OPINION:
The happy talk coming out of Singapore will mislead the rest of the world, which hankers for something, anything, that can eliminate the nuclear sword hanging over everybody. “Jaw, jaw,” in Winston Churchill’s famous formulation, is better than “war, war,” but happy talk, whether by Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un, can be dangerous for the unwary.
Rocket Man presides over one of the world’s cruelest and most inefficient regimes anywhere. North Korea now lives off the bounty of its mineral resources, swapped to China for food and necessary things. The people, even in Marxist satraps, “gotta eat.” With the American and U.N. sanctions squeezing Pyongyang toward negotiations with Washington and its allies — 90 percent of its international trade is with China — the effects of the economic squeeze are obvious. The rest of North Korea’s trade is with other pariah states, such as Iran.
The idea, oft repeated, that Mr. Kim is ready to open his regime to economic development funded by the United States, Japan and South Korea, is much of that happy talk. North Korea is a police state with tens of thousands of political prisoners. Political modification of the regime would have to come with a revolution, if a managed one. Managed revolutions, like unicorns, are rare.
It’s true that South Korea, with an economy that is the fourth largest in Asia and the 11th largest in the world, could offer a model for Pyongyang. The South, after all, began the journey toward industrialization and modernization, with a surplus population as its only natural resource.
The North’s trove of mineral resources theoretically offers more opportunities. It is also true that South Korea began modernization under Park Chung Hee, regarded by the rest of the world as a dictator from 1963 until he was assassinated in 1979. Mr. Park was a remarkable leader, having served an apprenticeship as an officer in Japanese military schools and later enjoying a close relationship with Nobusuke Kishi, who was first the economic tsar for the Japanese military during its occupation of Korea and then was twice minister in postwar Tokyo governments.
If there’s a historical parallel we can look to — and all historical parallels are innately faulty — it is East Germany. By far the most efficient state in the old Communist bloc, not excluding the Soviet Union itself, East Germany was nevertheless where the Soviet Empire began to unravel. Only with the total collapse of the East German state and the Soviet bloc’s dependence on it, did the end come.
Kim Jong-un cannot have it both ways. Either his personal dictatorship, with all the machinery of repression inherited from his father and grandfather, will go, or any attempt to build a modern economy — and not one drained of resources dedicated producing weapons of mass destruction, will fail.
Can that take place without a political explosion and the ouster of Mr. Kim himself? It seems unlikely that American, Japanese and South Korean generosity would be enough to absorb such revolutionary developments.
And what will be China’s attitude toward such developments if they should occur, with the overall prospect of Korean reunification hanging over everything. It’s no secret that not only China, but Japan as well, are wary of uniting two powerful Koreas. This would introduce a new player in East Asia, an outcome that even the Japanese fear. Seoul sees only positive possibilities under its tutelage, and through Seoul is the likely route when events begin to move.
This makes all the giddy talk about the peaceful emergence of a co-operative regime in the North at least for now so much wishful thinking.
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