Category Archives: Korea (North)

Kim Jong Il, the Don Corleone of North Korea, has Died

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Or was it Dr. Strangelove?

Some friends from Reuters asked me to comment on KJI’s death with these questions:

How stable is North Korea today, with the news of Kim’s death?

Pretty stable actually. When Stalin and Mao died the whole show didn’t tip over. Insiders took a bit more power from the now-missing center but more or less followed their previous roles initially. The Kim family network all have an obvious and deep interest – at least now, before the sorting out of the new pecking order – in preventing implosion. They’re all deeply vested in a brutal, human-rights abusing regime, and they would face SK post-unification courts with access to the death penalty if it all came apart. So the chance of civil war or implosion in the coming days is pretty close to zero. The real test will be in the next 6 to 12 months as the factional conflict heats up over the distribution of gains, particularly access to the badly-strapped national budget, in the nouveau regime. I think China after Mao is a good analogue here.

How prepared was the North for this scenario?

Better than we’d think, but still not too well. Highly personalized regimes, by definition, are institutionally poorly prepared for transition at the top, because the ‘sun-king’ has structured the system that way. Like Bismarck, Hitler, or Mao, they keep the underlings jockeying and guessing, but when they go, the hole in the middle is big. It took KJI years to solidify his rule after his father Kim Il Sung,  and even KJI could only do that by leading the army personally, likely to forestall a coup. That said, NK has gone this through before, and familialism of its elite and dynasticity of its succession alleviate some of the factional tension authoritarian successions generate. Ie, because they are all related to each other (like any good mafia), they are less likely to turn one another. That is the whole point of appointing relatives to high positions. But nepotistic grooming didn’t have the full time to play through, because Kim Jong Un hasn’t been the dauphin long enough. NK is much less well-prepared than in 1994 (KIS’ death).

How prepared are Seoul, Washington and Beijing?

Not very. As General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev’s health declined slowly, the West had time to adjust to rising factionalism and stagnation in the USSR. Brezhnev showed up less and less in public; the faces on the stage at Red Square changed to show who was up or down. This barely happened in NK; KJI was travelling and walking around in Russia just 4 months ago. My sense is that most of us thought KJI had recovered reasonably well from the stroke and might hang on for a few more years. This was a sudden heart attack that caught everyone by surprise.

How ready is the young Kim Jong-un to take over?

Not very. 1) He is young, which cuts against Korean cultural-Confucian standards of age matched to authority. 2) He has no experience in the military, which is now the central institution of the regime. 3) He does not have the years of ‘training’ and experience in Pyongyang backrooms to groom the connections necessary to govern a mafiaosi-like kleptocracy. Indeed, he seems to have no real political, military, educational, scientific, or other training for this role at all. The name is all he’s got, but that is central for the regime’s legitimacy given its hyper-patrimonialism and ideology. So my guess is that he will be kept for continuity and legitimacy but will basically become a figurehead for an emergent soft military junta (like Myanmar).

Who are the real leaders, now Kim Jong-il is dead?

The Korean People’s Army top brass and the National Defense Commission, because KJU is weak and they have the guns.

What role does the military have right now?

Regime Stabilizer. The extended Kim family is like the Corleones in charge of a whole country – shaking down SK, the US, the UN, China, and anyone else for aid and cash, counterfeiting currency, committing insurance fraud, dealing drugs, etc. Try to imagine that Brando’s Godfather character took over a whole state and ran it like a corrupt casino to rip off just about everyone – most obviously the NKs themselves. The nukes are just the biggest gun pointed at the world to force an offer no one can refuse.

But it is the military that keeps the internal peace and wards off the outside world to keep this whole racket running. So long as the KPA gets to keep their constitutionally exalted position (‘military first’), and their generous access to privilege and the budget that it entails, I see no reason to think the KPA will overthrow KJU. Why not keep him as a figurehead, and the Kim family in general as the fall guys in case the whole thing does collapse? Let them face the angry Southern courts and swing from the gallows. That said, I do think the army’s role will increase substantially. We know  that there was some resistance to yet another dynastic succession, and that the Kims seem given to megalomania and a god-complex which the army must know is hugely dangerous. So my thinking leans towards an emergent junta with the Kims as a figleaf.

I have written a lot on NK. Here is the whole list. Here are some of the better ones: post-KJI as a military dictatorship; policy options (all bad) for dealing with NK; Arab Spring and NK; and the parallels between Korea and Germany on unification. For some humor on those famous NK traffic cops, try this.

 

The Korean-German Unification Parallel; plus Blackwater … the Game?

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Quick IR test: name that dictator!

Regular readers will know that I have blogged about the parallels between Germany and Korea at length before: here and here. This week the Korean Journal of Defense Analysis published the long-form version of my argument. It is available here for free in PDF. KJDA is a great little publication in east Asian security is your area, and it is offered for free too. Very nice.

Comments on the argument are always welcome. I thought because everyone always implicitly compares NK to EG, and possible Korean unification to Germany’s experience, it would help to formalize the comparison at length. The bumper sticker version is that NK is about 10x poorer than EG, so unification will be way harder and more expensive than the German experience.

A foreign IR professor in Seoul argued to me that starting from the German analogy is an error, perhaps one that is flattering and preferred by Koreans because it turned out so well. A better parallel might be Yemen’s reunification, which worked out far less well. That seems pretty harsh to me. SK is a lot more like WG that either of the Yemens. For other comparison cases to Korean unification, try this.

Here is the summary section from the PDF:

To recap, domestically, there are more North Koreans than East Germans,
and they are much poorer as well. There are fewer South Koreans than West Germans,
and they are (albeit less so) less wealthy also. South Korea’s state capacity is lower
than West Germany’s, while North Korea today is dismal by even the former East
Germany’s standards. In sum, fewer people with less wealth in a weaker system will
support more people with less wealth from a worse system. That domestic calculation
is punishing, on top of which the international balance of forces is worse now than
in 1989 too.

Internationally, today’s external patron (the United States) of the free Korean
half is weakening, while the external patron of the communist half (China) is
strengthening. The opposite was true of the United States and West Germany, and
the USSR and East Germany, in 1989. Today’s northern patron (China) is trying to
push further into the continent (Asia), while yesterday’s eastern patron (USSR) was
looking for an exit (from central Europe). Nor is there is a regional encouragement,
revolutionary wave, or democracy zeitgeist that might accelerate the process. The
incentives for China to meddle (because of the greater importance of North Korea to
China, than of East Germany to the USSR) and the greater ease of such meddling
(because the United States and South Korea today are weaker than the United States
and West Germany were then, while China is much stronger today than the USSR
was then) mean Chinese intervention is likely. It will almost certainly seek to structure
any final settlement. The major policy question emanant from this paper’s analysis is
therefore: Will South Korea forego the U.S. alliance if that is required to remove
China from peninsular affairs? Will South Korea exchange neutralization for unity?

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So I got my wife a Kinect for Christmas (yes, it is very cool, but it’s a pain to set up your living room for it). While browsing for it, I found ‘Blackwater – the Game.’ Wow! Mercs for kids! Phenomenal! Who came up with that idea?! Recall that the Kinect is meant for the non-gamer types and kids (like the Wii). I understand that there are already lots of military-style shooters at home, and some of them are genuinely brutal and extreme. Yet Blackwater of course is/was a real firm, implicated in some of the most controversial moments of the Iraq War, and the game is on the wii-like Kinect. So do you really want your kids playing hired guns in Iraq? At least in most shooters you play a ‘public-spirited’ character (ie, a soldier); here you’re just killing people for money – a great lesson for little Johnny, I geuss.

Blackwater of course is gone now. Its called Xe today, but apparently former CEO Erik Prince owns the rights to the name and I geuss he needs the money. I’m just not sure what to think. On the one hand, I think realism and/or edginess improve gaming and make it less ridiculous; that’s why I don’t mind Grand Theft Auto or Halo, and I thought Bioshock was super. But mercs for kids is probably a new low. In any case, the game is terrible apparently.

And here is another nice item for the Korean-watchers. We bought a TV mount for the Kinect. It costs $20 on Amazon, and $36 in Korea. Yet another example of how Korean mercantilism and the weak won policy are killing Korean consumers by making everything pointlessly, outrageously expensive here. What possible explanation besides politics can there be for an 80% (!) price differential like that on such a mundane, irrelevant product? Ugh.

“Homefront” (2): The Michigan Militia saves America from the ‘Norks’

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Part one is here, where I noted the game’s high-level of 80s camp hamminess.

To compensate for that gauzy 80s nostalgia, the game throws copious, unnecessary brutality at you to tell you its ‘serious.’ This creates a high moral awkwardness in that NK is an extreme human rights abuser in the real world, but is here used for sadistic entertainment. ‘Highpoints’ include: the opening sequence shows occupation soldiers executing American parents in front of their screaming child. Later your character hides from the NK People’s Army (KPA) by climbing into mass grave, after watching a mass execution, and hiding under the bodies. Survivalist gun-nuts are presented who torture and execute captured North Koreans, with implication that they may eat them too. At another point you are encouraged to not waste your ammunition killing KPA soldiers who are on fire after an air-strike.

If all this doesn’t make the gamer complicit enough in pro-American bloodlust, you get regular ‘kill ’em all’ exhortation in your militia from a one-dimensional, ‘tough-as-nails’ alpha-male stereotype (Milius wrote Conan the Barbarian too) berating his whining female sidekick for her lack of vengeful determination to butcher on behalf of America. As the game website tells us, “Because Rianna is not former military, and not a battle hardened combat vet, cracks in her exterior resolve will show at times. She is a humanitarian, she does have feelings that she needs to deal with and control in the line of duty. She’ll never feel good about everything the Resistance has done and will continue to do, but she’ll also never let those emotional struggles to destroy her and the other’s ruthless resolve to win at all costs. There is no other option.” Yes, the NRA, military-loving, survivalist patriot will triumph over her inner Amnesty International sissie.

So we are back to the tiresome, right-wing GWoT trope that if you really love America, you must be willing to go over to the Cheney’s ‘dark side’ and beat the hell of out people. I hate this motif, because it says the rules of engagement are for liberals and wusses. All of America’s opponents are unremitting, unrelenting, thoroughly evil, and so cunning, that there is no choice but to blow them away with extreme prejudice at all times. You namby-pamby liberals, with your Geneva Conventions and squeamishness to use a gun, just get in the way, or worse, give aid and comfort to the enemy by according them due-process. Real men just kick a—. As with Michael Bay villains, the ‘evil’ of the Homefront Koreans is so ridiculous and exaggerated, that it is obviously just a narrative fig-leaf to mask the real point of movies and games like this – vengeful, extreme carnage, including torture, executions, and mass killings, as pro-American, nationalistic entertainment.

I want games and films to be edgy too, but I am increasingly disturbed by the Cheney-esque reveling in gratuitous torture and brutality by the good guys in post-9/11 geopolitical action entertainment. There is a willingness to wear it openly, almost proudly, as if it were a badge of honor of one’s seriousness and commitment to defend America that one won’t hesitate to violently break the law. Bay’s Transformers trilogy is filled with executions as entertainment; Modern Warfare 2 included torture and an infamous scene where the gamer actually machine-guns dozens of innocent civilians as part of the plot; 24 is notorious for torture and similar brutality; and Homefront includes a ghastly ‘killing fields’ sequence not narratively necessary, but just thrown-in to raise the extremity level yet higher (shooting parents in front of their kids wasn’t enough I guess).

This doesn’t mean games and films should be neutered, and I concur that mature games that include adult themes enrich it as a medium. But there are games that include moral choice that actually inform the violence and give it some meaning – even if you choose to be harsh. And even the Halo series, arguably the best shooter out there and filled with violence unsuitable for minors, doesn’t present gratuitous brutality just for its own sake.

In sum, the NK invasion environment is interesting, creative, and somewhat engrossing, especially if you know anything Korea. The wacko blend of gun-fetishism, surreal NK agitprop, 80s USSR references, and Hooters and White Castle (another sponsor) generates unintentional and bizarre camp laughter throughout. But Homefront eventually capitulates to the Tea Party/NRA version of US force – armed militia vigilantes rescue America with extreme brutality and righteous vengeance. Terrifying; it’s ‘Michigan Militia – The Game.’ In fact, I got so emotionally jaded after the killing fields sequence, I was surprised that the later implied cannibalism wasn’t actually shown. I can only imagine how uber-bloodthirsty the next Modern Warfare will be this fall. As I have said so many times before, this is why we frighten the rest of the world…

I finally played “Homefront” (1): its more @ Gratuitous Brutality than NK

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Part two is here.

As a part of my regular effort to avoid work yet nonetheless self-justify slacking as ‘work-related,’ I played Homefront this summer at home on vacation. Unfortunately, it has been banned in SK (where it would make millions, I have no doubt). I wrote about it earlier when it was released and there was controversial buzz around it. Readers will recall that it is a first-person shooter in which you play an American resistance guerilla fighting against a North Korean occupation force in the US. Through a (rather ludicrous) series of geopolitical twists, NK manages to reunify with SK under Northern leadership, then pull Japan and Southeast Asia into a ‘Greater Korean Republic,’ and then sail across the Pacific (!) in order to invade the US which has been crippled by a massive oil shock resulting from a Saudi-Iranian war. If you are genuinely interested in the details of this future ‘counterfactual,’ the wiki write-up is good. For the idiot fan-boy, ‘this could really happen, dude!’ version, try here. As a website about Korean security, I thought this would be off-beat to discuss.

As for a review of the game itself, it got 70% from Metacritic. That sounds about right to me. The gameplay is like most other shooters, and I found the long distance between checkpoints had me re-playing too many sequences again and again. The real hook is the apocalyptic, over-the-top environment. In play, it is basically a nastier, crueler version of the already fairly cruel Modern Warfare series. As I said in my commentary on Bay’s Transformers 3, I believe one reason contemporary geopolitical games and films show increasing levels of gleeful brutality and unnecessary cruelty is US disillusionment with the GWoT. After a decade of torture, wounded veterans, and exhaustion with the ‘recalcitrance’ of the Middle East to its ‘liberation,’ the Americans who ‘hoo-rahed’ at bin Laden’s death are ready for geopolitical viciousness as entertainment. So forget Halo’s goofy aliens or having tea with Afghan village elders – let’s get down to kicking the crap out of the axis of evil.

The influences on the game will be immediately apparent to anyone in IR who lived through the 1980s and will provide regular camp laughs of nostalgic recognition. The story is ridiculously cheesy, because it is basically a re-tread of the Red Dawn scenario which feels wildly out of place today. Made during the height of the second cold war, that 1984 film, featuring a Soviet ground invasion of North America in the mid-80s, was already pushing reality enough, but here the story just goes off the rails, because NK is so preposterous in the USSR role. Can anyone really imagine NK helicopters flying air patrol over the ‘American zone’ of occupied Denver? I’m not even sure what means… It’s just too improbable to pull you in. Indeed one wonders why the invader wasn’t the far-more-obvious China, but I guess you can’t annoy the world’s biggest emerging market…

In the wake of 9/11 and given NK’s well-know weakness, the scenario is ludicrous. The ‘Norks’ (a suitably racist replacement for today’s ‘haji’) are shown doing stuff that modern gamers won’t even recognize as Cold War-tropes and motifs (re-education camps, house-to-house round-ups, a stalinist cult of personality). Modern Warfare and 24 have your standard issue, post-9/11 terrorists to give them immediacy and edge (and racism), but how many people will identify with a NK-cum-Soviet invasion of America in 2011? Playing it made me feel like a tween again, worried about whether we needed bomb shelter in our backyard.

(A bonus bizarro addition is the game’s sponsorship by Hooters [wait, what?]. Its restaurants show up in the game, generating even more surrealistically dissonant dialogue like ‘take out the sniper in the Hooters’ lobby.’ Hah!)

The writer of Red Dawn was John Milius, and he wrote this game as well. He even wrote a book for the game, in case you need more killing in the name of freedom. Homefront has all the traits of campy, right-wing cold war paranoia that Milius is known for and that IR types old enough to remember the 80s will recognize immediately. There are heroic resistance fighters in a masked nod to the mujahideen, contras, and other ‘freedom fighters’ against communism whom the US sponsored back in the day. Pol Pot-style death camps are included (!). The survivalist, NRA (National Rifle Association) gun-culture machismo that informed Red Dawn is back; lots of cut scenes show an ‘armed citizenry’ guarding their homes and lounging with their weapons. The enemy of America is once again communists, and somehow those communists manage to launch an transoceanic invasion of the US homeland. There are commie agit-prop signs up throughout the game, like ‘Praise to the Dear Leader’ and ‘Rejoice at the Korean-American Reeducation Facility.’ These are in proper Korean and provoke great laughs of 80s recognition mixed with sheer campiness for rendering NK agitprop into a surreal US occupation setting. The antagonists even speak in a NK accent. But it all feels like such a weird stalinist throwback in the current age of terror and al Qaeda, that it’s more like watching ‘I Love the 80s’ than a edgy contemporary video game. Someone remind Milius that Brezhnev died 3 decades ago.

Please continue to Part two.

5 (Bad) Options for Dealing w/ NK (3): Defense Build-Up to Harden SK

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Part 1 is here; part two is here.

Last week I spoke at the Korean Institute of Defense Analysis. I presented four options for dealing with NK that have all broadly failed: negotiations (NK doesn’t seem to take them seriously), muddling through crisis-by-crisis (condemning the long-suffering NKs to permanent repression and leaving SK open to regular provocation and blackmail), China (despite its widely touted leverage over NK, China doesn’t seem willing or able to use it), and Sunshine Policy bribery (a noble effort that failed, however unfortunately). My review left me with this final choice that I find disagreeable, but I see little alternative at this point (i.e., after the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents last year).

5. Defense Build-up: The idea here is to create space from NK by building a hard ‘shell’ around SK to insulate it from NK antics. The attraction is its unilateralism. Instead of waiting for NK or China to come around, SK can act proactively. Given that SK only spends 2.5% of GDP on defense, there is clear room for more spending. Certainly, the US, which regularly bemoans low allied defense spending, would welcome a more robust SK defense. Indeed, given that SK borders one of history’s worst, most unpredictable rogue tyrannies, SK defense spending is probably too low. Much of the gap has been filled by US forces in country, but with the US in relative decline, SK defense hikes are likely anyway.

A questioner asked me what should SK spend the money on. I made this argument earlier too, after Yeonpyong, but it seems to me that C4ISR, a larger navy, and missile defense would be good choices (although I am no formal military type, so readers comments here would be great). C4ISR are capabilities that SK leans heavily on the US for. A better navy would help harden SK in the Yellow Sea, where most of the clashes take place. And theater missile defense (TMD), which the US has approached SK about a few times, could help neutralize the burgeoning missile threat. In conversation, I rejected armor, because it has stronger offensive implications. A lesson from the offense-defense balance literature in IR is to try to buy defensive weapons as much as possible, in order to lesson your adversary’s paranoid reaction. But more generally, the idea is similar to McNamara’s ‘flexible response’ – give SK a wide range of capabilities to credibly counter NK provocation however it might occur. Needless to say, such ‘full spectrum dominance’ would be expensive, but I don’t see too many alternatives now. (Here is a good essay on defense transformation in Korea.)

The ideal would be to create an environment where SK could respond to NK provocation immediately, proportionately, and precisely. The game theory literature on cooperation argues that retaliation is most effective if, 1) it occurs immediately in response to provocation, so as to create an impression of one connected action in time, 2) it is proportionate to the original provocation so as not create either the downside impression of weakness or the upside impression of warmongering overreaction, and 3) it targets precisely those actors responsible for the provocation. Applying this to the Yeonpyeong shelling last year would result in immediate counter-battery fire onto exactly and only those NK batteries firing, and do only as much damage as SK suffered on its own island. Obviously this is an impossible ideal. No one even knew how many S Koreans were killed or how much property damage was suffered until after the incident. But to the extent investments in C4ISR could improve the information available to SK decision-makers and the rapidity and precision of their response, it will improve SK’s ability to respond ‘kinetically’ without necessarily creating a spiral. The ideal should be ‘perfect retaliation’: instantaneous, precise, and perfectly congruent to the damage done. While obviously impossible, defense spending hikes could narrow the technological gap and allow for better SK point-to-point counterforce and hence improved local deterrence. This should reduce the window of opportunity available to NK to get away with these sorts of strikes, if the political decision is made to respond.

Such hardening could insulate SK from NK, while also pushing NK to exhaustion, as the Reagan build-up helped lead to Gorbachev. The downsides of this option are:

A) It simply may not possible to de-link like this from NK. No matter what SK does to harden itself, it simply may not be possible to draw enough distance from NK and insulate itself. Here I argue that so long as half of SK’s population lives on the border with NK, the SK military’s hands are tied. Hardening would almost certainly require moving the capital out of Seoul which is just 50 miles from the DMZ and hence super-exposed.

B) I worry about the democracy costs to a young democracy that only just escaped military rule in the 80s. Regular readers will know that I bemoan the high price of the military-industrial complex in the US, and worry about the costs of semi-permanent war on US democracy. And here I am arguing for a ramp-up in SK…

The problem is that I just don’t see any other choices. Negotiation and the Sunshine Policy are failures. Yes, we should keep trying. Jaw-jaw is better than war-war. Talk is cheap, so why not? Maybe we’ll get lucky, but it is simply fantastical now to bet on that. The China path too has not lead to progress, and muddling through means more gulags and Cheonans. So improving SK’s position of strength could signal that NK cannot bully SK with provocations, push the NK toward competitive exhaustion, and improve SK autonomy in an era of US relative decline.

I suppose there is a sixth option – an invasion of NK. But to the credit of South Koreans, I have never heard this seriously entertained. I ask my students often what they think should be done, and I always mention this as a possibility (in part because it occurred in 1950). No one has ever raised their hand, even among my hawks. I guess that is the good news among all these bad options…

5 (Bad) Options for Dealing w/ NK (2): China & Bribery don’t Work either

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Part 1 is here.

I spoke at the Korean Institute of Defense Analysis last week. This is an expansion of my remarks. In part 1, I argued that the first option, negotiation, would fail. Here are three others that I don’t think have lead anywhere either.

2. Wait for Change/Muddling Through: This is the default position, as NK is so erratic, it is hard to build a ‘grand strategy’ to deal with it. Call this permanent crisis management. This is attractive, because it doesn’t require a huge Southern defense budget; the Americans are here and will help SK deterrence. It also appeals to our sense that NK is living on borrowed time. If there is one idea I hear at just about every conference I’ve been to in Asia, it’s that NK can’t last. If SK can just hang-on, then eventually NK will go away. I see two problems: First, NK doesn’t seem to be going away no matter how many experts and economists tell us they are on their last legs. Indeed, NK confounds us all by surviving, somehow, no matter what happens. It’s astonishing actually. Second, insofar as NK is an unbelievable brutal regime, simply waiting for change raises the moral issue of the fate of North Koreans. North Korea is beyond your run-of-the-mill dictatorship; its 1984. It allowed some 1 million of its own people to starve to death in the 1990s, and it runs the worst gulag system on the planet. Insofar as ‘traditional’ dictatorships allow regular people to survive if they keep their heads down, the moral compulsion on outsiders to end that regime is low. But when a regime actively brutalizes its own people, the R2P principle kicks in. I wonder if all this raises moral culpability among the liberal states in the 6 parties? Given just how bad NK really is, do we have a moral responsibility to try to accelerate its demise? Is mutual coexistence defensible with a regime this bad?

3. China: This was the great hope of the last decade, but it seems to be going nowhere. The liberal states of the 6 parties are played for gain by NK less and less; they have learned to not get gimmicked and played off against each other. This has driven NK, in desperation, to China, as its last benefactor. (Russia is neither wealthy nor interested enough to care.) So for awhile in the 2000s, there was talk about the ‘way to Pyongyang runs through Beijing.’ And this would be true, if China used its leverage, and one read of the NK nuclear program is that it prevents the total clientelization of NK by China. But they just aren’t helping. Indeed, the Chinese decision to continually subsidize NK led me to call them ‘liars’ on unification two years ago. Maybe that was an overreaction, but their non-response to both the Cheonan and the Yeonpyeong last year was a terrible failure of global citizenship. NK is ground-zero for all that talk of China being a ‘responsible stakeholder.’ Reining NK is vastly more important the China’s currency gimmicks or even the South Chia sea flap. If there is any one thing the world wants from China, it’s help in bringing the NKs to, if not change internally, at least behave with a modicum of normality externally. My own thinking on China has softened since I’ve lived here. I have had enough ‘track II’-style relations with Chinese scholars and students to see that there is a lot of worry about NK, an awareness that the world is really watching China on this issue, and a general sense that Chinese global prestige is damaged every time it looks like NK is the maniac pitbull whose owner won’t control it. But perhaps old ways die hard, or the PLA is the one really calling the shots on the NK issue. I can certainly understand that China does not want an American-allied, nationalist, larger ROK on its border. Whatever the reason, this is not working; China is not disciplining NK (or maybe it can’t and we have over-estimated it). Sure, we should keep talking to Beijing about this, but like the negotiating strategy, it is time to be realistic that this probably won’t work.

4. Sunshine Policy Bribery: Contrary to SK hawks, I thought this was actually a good idea back in the 90s. By 1997/98, it was pretty clear that NK was going to survive the end of the Cold War and its internal famines. Waiting for NK to collapse feels like waiting for Godot, so just about anything that might work is worth a try at this point. Given that the goal is NK change, not ideological purity, I see no reason we should criticize Presidents Kim or Roh as dupes of NK or something like that. They tried. A pragmatic decision to see if another approach would work was absolutely worth it at the time. It’s unhelpful right-wing ideology to say that we should never talk to NK or that they are part of the ‘axis of evil.’ What we really need is change, and a pragmatic decision to reach out was certainly defensible. It should also be admitted though, that it didn’t work. We know now that both President Kim (1997-2002) and Roh (2002-07) were bitterly disappointed that NK did not respond. Kim Jong Il even needed to be personally bribed in order to come to the inter-Korean summit. In the language of game theory, the Sunshine Policy could be read as persistent, unreciprocated cooperation, even as the other player defects and defects, in order to see if the other player can eventually be brought around. The failure of player B (NK in this case) to respond tells us very important information: at least until the current Kim passes, it is very unlikely that unreciprocated cooperation will work. It was worth a college try; indeed, it was a heroic, noble effort (Kim won the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize). But it also failed almost completely, and I entirely understand why the SK electorate turned against it and took the current hardliner as president. It is unlikely to be tried again, at least while Kim Jong Il is alive.

Part 3 will go up on Monday.

5 (Bad) Options for Dealing with NK (1): Don’t Expect Much from Talks – UPDATE: Today’s Talks flopped again

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Nov. 2 UPDATE: Not that anyone expected any different, but read this on the latest negotiation stalemate. Is anyone really surprised at this point? This just bolsters my point in this post that negotiation is just not working  – not that we shouldn’t try, but expectations should be very, very low.

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So off I went last Thursday for yet another conference on how to deal with NK. Honestly, this like a cottage industry here. I spend so much time on NK, it amazes me. If unification ever happens, it is going to bankrupt thousands of academics and think-tankers around the world…

Nonetheless, this was another excellent conference from the Korean Institute for Defense Analysis (KIDA). KIDA is fairly hawkish, especially on NK – I got some raised eyebrows when I argued that the Sunshine Policy was worth the effort – but honestly, it is hard not to be at this point. NK misbehavior, its rejection of the most basic international norms (man-made famines, gulags, violent provocations against the South, drug running, insurance fraud, counterfeiting), are so severe, that there aren’t too many options left. KIDA also publishes the very good Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, which you should probably read if Asian security is your area.

The conference concerned “Denuclearization and a Peace Community on the Korea Peninsula.” The papers were excellent. I commented on two regarding denuclearization in the run-up to the 2012 nuclear security summit in Seoul. I imagine that the global attention focused on Korea for denuclearization next year helped push the idea behind this conference. Park Geun-hee’s article (she is the front-runner now for the Korean presidency next year) in Foreign Affairs leans in this direction too, but honestly, I am really skeptical NK will change at all, especially after Arab Spring. Over the summer, I argued that NK is likely to go the other way in response to Arab Spring – repress yet more harshly and never, ever give up its nukes. One can only imagine how the footage of Gaddafi being roughed up and then lynched affects despots like Kim Jong Il or Robert Mugabe. One year, you are giving an address to the UN, and the next year you are gunned down in a ditch like some street punk, and all you’ve ‘built’ (Korean socialism, or the ‘Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’) is washed away in a flash. The lesson is never lighten up – ever.

In fact, there was a noticeable gap between the Korean presenters and the foreigners (me, Andrei Lankov, Bredan Howe, Christoph Bluth, Hideshi Takesada). All five of us argued that negotiations would go nowhere, that NK would use them to play for time, capture global attention, and blackmail for aid. Lankov called the Six Party Talks a ‘soap opera,’ and Howe noted that without its nukes, NK would be ‘Turkmenistan without the oil.’ Bluth gave a nice run-down of all the times NK has cheated since the denuclearization talks started – in and out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, cheating on the Agreed Framework, not reciprocating at all during the Sunshine Policy period, violating two of the Six Party joint statements, and then of course, last year’s sinking of the Cheonan and shelling on Yeonpyeong island. Takesada even argued that NK is building ICBMs (!) for the purpose of blackmailing the US in order to achieve unification on its own terms. (Btw, if anyone can verify that last claim, please let me know. That seems pretty extreme, and its important not to read NK, dangerous as it is, in too ideological a fashion. Let’s not make the ‘Iraq-has-WMD’ mistake again.)

The Korean conferees were all far more confident (hopeful?) that negotiation will work. I am not quite sure what to make of that insider-outsider split. Is it because South Koreans see North Koreans are ‘ethnic brothers’ who speak their language, literally, and therefore can be pulled into a deal? Is it because they are vested, as Korean nationals, here in a way that we are not and so therefore overread bargaining even though they may know better? I don’t know, but the non-Koreans were all terribly skeptical.

So here are the options that I laid out, as I see them (comments welcome):

1. Negotiation: This was the point of the conference, and the papers explaining the evolution of a ‘peace community’ on the peninsula were excellent in their detail. IF North Korea comes around and deals in good faith, then there are clear road maps for building down. And I have the strong sense that S Koreans really, really want this. Last year made South Koreans pretty nervous, and no one wants their country to be an armed camp, especially since SK just escaped military dictatorship in the last generation. I think SK would like to be more ‘normal’ with regular participation in the global economy as a regular country, not endlessly hamstrung by NK shenanigans. This is what President Lee’s ‘Global Korea’ campaign is all about – to show that Korea is a global player, not some half-country locked into the Korean ghetto by a mad uncle in the attic. The problem is that the NK just doesn’t negotiate following the pacta sunt servanda principle, so I argued that the best the liberal states of the Six Parties (Japan, SK, US) could hope for it small improvements like a bit more monitoring here or a few more family reunions there. But this is small stuff. Still, at least if N and SK are talking, then are not shooting. That is progress I guess…

Here is part two.

What SK President Lee should have said to the US Congress – UPDATED: A Response to my Critics this Friday

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South Korean President Lee Myung Bak Apologies PQZbJ4V5Fo8l

UPDATE: This post got a mountain of traffic and commentary. The good people at Marmot, Busan Haps, KoreaBridge, and Ask a Korean all linked/reposted it. The post was meant half in jest, half seriously, not so much a “rant” (which I comment I found bizarre), but a psychological displacement into Korean shoes with some wisecracks. I was trying to capture what a Korean policy-maker might really like to say to the Americans. Not everything is my own thinking. Yet, one commenter told me my PhD was bogus, another that I hate America. Yikes. I have to say I am surprised at the explosion of interest, when I feel like a lot of my other posts are richer. Much in this post only tells you what you already know if you’ve been here for awhile. In any case, given the response, I’ll post a more serious take on the US-Korean alliance on Friday and Monday. Blogging is time-consuming. Thank you for reading and for those commenters who were polite.

rek

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Regular readers will know that I like President Lee, even if he has a taste for hyper-presidentialization. On October 13 he spoke before the US Congress. It was a good speech that didn’t actually tell you much that you didn’t already know. Because Korea is asymmetrically dependent on the US for exports (Korea’s third biggest market) and for security (the US alliance), Lee couldn’t really level any necessary criticisms.

So here is the speech Lee should have given:

“Thank you for inviting me, but honestly how many of you congressmen know anything about my country? How many of you could name a city in Korea besides Seoul? How many of you recognize Kim Jong-Il’s name but not mine? How many of you think the Choseon Dynasty is the name of a Chinese restaurant in Union Station? So let’s drop the insipid, hollow bonhomie about how this ‘visit will also celebrate the strong bonds of friendship between the American and Korean people.’ Koreans most definitely want that, but for most of you untraveled, monolinguistic congressmen, this relationship is ideological more than real: SK confronts a stalinist rogue onto which Americans project an idealization of democracy vs. the axis of evil. But how many of you congressman have ever travelled to Asia (much less Korea), especially you neo-con hawks who want me to risk nuclear brinksmanship with the North? You’re too busy visiting Israel, and if you learn foreign languages, you bone-headed Americans still go for Spanish or French, because they’re easy with lots of cognates. We learn English like mad, but you couldn’t care less about our language.  Lots of Koreans resent your projection of the US values and foreign policy preferences onto a country you are startling ignorant about. We are just too polite to tell you, and we really need your markets and military help so we don’t say it.

Next, WTH is wrong with your political system? The world used to look at you as model. Remember the Washington Consensus? Now the rest of the world thinks you are bonkers. The Tea Party particularly has become a global embarrassment. The same Republicans in this chamber who so desperately want me to pick fight with North Korea also think your president is a Muslim socialist. You run a budget deficit in excess of 10% of GDP; your unemployment rate would generate street riots in my country, and the IMF thinks your debt-to-GDP ratio will top 100% by the end of the decade. Koreans are starting to realize that your politics are astonishingly dysfunctional and that we can’t count on you the way we used to. We want you to be an Asia-Pacific power, but we also know you are broke and that you lost your mind over Islamism in the last decade. Now we are all wondering if you are in decline or not. Just telling us that America is ‘exceptional,’ or that declinism is an overhyped myth is not enough. We live next to China (and Russia, and NK) not you. So get your act together, or we’ll start looking elsewhere soon, and if really pressed we might have to go nuclear.

Next, you better get used to Asia. The war on terror was a big mistake, even if a lot of Korean Christians supported if for the same tribal reasons the Tea party does. For a decade you chased around ghosts, built a fearsome national security state that makes it hard for my citizens to get visa into your country (even though the ‘American and South Korean peoples share deep ties rooted in history’), and convinced my fellow citizens that you are a global bully. Instead of focusing on China with a billion-plus people engaged in the fastest, widest modernization in history, you obsessed over the Middle East to the expense of other areas of interest. We even went to Iraq with you to show our goodwill and commitment.

But there’s no way my electorate will let us pull that stunt again. It’s time for you to think a lot more about how you really want to participate in the world’s fastest growing region. Remember, we Asians buy about half your Treasury bonds. You need us a lot more than you think. You think you have social discontent in the US now? Just wait until all those cheap Asian products your voters have come to expect in Walmart jump in price because you congressmen pick trade wars with a region you know almost nothing about. Bluster about ‘America is an Asian power’ is not enough. You people need to start learning Asian languages, sending your students here for junior years abroad, get your trade policy in order, and generally realize that trouble in places like Israel, NATO, and Pakistan pale in importance to the monumental rise of China and India. In security, the world may be unipolar, but in economics it is multipolar.

Finally, thank you for helping Korean security. Most Koreans are genuinely aware of the US commitment and are grateful for it. (We just wish you weren’t so d— arrogant and condescending about it.) Indeed, you should contrast us with your other allies. We are not insolent trouble-makers like Israel, Turkey, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, or Pakistan. Nor are gleefully exploitative free-riders like Germany, Japan, and Italy. We carry our weight pretty well. What other medium power allies went to Iraq or fights the Somali pirates?

So yes, we are grateful for the alliance. We like America generally, and we all learn English because of that. But we also wonder why you don’t seem to know anything about our country, even though we are 50 million people, in the G-20, and a far more capable yet loyal ally than almost any other you have. Israel has only 7 million people and they live in a lot less danger than we do, but you obsess about them in a way you never have about us. Given that Asia is rising, while the Middle East has a become a sink-hole of American power, we understand your disinterest in Asia even less. How many more books with titles like ‘when China rules the world’ do you need to read before you realize that your Middle East obsession is ridiculously overwrought? We look forward to the day your English teachers, soldiers, and other expats can speak a little Korean, behave better, and know what the Choseon Dynasty was.’

Soldiers Shooting at Airplanes: Yet Another Reason to Decentralize Korea

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seoul-incheon-airport

I was just about to leave town for the summer when this incident occurred. In June, two Korean marines fired on a civilian airliner coming in to land at Incheon international airport (pictured above). Much of the commentary has focused on the heightened levels of tension because of last year’s incidents (the sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island). And certainly, the ‘enhanced readiness’ and ‘proactive deterrence’ sought by the new minister of defense add (with obvious justification to be sure) to the tension. While clearly SK should defend itself, I was wary last year of the new guidelines because of precisely this possibility. Everyone is edgy, so incidents like this aren’t unexpected.

Yet no one has brought up the obvious fact that is hugely dangerous for civilian airliners to be regularly landing and taking off less than 50 miles from the demilitarized zone to begin with. I argued this point at some length last year. My concern was and remains that SK is far too centralized (a problem in itself) on a hugely vulnerable region right on the border with NK. 55% of the SK population lives within 50 miles of the DMZ, most obviously the massive northwestern agglomeration of people living in Seoul, its surrounding Kyeonggi province, plus the city of Incheon.

Note further that this problem is worsening, not improving. Seoul continues to grow, while Incheon, a new, hyper-modern ‘model’ city is exploding in size too. To boot, the new (and supercool and efficient) Incheon airport is now one of the busiest and largest in Asia. On the downside, Korea’s second city, Busan, which is already a paltry 3 million (Seoul is 20+ M), is shrinking. A friend who works in US Forces in Korea, and who interfaces regularly with the Korea military, tells me that the Korean military is increasing closing (naval) installations in the south (near Busan), because no one is willing live down here anymore. Just about all of my students tell me they want to move up to Seoul, the center of the universe.

So I will ask once again, why does the ROK government continue to worsen SK’s strategic position by permitting this wildly lop-sided regional development? You could say that this is simply the outcome of consumer choice – ie, SKs all want to live in Seoul. That is true, but the government could obviously do a lot to discourage that. Remember that this is SK – ground-zero for state-led capitalism, ‘administrative guidance,’ and all that. SKs are accustomed to the government ‘directing’ or “nudging” (in American/Obama era parlance) national life far more than westerners. SK efforts to incentive extra-Seoul demographic accumulation would hardly been seen as a government tyranny or something like that. And besides, the reason – security against NK – is very defensible. This wouldn’t be like uprooting a neighborhood to build a strip mall or something. This wouldn’t be District Six in Capetown.

If you lived next to North Korea (North Korea!), would you really want these sorts of demographic-regional patterns? Even if you drop all the other (very good) arguments about regional equity, sustainable living patterns, the informal discrimination against the rest of Korea doomed to the ‘provinces,’ etc, there is an obvious national safety argument to unwind Seoul-centricity. Yet this is never discussed, even after incidents like this shooting. I don’t get it…

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OTHER POST-SUMMER THOUGHTS

1. The S&P downgrade of US debt was both meaningful yet ludicrous. Meaningful in that it put a point on something everyone already knew anyway – the US political process is so gridlocked and its political culture so acrimonious, that it calls into question the ability of the USG to meet future obligations. But it was simultaneously inaccurate, because the very next day, the market rushed into US Treasuries as the safest global asset. Interest on the benchmark US debt issue – the 10-year Treasury bond – is near record lows, around 2.5%.

In fact, I find this astonishing. For a decade, budget hawks (me included) thought the US was borrowing far more than it could ever pay back to cover the Bush tax cuts, the GWoT, and Medicare Part D. I find the interpretation that the western welfare state is in crisis, to be persuasive. I never thought the US would be able to just borrow and borrow and borrow like this. It is astonishing just how willing foreigners are to buy American debt. For all the chaos, no other asset is even close to the reliability of the T-bill, so maybe Cheney was right – we can just borrow forever… (how terrifying) … which leads to me next thought:

2. It is probably time for another stimulus. Increasingly it looks like the economy never climbed out of the 2008 implosion. The fear of the double-dip looks pretty warranted, but it is more likely to be understood as the long tail of the Great Recession rather than as a separate event. And increasingly I think Krugman is right that we should use the continuing super-low interest rates on US debt to fund another stimulus. I find the GOP/WSJ argument that the first stimulus didn’t work to absolutely fatuous. No less than the IMF has found that the stimulus prevented US unemployment from reaching 15-20%. The standard Keynesian prescription is that when consumer spending contracts, followed by investment spending, government is the only collective or ‘public goods’ actor that can step in countercyclically. And I don’t see much evidence that this doesn’t apply here, just as it applied and worked pretty well 3 years ago.

It should painfully obvious after the stockmarket roller coaster of two weeks ago, that uncertainty is worse than usual; government focus would probably help, especially given the policy-process meltdown of the debt-ceiling fight. But the DOW numbers increasingly strike me as frothy and casino-like rather than genuinely indicative. CNBC can cash in on the drama of wild ups and downs, but I think Yglesias (following Krugman) is increasingly correct – the real issue is growth and unemployment. And I don’t see the correlation between debt reduction and (job) growth (much-touted in the GOP Iowa debate). Speaking of…

3. The GOP Iowa debate was terrifying. Among other ideas raised were: to return to the gold standard (Ron Paul), to criminalize abortion for rape-victims (Santorum), to never raise the debt ceiling (Bachmann), to cut the highest US tax rate to 25% (Cain), and that the EPA runs a “reign of terror” over US business (Huntsman). Wow. Really? Who let these people of out the asylum? Is the GOP really this conservative? Is this even conservatism anymore, because it increasingly looks to me like nihilism of a sort. Do Republican primary voters (FULL DISCLOSURE: me included) really believe it when Perry says God is calling him to run for prez? None of this tea-party reactionary delusion actually reflects the reality of modern, cosmopolitan democratic governance enmeshed in the global economy. As always, I can only think that this sort of stuff convinces the rest of the world that we are bonkers and unfit to lead to lead the international community. Don’t believe me? Try to figure out how you explain this to non-Americans. Why aren’t the GOP candidates talking about stuff like this, a far more realistic and worrisome scenario of American power? Only Huntsman even came close, so if he survives to the Ohio primary, I guess I’ll vote for him. If anything, I left the debate thinking of Thomas Frank’s book, which I read this summer: the surreality of the GOP primary speaks to extraordinary insularity of rural America and the almost purposive resentment of the modernity in contemporary US conservatism. Creepy…

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This and this are the best short-form articles you didn’t read this summer. And then of course, there’s this, by an expat busted for pot who turned his jail-term into local Korean celebrity – bizarre, but the article is dead-on.

The Impact of Arab Spring on North Korea (2): Cleave to China even more

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arab-spring 2

Part one is here.

This is the second part of a soon-to-be-published quick piece for the Korea National Defense University on Arab Spring and NK. Comments would be appreciated.

4. Find new nuclear clients, perhaps in Asia. It is widely argued that NK’s decision to nuclearize was foolishly expensive for an impoverished country. This might not have been true, as the DPRK has actively proliferated for cash – most notoriously with the AQ Kahn network and Syria. But as old autocratic buyers in the ME fade, pressure will grow to re-coup the expense of NK’s nuclear program elsewhere. Look for NK to probe new proliferation ‘friends,’ including Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Burmese junta, and others; this will test the meaningfulness of the Proliferation Security Initiative.

5. Cleave to China, as the moral cover of fellow autocracies fades. Not only will there be fewer autocracies in the world as a result of Arab Spring, the remaining will be more morally intolerable. For two decades, the ME seemed impenetrable to the post-Cold War spread of liberal democracy seen in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Africa. Continuing ME dictatorships bolstered the moral ‘normalness’ of NK; if there are many dictatorships in the world, then NK is not especially odious. By contrast, if the world becomes more and more democratic, then non-democracies increasingly stick out. (This is arguably why China informally props up so many other dictatorships.) If this democratization of the ME is genuine, then many of the fellow autocrats who helped NK seem less uniquely awful will disappear, and NK’s isolation will deepen. NK already faces major restrictions on where its nationals and firms may operate. The loss of ‘friends’ like Qaddafi or Assad shrinks this further.

Worse, the debate in the West seems to be genuinely changing on the merits of looking the other way on dictators in the interest of stability. Western elites increasingly recognize the long-term unsustainability and ultimately self-defeating posture of tolerating dictatorships. As Western leaders scramble to get on the right side of history with the Arabs, their moral tolerance of dictatorship elsewhere will decline too. That obviously includes NK. If NATO can bomb for Libyans’ human rights, then why not for Ivorians, Syrians or North Koreans? This is opportune for the Lee Myung-Bak (LMB) administration. LMB’s rejection of the Sunshine Policy and tough line on NK has not been popular in the West. However, changing Western attitudes on the accommodation of dictatorships will likely generate new Western acceptance for LMB’s harder line. Post-Arab Spring, LMB’s rejection of the Sunshine Policy will go down more easily if detente is seen as coddling a dictator similar to Saleh or Assad.

If dealing with dictatorships becomes harder for democratic elites to justify and for democratic publics to accept, then the Six Party Talks are unlikely to resume, and NK will more openly become a Chinese client. It is no surprise Kim Jong Il now visits China regularly; it is all he has left to go to. Post-Arab Spring, the democracies of the Six Parties are even less likely to deal with NK. Losing its autocratic ME friends and unable to meaningfully negotiate with democracies, NK will (d)evolve into a Chinese satellite.

6. Do not give up the nuclear weapons – ever. This most obvious lesson is one Qaddafi, and before him, Saddam Hussein, learned the hard way. The CNN effect can chain-gang the West into places like Kosovo or Libya under R2P, but the West’s casualty tolerance is low. The West will not carry a war solely for human rights if casualties are high, and minimally interventionist air-power is the preferred tool. The easiest way to deter R2P interventions then is weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Libya turned away from its WMD program in 2003, for which it received an implied ‘no regime change’ deal from the Bush administration. The West then reneged on this deal, attacking Qaddafi, just as it was able to attack Hussein, because neither completed their WMD deterrent. Now with NATO insisting on Qaddafi’s ouster (likely resulting in his death at the hands of angry Libyans, as with Mussolini or Ceausescu), NK, especially the Kim family, will be that much less likely to deal on its nuclear program. If NK gives up its program today, it will be more open to democratic pressure and air campaigns tomorrow. Without nukes, one is vulnerable to R2P air interventions, but no democratic public is willing to tolerate a nuclear strike to push regime change. Bombing, yes; nuclear war, no. The lesson of Qaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, and Hussein is that the West will only blink if you have WMD.

In sum, the overall lesson to NK of Arab Spring is, don’t change at all: permit no foreign reporters (they synergize the CNN effect), give as little information as possible to the NK people (rising expectations from the internet pushed Arab youth into the streets), push China as much as possible (it’s the only option), leave son-gun in place as a bulwark (when in doubt, massacre first, ask questions later). Indeed, this is the lesson of Arab Spring to all the world’s remaining dictatorships, and the worse the regime (Zimbabwe, Syria, NK), the more it applies. Moderately authoritarian states like China or Tunisia can flirt with reform, but for genuinely ferocious systems, like NK, any change risks a huge explosion, because so much social frustration has built up. There is no other way to maintain the state in its current configuration than to clamp down yet more. Sadly, Arab Spring’s liberatory potential in the ME is precisely why its impact in Korea will be a yet deeper freeze.