A 5 year old blog post, but North Korea is very similar today -
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Stardate 20021216.1522
(Captain's log): North Korea is an example of a foreign policy problem for which there's no good solution. It's radically different from Iraq, and where I think the only acceptable solution to Iraq is military intervention, I think the only real solution for North Korea is encapsulation. It's a demonstration of the way in which the devil is in the details, and how foreign policy must be based on a detailed understanding of the local situation.
In Iraq we're dealing with what amounts to malevolence. Its leadership has certain grandiose ambitions, but based on that their behavior has been reasonably rational as a way of trying to achieve those goals. It happens to be the case that their ambition is profoundly counter to our best interests, and every way short of war which has been attempted to try to make them give up those ambitions has failed, which is part of why I think we'll have to invade. (I have discussed this many times and won't go over it again here.)
The North Korean situation is entirely different. The leadership there seems to be collectively insane; their reaction to things is difficult to predict, and sometimes even difficult to understand after the fact. It's hard to deal on any level with someone which is a raving lunatic. Except for the obvious ambition of remaining in power, it's difficult to understand just exactly what the leaders of North Korea actually want. (Remaining in power may well be the only guiding principle behind their policies.)
The good news about North Korea is that it only borders two other nations. South Korea is more populous, vastly more successful and wealthy, and probably has a better and more powerful military than North Korea. China, on the other hand, is the only great power which maintains even somewhat friendly relations with North Korea, and though it has not been threatened militarily by North Korea (that either side has admitted) it is militarily vastly more powerful than North Korea and there can be no question that it could fight off an invasion if need be. There's also a 20 km. border with Russia but it's neither militarily nor economically significant and can be ignored.
North Korea is one of two remaining Stalinist nations, the other being Cuba. They're the ashes left over from the Cold War, and the Korean DMZ is the last combat zone of the Cold War.
The diplomatic situation is somewhat complicated. Technically speaking, the Korean War never actually ended. In 1953 an armistice was signed and went into effect (more or less) but there was never actually a treaty formally ending the war. And for fifty years, there's actually been low level combat on the DMZ. It's the status quo, and it doesn't hit the news when it happens. There generally aren't many casualties, but they do happen. But the two sides exchange fire across the DMZ quite routinely. (The DMZ may well also be the most heavily mined territory on the planet.)
In a sense, the Cold War was a conflict between groups of nations embracing radically different economic and political systems, and Korea turned out to be a laboratory where the two systems were tried in tandem. North Korea fully embraced the Stalinist system of repression, socialism and centralized planning, while South Korea became capitalist and mercantile, with progressive increases over time in civil rights and embrace of the principles of democracy. In the early years, South Korea was one of the show-democracies where elections were held but the outcome was predetermined, such as exists now in Egypt. But now when elections are held in South Korea, they really do matter. South Korea is still not as much of a democracy as the US or UK, but it is far better than many nations which claim to be democratic.
It would be difficult to find any place that better demonstrates the differences between Stalinism and capitalist Democracy. A satellite night image of the region makes it graphically clear.
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Japan and Taiwan are heavily lit up. China does well, and you can clearly spot the area around Hong Kong. You can see the trans-Siberian railway, which is lined with towns. South Korea blazes with light, nowhere brighter than the region around Seoul. But North Korea is virtually black, with just a small blip of light at Pyong-Yang and nothing else whatever. Even from space, the failure of North Korea is blatantly obvious.
North Korea is an economic basket case, and the primary reason is the utter incompetence of its leadership. In the first half of the 20th century, the region which is now South Korea was almost exclusively agrarian, and the region which is now North Korea was industrialized. Korea was under Japanese rule, which was brutal but at least somewhat efficient. Korea was liberated at the end of World War II because of the defeat of Japan, and shortly thereafter was partitioned as part of Cold War politics, leading to the war there and the current partition.
Now South Korea is one of the great industrial and high-tech economies on the planet, and North Korea is among the very poorest of nations. If there is ever unification, it's clear that North Korea will be swallowed by the South culturally, politically and economically, and all remnants of the failed North Korean system will vanish as rapidly as they can be dismantled. Which is part of the problem.
Unfortunately, North Korea also has one of the larger and better armed militaries on the planet, which is another part of its problem and ours. Estimated at a million men (about 5% of the total population), it has a much larger military than it can actually afford, and the economic and political cost of maintaining it has been part of what has deep-sixed the North Korean economy. But much of their problem has been due to a continued reliance on policies gotten from the Soviet Union of collectivized farming and centralized industrial planning, which even Russia has long since repudiated and abandoned. Add to that the sheer incompetence of the government and you have a recipe for disaster, and North Korea has been living with disaster for decades.
If there's any rational explanation at all for the behavior of the North Korean government, it's been an institutional commitment to never admitting error, and to doing whatever is necessary to avoid even being forced to admit that anything that its leaders have ever done was unwise or wrong in any way. One reason for that may be that the depth of North Korean failure is now so clear that any acknowledgement of it would naturally call into question whether the existing rulers should continue to rule, and maintenance of the ruling coalition's power seems to be the primary goal of all their policies regardless of the consequences for anyone else (including the people of North Korea).
Any attempt to change or reform the North Korean system would necessarily bring the failure of the previous policies into view, which is intolerable. Thus the rulers continue those policies even though they know they won't work, and spend all their time blaming everything that goes wrong on America or the South Koreans. And as a result, North Korea is one of the places on earth where daily life approaches the hellish. The people of North Korea are subject to even more repression than in Iraq, with the added benefit of widespread starvation due to the inability of North Korea to even approach food self-sufficiency, along with the diversion by the North Korean government of external food aid to serve its own political purposes by feeding the loyal and starving anyone who might be a threat. The fact that North Korea produces far less energy per-capita than Iraq doesn't help matters. As horrible as life in Iraq currently is, life in North Korea is incomparably worse.
The result internationally has been a regime whose behavior and attitudes makes any kind of rational diplomacy prohibitively difficult. Their demands are absurd; their rhetoric is insane; and they can't be relied on to deal in good faith, indeed even to negotiate on the basis of a shared understanding of reality and common interests, let alone to honor any agreements they make. The nations which have been trying to deal diplomatically with North Korea (mainly Russia, China, South Korea, Japan and the US) all do so mainly because it represents a significant hazard to them and really can't be ignored, but all diplomacy with North Korea is extremely ginger and tentative because there's almost no way of knowing what might set them off into a fit of lunatic raving anger and denunciations. The government of North Korea demands much, offers nothing, and lives in a world of its own. Diplomacy in any traditional sense is impossible.
The only reason that the situation in North Korea hasn't totally collapsed long since is because of substantial American aid. (Others have provided aid as well, but ours is the most important.) We've been providing them with vast quantities of food and fuel for years without which even the last remaining semblance of order in North Korea would have long since collapsed. The main reason why is the fear that the government of North Korea might attack south and reignite the long-simmering Korean War if it is pushed into a corner, or even comes to think that it has been.
By providing enough support to North Korea to keep it from collapsing, we maintain the conditions of misery and death for its own people, but have avoided having misery and death spill over into South Korea (for sure) and Japan (highly likely) and China (at least on some level); it's a deal with the devil, but the only one we've really had. And in the mean time, the primary goal has been to isolate North Korea and wait the situation out.
There isn't enough food in North Korea, and there won't be any time soon. In 2001, the nation had its best harvest in six years due to favorable weather, which reduced its food deficit from 2.2 million tons to about 1.5 million tons. The remainder had to be made up by imports, large amounts of which were donated by the US through the World Food Program. The US has been feeding a substantial proportion of the people of North Korea for years, contributing literally mountains of grain and other foodstuffs.
Which has made food a political weapon and in fact has made it the primary tool the government has for punishing dissent. In most years enough food has been shipped into North Korea to actually feed everyone, but the government has insisted on controlling distribution of it, and it hasn't been feeding everyone. Some reports say that as many as 2 million people may have starved in North Korea in the last few years; it may even have been worse than that. The FAO says that upwards of 13 million people (about two thirds of the nation) are at least malnourished.
In particular, the government uses food to keep the army loyal. Control of distribution of food is one of the major foundations of government power in North Korea, and they're loath to give it up. So when, in recent negotiations, the US demanded that food aid distribution be supervised by international monitors to make sure it was really going to starving civilians instead of to the North Korean military, the North Korean government exploded into one of its rabid denunciations.
"North Korea said Monday that the United States was blocking food aid to the North and using it as leverage in the dispute over the North's nuclear facilities.
The United States said earlier this month that its future food aid to North Korea will be linked to the communist country's willingness to open more of its territory to international workers to monitor distribution.
Aid workers complain they are denied access to large areas of the country and some suspect that food might be diverted to the North's military. The North denies it."
Part of the current tension is that the previous deal-with-the-devil, made by the Clinton administration, unraveled in October. In exchange for a deal where the government of North Korea agreed to cease trying to develop nuclear weapons, the US has been shipping in 500,000 metric tonnes of refined petroleum to North Korea every year, primarily heating oil.
And then as part of some negotiation or other, the Deputy Foreign Minister of North Korea informed the US representative that North Korea had continued to work on production of weapons-grade uranium during that entire time. A rational person would assume, under the circumstances, that this would mean that the deal was dead; North Korea had flagrantly violated it.
But nothing is rational when you're talking about the North Korean government, and they started to talk about how the deal was threatened, "hanging by a thread", because of US behavior, and to make demands on the US so as to keep the deal in force, a deal which North Korea itself had apparently never honored. The idea that North Korea had never fulfilled its side of the bargain and that we (US/Japan/South Korea) were getting nothing out of it never seems to have entered into the calculation at all; the deal could still be salvaged but only if we made lots of new concessions to North Korea without expecting anything whatever from them. They even asked South Korea for help against the US.
Shorn of the diplomacy and lunatic raving, what it meant was that North Korea wanted the US to keep shipping it petroleum and grain to use as it wished without any external controls, without North Korea making any concessions whatever in exchange.
During the Cold War, Korea was one of the front-lines, exceeded in importance only by the Iron Curtain in Germany. South Korea was an ally of the US and the US kept substantial military forces there. North Korea was supported by both the USSR and China, and if there had been any reignition of the Korean War, it not only would have been a calamity for everyone in the region but it risked actually igniting a nuclear exchange, so everyone tried to maintain an armed status quo, a heavily-armed standoff very much like the one in Germany.
With the end of the Cold War, the likelihood of a new Korean war causing a nuclear exchange between great powers is low. And though the North Korean military is very large, its actual military value is open to serious doubt. It has a mountain of arms left over from before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but how much of it is still actually workable? How well can their men actually operate the tanks and guns? How many of the tanks will even still run? How much of their ammunition is still even good? How effective would they actually be on a battlefield? It's difficult to calculate, but we're definitely not talking about a first-class army here; its military value per man is probably on the order of that of Iraq.
Unfortunately, even if it's relatively poor, numbers matter, and even a million men armed only with assault weapons are a potent force which can't be ignored. Given that the northern part of suburban Seoul is within artillery range of North Korean territory, any new outbreak of violence on the Korean peninsula would unquestionably cost hundreds of thousands of dead on both sides. (Seoul might fall to North Korea in the early stages of an invasion south.) The chance of North Korea actually prevailing in the war is negligible, but even if such a war was won by South Korea and its allies, it might take decades to recover. It's not like Iraq, where there are vast trackless spaces for combat to occur in without affecting huge numbers of civilians. In South Korea, there are a lot of people nearly everywhere; it's just about the last place you'd really want to fight a major ground war.
South Korea has more than twice the population of North Korea, and more than 40 times the GDP. The situation is not comparable to 1950; the South Korean military is big and powerful and quite modern and well equipped, and would be no pushover. There would be no "Pusan Pocket". But when you're facing a massive horde of armed men being driven against you by leaders who don't care about losing them, then even if you kill five for every man you lose, you're still going to lose heavily. Even if nothing else they've got works, a million men armed with AK-47's is not something to ignore if their leaders are willing to sacrifice them to hurt you.
In the latter part of the Korean War, after MacArthur was relieved and Ridgway took command, the Chinese and North Koreans maintained a stalemate for more than a year by being willing to sacrifice five casualties for every one they inflicted on us, including a much higher proportion of deaths among their casualties than among ours. There's every reason to believe that the current government is even more ruthless and might be willing to concede 10:1 or even higher.
It's this prospect, this danger, which has primarily driven all foreign policy by other major nations towards North Korea, and part of why North Korea is so pugnacious is that it's trying at all times to make it seem as if it's just at the ragged, rabid edge of issuing the orders to attack.
And it's the reason why military operations by us preemptively against North Korea are unlikely. If, for instance, we were to fire cruise missiles against that reactor which is in dispute, there's a significant chance of setting off a conflagration. It's North Korea's own version of "mutually assured destruction", implemented not with nukes but with the ruthless willingness to die just to destroy its enemy.
And that possibility hangs over nearly anything else we might do. We could, for instance, probably bring the government there down in a year by imposition of a naval blockade. If we stopped all cargo moving into and out of North Korea (which would we could easily do with 30 destroyers backed by one CBG or land-based air power) then it might start the ground war again.
I think that the rest of the world hoped that when Kim Il-song finally died that reform might become possible. Even though he was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-il, it was hoped that this might be an opportunity for North Korea to "discover" a way of "fulfilling" the promise of the Stalinist dream, "proving the wisdom" of the elder Kim.
Unfortunately, it didn't happen, and there was no important change. Nor is it obvious how any such change could be induced safely. Such things as attempting to inspire an internal dissent movement are impossible, and even if they were not, simply making the attempt might well cause the raving paranoids in Pyong-Yang to order the attack. Under the circumstances, the cost-benefit analysis says that the best course is to try to keep North Korea as isolated as possible, and wait for it to collapse of its own weight. It's a truly shitty choice but all the others are vastly worse.
And, unfortunately, the situation has reached the point now where even sins of omission, as perceived by the North Korean government, might well set the war off. It's not just that attempts by us to destabilize the government would do so, but that cutting off the aid which has kept them going might do it. That's why there was substantial disagreement among Japan, South Korea and the US about whether we should continue to ship petroleum to the North; Japan and South Korea are far more worried about a North Korean attack because they'd both be far more affected.
It's another devil's decision: is it better for us to actively work to keep the current North Korean government in power, or to risk the consequences to us and our friends if we don't and it falls apart?
Are we willing to sacrifice the lives of a million South Koreans, and probably between 50,000 and 100,000 Americans, as well as an unknown number of Japanese, in order to save the lives of several million North Koreans and to improve their situation in the long run?
Basically, we're not. That's what it comes down to. We have to be concerned more about our own people than those who live in our enemy's nation under a brutal government. The millions who have starved in North Korea were nearly all innocent, and so will be the millions more who will starve in future, but we're not ultimately being altruistic here and we aren't willing to make a sacrifice that large for their benefit.
What the Bush Administration seems to be doing is to go limp. It's not doing so rapidly or in any fashion which could cause enough of a perceived stairstep by the North to cause them to "push the button" as much as to gradually degrade the situation, very slowly but very deliberately. Food aid is not being increased, though the need has risen. We're refusing to negotiate with them at all, rather than to walk into a room and listen to their lunatic demands. The November shipment of oil was delivered, but there probably won't be any more (or at most one or two). The best hope is that all of this might precipitate a collapse without sparking a war; it's a forlorn hope, but seems to be better than the previous approach which only deferred the problem while letting it get worse. (Clinton never faced a problem he could put off.)
The only thing about the situation which is good is that North Korea is geographically isolated, and that encapsulation is at least somewhat practical. There are no significant borders where large scale smuggling either in or out can take place, and no neighbors which are sympathetic. China isn't actively hostile to North Korea, but it isn't really friendly either, and China's foreign policy is mainly driven by the fact that any new war would result in a horde of refugees trying to cross into China. (Indeed, there are rumors that there already have been a lot of refugees trying to escape the famine, and there have been some high-profile cases of North Koreans in Beijing fleeing into foreign embassies and demanding asylum.)
As long as the military balance doesn't change radically, encapsulation is feasible. North Korea's industry is on its knees but it does produce some things, and it seems to be specializing on weapons for export as a way of bringing in at least some hard currency.
They aren't what we'd think of as being "high tech", but you can create dangerous low-tech weapons, especially if you don't require a high degree of reliability in operation, and the problem has been that North Korea has been working, off and on, toward having the ability to directly threaten Japan militarily. There has been a dual-track effort there to develop long range missiles and nuclear warheads to put on them, and if both become successful then North Korea will be in a position to make, in its patented hysterical tone of voice, substantial demands of Japan. At least one of the previous missile tests flew over Japan and fell in the Pacific, and that shows clearly that the missiles they're developing now would have range to strike anywhere in Japan. The Japanese are extremely worried about this, not least of which because they're number three on North Korea's list of "nations of paranoid obsession".
I think that the hope, among Japan and the US and in particular South Korea, has been for a lessening of tension and a very slow and gradual improvement in relations. That was certainly attempted in the 1990's, especially in efforts spearheaded by Kim Dae-Jung. But every time it seems as if something like that has been negotiated successfully, even when it's something as simple as letting a few people from each side visit relatives on the other, or of opening up a railroad track across the DMZ, the North Korean government will find some sort of way to provoke a new crisis and blame it on the other side, even if it's trivial to the point of idiocy. It seems that even a lessening of tension is seen by the North Korean government as a threat to its survival, or maybe it's just that they're all lunatics. It isn't even clear that such provocations are the result of cunning; they may just have been yet another demonstration of North Korean insanity and incompetence.
There probably isn't any good answer here. It can be and has been argued that in any conflict there's actually a reasonable solution; it's not obvious that this is true. But if it is true in this case, the unfortunate fact is that the choice of following the path to a reasonable solution belongs to the government of North Korea, and as long as they refuse to do so there's little that we can do to make the situation better. All choices we have available to us result in massive death and suffering for millions of people somewhere; all we really can do is to decide that we'd rather let the North Koreans do the suffering. If so, that means continuing to perpetuate the status quo while doing our best to make sure that it doesn't become unstable on its own and break open into war regardless. Such a war would benefit no one, but it's not clear that the leaders of North Korea even care about that kind of thing.
Unfortunately, that means that we may occasionally have to deliberately ignore small but tolerable provocations by North Korea, even though it goes against the grain. This is a situation where only pragmatism can be used, only realpolitik will do. Any application of principle to our foreign policy in the region will lead to bloody war, no matter what principle is involved.
The primary difference between the calculations regarding war in Iraq and war in Korea is that if we fight in Iraq we have an excellent chance of winning with a low cost (even in civilian casualties), and achieving a goal we require. But if there's another war in Korea, the only question will be which side loses worse. There will be no winners.
Update: Ken writes:
The best description of North Korea came from an ex-roomie. I was reading to him some passages from Larry Bond's novel "Red Phoenix" (Second Korean War novel); upon its description of Pyongyang, he burst out:
"It's Mordor! It's a technological Mordor!"
A real-life Mordor with a million orcs with AK-47s. And forging a nuclear "Ring of Power".
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