By Andrei Lankov | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 18, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Apr 27, 2009
Over the past few months, North Korea's behavior has grown unusually belligerent, even by Pyongyang's prickly standards. The North has cut relations with Seoul, tested a new missile, and, after the U.N. condemned the launch last week, threatened to withdraw forever from further nuclear-disarmament talks and restart its weapons program.
Much of the recent commentary has suggested that these moves are a ploy—an attempt by North Korea to sweeten a coming deal with the United States—and that ultimately, Pyongyang will give up its provocations and open to the outside world, as China has. This is a dangerous fantasy. Kim Jong Il and his circle know that exposing their subjects to foreign influence would be fatal to the regime. So they're likely to continue clamping down and provoking the West. There's only one way for outsiders to stop Kim's aggression: regime change.
North Korea will never follow the Chinese path because its circumstances are profoundly different. The biggest factor is the existence of a rich and free South Korea across the border. Southerners share the same language and culture as the dirt-poor North, but their per capita income is at least 20 times higher—and at the moment, average North Koreans are ignorant of the gap. The regime's self-imposed isolation is so draconian that even owning a tunable radio set is a crime. If North Korea started reforming, it would be flooded with information about South Korea's prosperity. This would make North Koreans less fearful of the authorities and more likely to push for unification with their far richer cousins, just as the East Germans pushed to rejoin the West.
Knowing all this, North Korea's rulers will do whatever they can to maintain control. Given the weakness of its Stalinist economy, this means coming up with new ways to squeeze aid from the outside world. In order to keep the money flowing—with as few conditions as possible—Kim is likely to continue engaging in risky brinkmanship and blackmail. To survive, Pyongyang has to be, or appear to be, dangerous and unpredictable.
But such tactics could easily lead to disaster. The only way to avoid this is to replace the regime.
That's easier said than done: Military options are unthinkable. And sanctions won't work either, since China and Russia are unlikely to cooperate fully. Even if Moscow and Beijing did go along, the only likely result would be a lot of dead farmers. North Korea's great famine of 1996–99 demonstrated that the locals do not rebel when oppressed, even under terrible circumstances. North Koreans are terrified, disorganized and still largely unaware of any alternative to their misery.
The best way to speed things up is for Washington and its allies to push for active engagement with the North in the form of development aid, scholarships for North Korean students and support for all sorts of activities that bring the world to North Korea or take North Koreans outside their cocoon. Such exchanges are often condemned as a way of appeasing dictators, but the experience of East Europe showed that an influx of uncensored information from the outside is deadly for a communist dictatorship.
Pyongyang understands the danger of such exchanges, but it needs money and technology badly enough that it might allow them nonetheless—so long as they fill its coffers and don't look too dangerous. This is even more the case when exchanges ostensibly benefit members of the elite. For example, a scholarship program to study overseas would go mostly to students from top families. Yet this wouldn't limit its impact: experience of the outside world will change these young people and turn some of them into importers of dangerous information. A similarly small step helped to unravel the Soviet Union: the first group of students allowed to study in the U.S., in 1957, numbered just four and were carefully selected. Yet two grew up to become leading reformers, and one of them—Alexander Yakovlev—is often credited as having been the real mastermind behind perestroika.
This approach will take time, but it's the only one likely to work. The sole way to make North Korea less dangerous is to change its government. And the only way to do that is to change the North Korean people themselves.
Lankov is an associate professor of North Korean history at Kookmin University in Seoul and travels frequently to the North.
Review
I disagree with the writer that regime change is the only option to make North Korea less dangerous. The writer said that the only way to overthrow the North Korea's communist government is through it's people. However, as shown by the great famine of 1996-1999, many of the North Koreans would rather die than oppose the government. Hence, the method the writer proposed may not work. Also, if Kim Jong II felt that his rule is threatened, he may take radical actions and start a nuclear warfare with the United States.
North Korea is currently one of the world's top ten producers of fresh fruit and the 15th largest producer of apples in the world. It has substantial natural resources and is the world's 18th largest producer of iron and zinc, having the 22nd largest coal reserves in the world. It is also the 15th largest fluorite producer and 12th largest producer of copper and salt in Asia. Other major natural resources in production include lead, tungsten, graphite, magnesite, gold, pyrites, fluorspar and hydropower. Therefore, I disagree with the author's statement that "Kim is likely to continue engaging in risky brinkmanship and blackmail. To survive, Pyongyang has to be, or appear to be, dangerous and unpredictable."
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