Iraq and Afghanistan

North Korea and American Policy

Two Op-Eds have brought the discussion back to North Korea. One points to the responsibility that China has to bring the United States and North Korea to an agreement on dismantling whatever it has so far developed in the nuclear arms area. It suggests that China and the United States have the same interest in bringing the nuclear program to an end. But because of old ties dating back to the days when communism was really alive, only China has the trust of the North Koreans. The second editorial suggests that the "preemption strategy" that we say we used to bring the threat of Iraq to an end will not work against North Korea. In passing, it says that Libya did not actually cave under outside threats. It actually wanted to get out of the nuclear business for many other reasons having to do with a need to develop better political and economic relations with the rest of the world.

This should remind us that the so-called "preemption strategy" that we announced in regard to Iraq actually was never a strategy, since we did not preempt anything that Iraq was about to do, or even able to do. What we should talk of instead is a "hardline policy", one that uses threats to achieve objectives that we feel are in our national interest regardless of what the rest of the world thinks. We have, however, in spite of much talk, not actually taken such an approach against North Korea. Apparently the threat that North Korea holds over the South, conventional and possibly nuclear, together with the opposition in the South to any attack on the North effectively ties our hands. So we look increasingly like a helpless giant confronting a difficult and unpredictable child.

There are many other differences that are not talked about as much. First, Libya has a government that actually cares about its population and the rest of the world. North Korea does not. Second, Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a cruel authoritarian dictatorship, but not a totalitarian Brave New World. North Korea is all that the word "totalitarian" implies. This means that there is absolutely no opposition that anyone has ever heard of within the country. While many people evidently do not believe what they are told about the rest of the world — the continual drain of people taking extreme risks to escape the country attests to that, they do not have any means of knowing on a regular basis what goes on in the outside world or of knowing what their next door neighbors think. So there is absolutely no resistance movement to work with. Another result is that we have little or no idea of what would happen within the North Korean military should we take action. We can only assume they would die to the last man in defense of their atrocious system. They might, in fact, crack quickly and completely. But we certainly could not count on it. We also have no reason to count on the Russians, Japanese, Chinese, or South Koreans approving whatever forceful actions we take.

So we are completely deterred from doing anything militarily against North Korea. The only thing left is to play by their rules. These rules are to pay bribes to the North Koreans on a continuing basis, yet to pay bribes with no assurance that they will actually be bribed out of anything. They apparently do not give a damn about the world or their own people and we have to accept that at the same time as we are giving them whatever they want. In the end we may find they have preserved an ability to develop a nuclear program, or that they may actually have developed one in the interim.

North Korea is a problem for which I do not have a solution. Any ideas?