Jong Il allowed somewhere between 600,000 and 2.5 million North Koreans to die, he squandered resources on his military and gorged himself to corpulence on pizza and sushi prepared by personal chefs flown in from Italy and Japan. For a nominally socialist state that held a monopoly on the supply of food, this was more than obscene inequality; it was, at best, a state policy of selective malign neglect. And yet, in defiance of many predictions, hunger did not destabilize Kim Jong Il’s regime, nor will it. In fact, I believe the exact opposite to be true.
Consequently, there isn’t going to be an Orange Revolution in North Korea anytime soon — at least not a successful one. Neither Kim Jong Il nor his security forces would hesitate to open fire on any protest, and the people know it. North Korea isn’t Czechoslovakia, where the authorities doubted that their troops would shoot; it’s like Burma, where the regime has no such doubts and the troops obey. Instead, it should surprise us that there was any resistance at all during North Korea’s leanest years. I’ve chronicled an brief history of it here. Read it and you’ll notice that most of it was too fragmentary and isolated to represent a threat to this regime. Perhaps we mislead ourselves by remembering 1989 as a year of spontaneous events. But crowds did not cut holes in their flags and flood the streets spontaneously. Their dissent had developed over decades of watching the suppression of Solidarity and Charter 77, of crushed uprisings, of Radio Free Europe broadcasts, and of tacit opposition to communism by deeply rooted churches that the regimes of Eastern Europe did not dare to suppress. In the Soviet Union, there was samizdat written by dissidents and intellectuals who were famous worldwide. The security forces shared in those regimes’ advanced state of decay. They were no longer capable of the ruthless methods of Kim Jong Il.
Without pretending to offer a complete list, allow me to specify what those methods are:
Isolation. Well all know that North Korea blocks foreign broadcasts and publications. The regime also prevents information from leaking out of North Korea that could impede its access to needed foreign aid and capital. More importantly, it isolates North Koreans from each other. Most of North Korea is a rugged stitchwork of bleak towns and cities strewn along mountain valleys or rocky coastlines. News and ideas do not travel easily there. There is no domestic air service; travel between counties is slow, dangerous, and requires a pass from the authorities; mail is also slow, irregular, and censored; telephones are scarce and monitored; cell phones are banned (though increasingly available); and radios are (supposed to be) fixed to receive official broadcasts only. Aside from a few sham churches for foreign visitors, religion does not exist. Dissenters can live only in secret, or before a firing squad. Thoughtcrimes cannot propagate in a society where the slightest hint of it might mean death in a prison camp for the dissenter, and for his wife, his parents, and his children. North Koreans can barely talk to each other, much less organize an opposition.
Class Warfare. The common perception of North Korea as a purely socialist society is belied by its detailed system of political castes called songbun. Within the songbun system are 51 hereditary political classifications that often burden the children and grandchildren of class enemies as presumptively disloyal to the state. More broadly, these 51 classifications fit within three broad categories: core, waving, and hostile. In North Korea, your songbun is your destiny. Songbun is not discussed openly in North Korea, but local party authorities consider it in all of the most important decisions that control a person’s fate. With good songbun, the incompetent can enter the best schools and get the best jobs. Bad songbun relegates many talented individuals to lives of hard labor at best, and starvation at worst. Although there is some social mobility in North Korea, promotion in the songbun system is still exceedingly rare. North Koreans do not dare to show signs of disloyalty to the state because they do not want to harm the prospects of their children and grandchildren to succeed and survive.
Food as a Weapon. Since the Great Famine, North Koreans in the lower political castes have been the last to get rations and the first to starve. International aid workers noted the class disparity in the health of North Korean children as they fought in vain to ensure that their aid was going to the hungriest recipients. Americans often wonder why North Korea constrains international aid workers, rejects U.S. government food aid, and makes food such a low priority for its many hard currency purchases. But as Stalin knew, starvation can be an effective tool of repression. Conversely, the U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Manual notes, “Sometimes societies are most prone to unrest not when conditions are the worst, but when the situation begins to improve and people’s expectations rise.” Like the North Korean famine, the Scottish land clearances and the Irish potato famine resulted in much more emigration than rebellion. The starving have neither the time, the energy, nor the will to pursue anything but their next meal.
I see no explanation for the unnecessary suffering of the North Korean people that is consistent with the state possessing a sincere interest in increasing the aggregate supply of food available to them. My suspicion — one that I admittedly can’t prove — is that there is more than ruthless apathy and obscene inequality behind a state that prizes stability over everything else, yet which always seems to have enough cash laying around in European banks to spend on yachts, cars, fancy booze, weapons, and most recently, two baby African elephants for $10,000 each, and which may not even survive the trip from Zimbabwe to Pyongyang (the reports do not specify whether the elephants are white). If Kim Jong Il really wants all of his subjects to eat well, why has he gone to such trouble to ensure that they can’t?
Exhaustion. Even when a theocracy’s cultish indoctrination loses most of its power to mesmerize, it is still exhausting to bear it as much of it as North Koreans must. Workers must rise early to hear political harangues. There are more harangues in the middle of the workday, and late into the evenings. On the weekends, citizens are mobilized for “voluntary” labor, such as trash collection and agricultural work. Then there are the mobilizations — the hundred-day and 150-day “battles” and “campaigns” when workers are sent to the countryside for more agricultural labor, or to build irrigation canals. These methods are so inefficient and labor-intensive as to suggest a design to keep North Korean citizens too busy, underfed, and exhausted for them to associate freely with others of like mind.
Terror. Satellite photography has revealed the vast size of North Korea’s largest prison camps, and witnesses have escaped to describe the horrors within. The National Security Agency, commonly known as the Bowibu, runs most of the camps. Others are operated by the Inmin Pohan Seong, the Peoples’ Security Agency, commonly known as the Anjeonbu. These dreaded security forces also have agents spread out throughout North Korea’s cities and towns maintaining control through terror, increasingly by executing political and economic criminals before public firing squads, with their neighbors required to observe. The security forces have also built many smaller prison camps, largely for economic criminals. The have created a culture of extortion by Anjeonbu and Bowibu officers who shake down merchants and citizens for cash.
[A Public Execution in North Korea]
For all of these reasons, North Korea could not and still cannot develop the kind of dissident infrastructure that grew in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But within this bleak picture, one institution has finally emerged that the state cannot crush: the free market. Markets now provide most of the food that North Koreans eat, and increasingly, they also deliver cell phones, radios, DVD players, and South Korean consumer goods, junk food, movies, and TV programs:
[W]ithout people intending or even realizing the implications, some activities motivated by profit have led to more access to information: the roaring trade in imported CDs and DVDs of South Korean soap operas and movies, for instance. Since many North Koreans still don’t have enough to eat, it may seem odd that people would spend money on entertainment, but the fact is that North Koreans are hungry not only for food but also for diversion. “I would trade a meal for a South Korean movie,” said one North Korean teenager. “Food is not all you need to survive.”
The regime’s monopoly on information is breaking down, but until now, U.S. and South Korean government policies have done more to help the North Korean regime sustain its capacity to repress than we’ve done to help the North Korean people sow this bloom of subversive capitalism. That subversive power and its greater latent potential will be the subject of tomorrow’s installment.
Joshua Stanton blogs at OneFreeKorea.
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