The Lesson of North Korea
Appeasing a tyrant leads to disaster.
opinionjournal.com
Hand-wringing has become the main form of exercise for our chattering classes and this has never been more evident than over the holiday season when, tired of agonizing over Trent Lott's fate, they seemed to discover that a nuclear North Korea is a danger to us all.
Predictably, this has led most of the talking heads to a pretense of puzzlement over why the Bush administration is pursuing a hard-line policy toward Iraq while merely seeking diplomatic and economic sanctions on Kim Jong Il's North Korea. The latter is even more dangerous than Iraq, they argue, so why should the U.S. go to war with Iraq instead? Conversely, if the U.S. is willing to pursue economic sanctions against Pyongyang, why pursue war against Baghdad? The best answer to all this is "get real"--North Korea is now nuclear and Iraq is not, yet.
The reason to go to war with Iraq obviously is so that it does not become a nuclear power like Pyongyang. The very reason North Korea has become a nuclear power is a decade of appeasement by previous administrations. And the reason not to go to war with North Korea is only that it has the ability, which Saddam Hussein still lacks, to turn a conventional military action into a regional nuclear war. We hawks, believe it or not, understand the difference between using military force to preclude a future nuclear conflict and initiating military action that might spark one. Those of us who, in the early 1990s, advocated a military strike on North Korea as the only way to halt its nuclear ambitions, are reluctant to advocate that course today.
Thankfully, viable military options exist for dealing with Saddam. And the Bush administration intends to pursue them over the coming winter months. The bad news is that there are no longer viable military options for dealing with North Korea. While the administration pursues diplomacy with China, Japan and Russia in an effort to pressure North Korea to fold its nuclear program, and while the U.S. may even succeed in mobilizing a coalition behind economic sanctions against North Korea, neither of these strategies is likely to achieve disarmament. Diplomacy, even backed by a credible military threat, doesn't guarantee results, as a decade of failed diplomacy with Saddam clearly demonstrates. But diplomacy absent a credible military threat inevitably is impotent.
What Pyongyang offers the world is a clear picture of the consequences of appeasement. Apologists for Saddam should see in North Korea the proof that, contrary to their wishful thinking, cajoling dictators doesn't make the world safer, but rather more dangerous. Indeed, Pyongyang's possession of plutonium with which to make bombs--and perhaps the bombs themselves--is the result of more than a decade of diplomatic duplicity between North Korea and the U.S. As long ago as the early '90s, U.S. intelligence believed North Korea had sufficient plutonium to make at least two nuclear bombs. To halt Pyongyang achieving greater nuclear capability, the Clinton administration agreed to provide North Korea oil and non-plutonium-producing reactors to meet its energy needs if it would give up its nuclear ambitions. Pyongyang agreed. Yet when confronted by the U.S. this fall with hard evidence of its nuclear capabilities, Pyongyang simply acknowledged it had lied.
As one who has visited both Baghdad and Pyongyang and interviewed Saddam if not Kim Jong Il, I see both important similarities and crucial differences between these two rogue nations. First the similarities. The most chilling one is that both are ruled by dictators whose isolation and ruthless hold over their people have left them almost completely out of touch with the real world. This is dangerous because neither ruler is responsive to the rational thinking, to the carrots and sticks, that guides action by other leaders in other countries. As counterintuitive as it may seem, Kim Jong Il is the less isolated of the two. He at least has traveled to Moscow and Beijing, where his hosts presumably gave him some small dose of reality. Saddam, by contrast, hasn't left Iraq since 1979, when he visited France shortly after seizing power. Both are surrounded by yes-men who, even if aware of outside realities, aren't courageous enough to speak truths to their puppeteer.
Both Saddam and Kim Jong Il have no compunction about torturing, murdering or, in the case of North Korea, also starving to death their own citizens in order to preserve power. Both share a belief that their best protection from threat lies in the development of weapons of mass destruction--above all nuclear weaponry. These similarities between the two are stark; the differences are in the shadings. Iraq, subjugated for nearly 25 years, remains a society largely of educated people with an economy that permits a modicum of economic enterprise and business contact with the outside world even after a decade of U.N. sanctions. Iraqis still have memories of life before Saddam, and of the oil-based prosperity of the early '80s, before Saddam led them into war with Iran, the invasion of Kuwait and the confrontation with the U.S.
If Iraqis can compare their suffering under Saddam to other times and places, North Koreans are denied even a standard of comparison. The word "society" doesn't even apply to North Korea. Over 50 years it has been transformed into a giant ant colony, subjugated and shut off from the world, in which the ants have become ever more emaciated as starvation has accompanied total regimentation. As a visitor there a decade ago, it was hard to imagine a society more servile, a people more deprived. Pyongyang's streets were empty as the average North Korean lacked even a bicycle. Unlike Baghdad, there are almost no cars, no shops, no street life--only files of ants, dressed alike, trudging with eyes downcast to slave jobs. If Iraq is the worst-ruled nation in a world we know, North Korea is of a different world.
What distinguishes the North Korean crisis from any other is the nature of North Korea. The U.S. isn't dealing with a rational adversary as with the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis. Nor is it facing a ragtag Third World regime like Afghanistan, Serbia or Libya. The U.S. is facing the world's most intransigent totalitarian regime, one with nothing to gain from peaceful coexistence and little to lose from confrontation. For such a regime, nothing is so valuable as nuclear weaponry. No other assets compare.
This is what makes North Korea even more dangerous than Iraq, where regime change can be accomplished quickly. No such swift outcome is possible in North Korea. Even if President Bush can persuade the world to withhold energy and food--a big if--North Korea's collapse won't be swift. It is accustomed to subsistence. China, which provides oil to its ally, and South Korea and Japan, which provide money, are squeamish about a collapse that would send millions of starving Koreans streaming into China and South Korea. What's more, the very specter of starvation blamed on the absence of Western food aid rather than on the intransigence of Kim Jong Il, will be hard for the world to stomach.
Even if airtight sanctions are agreed on, a desperate regime in Pyongyang might conclude it has nothing left to lose and go to war with South Korea. The point here is there are no good options left for dealing with a nuclear North Korea whose ruler knows his very survival depends on retaining a nuclear capability. Indeed, the lesson Kim Jong Il almost surely has deduced from the impending war with Iraq is that all that stands between his fate and Saddam's is his credible confession that he has nuclear capability and a credible fear abroad he might use it. His surprising confession was prompted by concerns for his own security.
But the lesson we must draw from the North Korean crisis is that we cannot pursue a policy of appeasement that permits Iraq to become another nuclear North Korea. |
