On a “Democratic Integrated Government”
— by B.R. Myers

Here’s a thought experiment for my American readers. Imagine it’s 2024. The economy’s in bad shape, and at least half the electorate wants the Democrats thrown out of power. Despite an inept campaign the Republican presidential candidate leads in half the polls.

Meanwhile prominent members of his campaign committee publicly blame America’s woes not on the Democrats, but on the presidential system itself. The office is just too powerful, always has been. The German system? Much better.

What’s needed, they say, is a new constitution that would transfer half the White House’s power to Congress. The head of the Republican campaign committee adds that he’d like to see a “democratic integrated government,” with members of both parties in key posts. Then the Republican candidate announces he is creating a so-called Power Reform Committee to decide what must be done.

Is your head spinning yet? Now imagine that at the time in question the Democrats have the largest majority in the House in American history.

The above is a transposition of the latest South Korean political developments into American categories. (I trust I’ve already given enough background information about constitutional revision on this blog; I’ve also explained how the desire for a weakened presidency induced the conservative party to turn on Park Geun-hye in 2016.)

Yoon Seok-youl shakes hands in November with a cut-out of Kim Dae Jung, whom he described a few days ago as “a saint.” Photograph: News 1 (Nov 2021).

Why would the People Power Party want a weaker president even if he or she is from its own ranks? Because a stronger National Assembly would have more say in key appointments, thus enabling each of the party’s factions to have a turn at the trough. The key Korean verb here is haemŏkta, literally do-and-eat: to get and patrimonially exploit a post for the benefit of oneself and one’s faction.

The last time South Korea had a weak president and a strong National Assembly, things fell apart so quickly that right and left initially welcomed the military coup of 1961. The division of power between the president and the prime minister was a big reason why neither fellow put up any resistance, the latter quite literally getting himself to a nunnery. But all that’s forgotten.

The chaebols’ hope for a semi-presidential or semi-parliamentary set-up is easily explained; lawmakers constantly seeking re-election are much less likely to defy them than a strong president who can serve only one 5-year term anyway. But why (you ask) are the conservative media so keen on “integration” after decades of demonizing the left? Because they now make most of their money from their cable TV ventures, which they want to see protected from recurring, ideologically-motivated efforts to shut them down.

Another advantage of “integration” is the depoliticization that would result, making the electorate increasingly indifferent to public affairs, and giving the power elite an ever freer hand when divvying up goodies and executing policy. (I recommend in this context Chantal Mouffe’s On the Political, 2005, a critique of depoliticization.)

Tourist attraction: the entrance to the Ignorarium

I suppose there’s no point in hoping the Western press will abandon the  Luce-TIME tradition of personalizing exotic politics in the simplest terms. But can it perhaps give the two main candidates’ disparate family backgrounds a break for a while, and show some interest in the “integration” discussion? If only for its relevance to everyone’s preferred topic of North Korea?

In negotiations over constitutional revision the Minjoo-held National Assembly would be certain to demand removal or amendment of every article now impeding a “peace system,” i.e. inter-Korean confederation. We also know which key posts the Minjoo would insist upon in an “integrated democratic government” such as Yoon’s campaign chief Kim Chong-in envisions, namely the intelligence agency, which has always handled all the real work of inter-Korean affairs, and its front organization the Unification Ministry.

I’m sure Kim Jong Un and Xi Jin Ping see much the same advantages in a strengthened National Assembly that the chaebol do. In 1972 Erich Honecker famously told one of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s officials not to worry about a pending no-confidence vote in the Bundestag; he would make sure his friend stayed in power. Sure enough, two conservative lawmakers were bribed by East Germany to vote against the measure.

If you’re Kim Jong Un, and you need a man in the Blue House who can wheedle Uncle Sam into an end of war agreement and sanctions relief, you may well consider an ostensibly pro-American fellow on a Minjoo leash preferable to a wayward populist lefty like Lee Jae-myung. Either way, this is one election the regime in Pyongyang won’t be losing sleep over.

 

UPDATE: 19 December 2021

Some video of this weekend’s conservative street protests against a new constitution, a semi-parliamentary system and a “democratic integrated government.”

 

On Yoon Seok-youl [Yoon Suk-yeol] — B.R. Myers

In his latest NK News article Andrei Lankov expresses concern at the prospect of a Yoon Seok-youl presidency. The conservatives will insist on denuclearization, and since this is a non-starter, inter-Korean relations can only get worse, etc. I’m of course familiar with the assumption that if a demand is unacceptable to Pyongyang, the wise thing for the rest of us to do is to drop it, thereby accepting what we hitherto found unacceptable; the more rational side must always yield. I find this approach both irrational and dangerous, but I’ve argued the point often enough already.

Instead let me note that Park Geun-hye’s so-called Trustpolitik delinked cooperation from denuclearization, at least initially, and there’s no reason a man well to her left can’t do likewise, whatever noises he makes on the campaign trail beforehand to get the flag-wavers’ vote.

But near the end of his article Lankov goes so far as to say Yoon would “most likely … freeze all interaction with the North for the entire length of his term, extending the Cold War on the Korean Peninsula.” For that prediction to come true, Yoon would have to be the most hardline president since Syngman Rhee. And this with the National Assembly firmly under nationalist-left control.

Lankov goes on:

What if the North Koreans use limited military force against South Korea, replaying the Yeonpyeong Island and Cheonan provocations of 2010?

The dominant attitude of the conservatives can be summed up with an oft-repeated North Korean slogan: “We will revenge tenfold, hundredfold, thousandfold for every attack on our sacred land.” It’s quite possible that even a relatively minor confrontation could lead to escalation.

So we get only North Korean rhetoric in illustration of a South Korean attitude. It’s one even the military dictatorships showed no sign of, despite the North’s insurgencies and assassination attempts, but we could expect it in 2022 … from Yoon? The man who helped put so many conservatives behind bars — with the book thrown especially at defense and intelligence types — that he was promoted to chief prosecutor in 2019? The man who turned against the Moon government only when it moved to limit the power of the prosecutors’ office? The man who last week pledged to help enshrine the spirit of Gwangju 1980 in the constitution?

Moon Jae-in and Yoon Seok-yeol in July 2019 (Photo: Hankyoreh).

As for the People Power Party, thirty of its lawmakers voted with the left in 2020 to allow provinces to cooperate directly with North Korea. Its young chairman recently said he wants honor restored to participants in the Yeosu unrest of 1948 – which was in fact a rebellion against the republic itself. (The North’s account of this episode is more accurate than the current orthodoxy here.) And last spring one of the PPP’s candidates for the nomination advocated legalizing the sale of Kim Il Sung’s partly posthumous “memoirs.” These people are out to turn the inter-Korean clock way back, and vengefully escalate conflicts?

The election may well be won by Lee Jae-myung or, if the Daejangdong scandal ends up engulfing him, a Moon-picked replacement. But should Yoon win, what many here expect to follow, myself included, is a bipartisan push for constitutional revision: in other words, for an assembly-strengthening, trough-widening, semi-presidential system. Although Yoon made dismissive noises about a “naegakche” (the Korean term) a few months ago, he now surrounds himself with known naegakche advocates.

Most of these are the same center-rightists who helped the Minjoo Party impeach Park Geun-hye in 2016, but quite a few are fresh aisle-crossers from the center-left (like Kim Han-gil). All now join in presenting Park’s nemesis as the future of enlightened conservatism. Imagine if the Republican Party had nominated a Watergate prosecutor to run against Carter in 1976 — Archibald Cox say — and you get some idea of how strange all this is.

Many a flurry of talk about constitutional revision has fizzled out the day after the election, and this one may fizzle out too. That would still leave a President Yoon in no position to clash with the National Assembly — not least because that would also incur the wrath of the labor unions, which shut down Lee Myung Bak’s presidency in spring 2008 and Park’s in fall 2016. The implications for the next administration’s North Korea policy are obvious.

I don’t mean to deny that the inter-Korean relationship could deteriorate under Yoon, but this would likely have more to do with the North’s traditional reluctance to work with a conservative administration than with any “freezing” intention on his part. As I wrote in my earlier post on the United Future Party, as the People Power Party used to call itself, every conservative president since Rhee’s ouster has taken a more conciliatory approach to the North, and responded more passively to its military attacks, than his or her campaign rhetoric led the right-wing electorate to expect. Had it been up to the conservative power elite, something not unlike the Sunshine Policy would have begun under Roh Tae Woo (1988-93).

Most Western consumers of South Korea news want simple, moralizing commentary on the political scene: the “peacemakers vs Cold Warriors” narrative, if they’re on the left themselves, or the “loyal US allies vs communists” one if they’re on the right. But there’ll be more than enough of that sort of thing over the next few months without us Koreanists adding to it.

On the South Korean Version of German History
— B.R. Myers

After months of isolation at a riverside house in Gyeonggi Province I now have to return to Busan for face-to-face classes. Yesterday, to ease my way back into society, I went to a Ministry of Unification event in Seoul to which I and a few dozen others, Korean and foreign, had been invited. The occasion was the launch of the Council on Diplomacy for Korean Unification.

I’d been out of circulation so long that I found myself paying attention to people’s appearances. Every male in attendance, I noticed, had a variation of the Erich von Stroheim haircut which Korean barbers offer the older gent as an alternative to the hegemonic Moe Stooge. Whereas I haven’t seen a pair of scissors since last spring. Getting the event underway, the moderator asked Andrei Lankov, sitting on my right, to introduce the lady on his left.

In their congratulatory remarks the Minister of Unification Lee In-young and former occupants of the office made clear that t’ongil oegyo or unification diplomacy, the vagueness of which term had intrigued me, means persuading the world to support President Moon’s North Korea policy. Which is where we foreign Pyongyang watchers were to come in. An afternoon more hortatory than informative lay ahead. I decided I’d be able to make the 6 pm bus home after all.

But I sat up when Michael Reiffenstuel, the German ambassador, rose to say a few words. Will this be the time, I wondered, when an envoy from Berlin finally…? No, the message, while eloquently expressed, was the usual: Although unification took Germans by surprise, its foundations had been laid by Willy Brandt (1969-74), who opened the door for people-to-people contacts and exchanges that helped break down barriers, and it’s to be hoped that Korea too, though it will be a long process, etc.

This is the pat story of German unification one hears from South Koreans all the time. My question is why Germans always feel they must play along. They know full well that people-to-people contacts began before Brandt’s Ostpolitik — that they were agreed upon at the very height of Cold War tension, by two superpower-loyal governments that loathed each other. It was in 1964 that East German pensioners became able to spend up to a month in West Germany. Postal and telephone connections had been in regular use since the late 1940s.

So much then for the popular notion that Washington, the sanctions regime or “Cold War mentality” — or as the right-wingers would have it, communism — is to blame for the two Koreas’ inability to sustain the most minimal forms of humanitarian exchange and cooperation. (Even routinizing online family reunions is too challenging, it seems.)

Also untenable is the notion that German unification resulted organically from economic cooperation and displays of mutual recognition. As most German historians agree, that stuff actually strengthened the Honecker regime, which was the very reason no one expected it to collapse. A close friend of mine, whom I got to know in Görlitz in 1983, risked her life to escape via a third country in 1988. A man less fortunate died trying to escape in a hot air balloon in 1989, mere months before the Berlin Wall fell. It fell quite suddenly and despite Ostpolitik, for the simple reason that the USSR publicly withdrew support for Honecker. (See Margit Roth’s excellent book Innerdeutsche Bestandsaufnahme der Bundesrepublik 1969-1989, Wiesbaden, 2013.)

Of course there might have been more inter-German unpleasantness had a confrontational relationship persisted. But good relations certainly didn’t hasten unification, and there are grounds for arguing that they delayed it. Even the destabilizing effects of heightened East German access to Western culture, media, etc — which the North Koreans blame for what happened — appear to have been neutralized by the increase in surveillance and oppression with which the Honecker regime felt compelled to protect itself. (We saw a similar dynamic on a smaller scale in Kaesong, when the joint industrial zone was in operation.)

The Federal Foreign Office describes human rights on its website as “a cornerstone of German foreign policy.” If this is so, its diplomats should refrain from colluding in a misrepresentation of their country’s history that is often deployed to discourage criticism of the Kim regime. It’s unfortunately true that Bonn didn’t say much about Honecker’s violations of human rights, but behind the scenes it was at least committed to buying the freedom of political prisoners.

That practice began under Adenauer in the early 1960s. Ludwig Rehlinger, who was one of the responsible government officials — and who celebrated his 94th birthday last week — wrote a marvelous book on the subject called Freikauf: Die Geschäfte der DDR mit politisch Verfolgten 1963 – 1989 (Berlin, 1991).

Especially moving is the part where he discusses one of the first East German prisoners released. A carpenter by profession, the man had been given a life sentence by the Soviet Military Administration for an offense no one could clarify. He had no family. No one had shown interest in his case. He was oblivious to the wheels suddenly turning on his behalf. One day in 1963 he was taken uncomprehendingly out of prison and handed over to West German lawyers in East Berlin.

They took the carpenter by S-Bahn to West Berlin, then drove him to an office building and gave him a cup of coffee. The lawyers later reported that (my translation)

he was very still, looking mutely around him and incredulously taking in his surroundings. As he recognized the reality, and grasped that he was actually free, he collapsed in shock. The only words he could manage to bring forth were, “That somebody thought of me.”

Reading this, I was reminded how much goes undiscussed here lest it complicate the pursuit of the great abstract goals of peace and unification. There’s a lot to be said for the West Germans’ relative interest in quiet, steady humanitarian improvements, and in the fates of individual human beings. It would be nice if German diplomats said it.

 

UPDATE: 15 October 2021: 

This is from a “card news” sequence about German unification on the website of the Ministry of Unification:

“Minister Lee In-young has said we must pay attention to the fact that Germany’s unification processes resulted from processes of steady and continuous dialogue and cooperation.”

Another “card” in the sequence informs us that news of Germany’s unification was welcomed around the world. “Except on the South Korean nationalist left,” I feel tempted to add. Anyone who doubts me on this should read Hwang Sok-yong’s The Old Garden, a novel I reviewed for the New York Times in 2009.

On the “Media Punishment Law”
— B.R. Myers

Relax, Afghanistan is nothing like South Korea — or so the media have been telling everyone here over the past few weeks. An esteemed Dongseo colleague from the neighboring office just wrote an article for the Korea Times in this vein. Me, I have a hard time overlooking one parallel in particular. I’m generalizing of course, but not overmuch, when I say that in the one country our troops defended moderate Muslims from fundamentalists, and in the other they defend moderate nationalists from fundamentalists.

By moderateness in each case I mean not a principled, liberal-democratic opposition to the fundamentalism in question, but rather an untheorized, unreflecting preference for life under a less rigorous dispensation. America’s ally and its adversary thus form one ideological community in which real hostility is felt only by the fundamentalists toward the moderates, who in return feel a sneaking admiration for their antagonists’ superior resolve and purity.

(Granted, it’s much less sneaking in the South Korean case; North Korean soldiers and spies have been glamorized in hit movies and serial dramas for twenty years, and especially frequently since 2017.)

Is fundamentalist aggression lamented, bewailed, disapproved of? Certainly. But the indignation is missing — that concerted, angry sense of offended constitutional values which alone indicates a state ready to defend itself unaided. Such are the unwinnable conflicts America likes to send its young people into.

Not only America of course. In a Guardian article the other day a former British soldier recalled

the simplistic assumption that everyone in Afghanistan could fall into two categories, enlightened liberal reformers who would welcome a western presence, and conservative folk susceptible to the Taliban. Needless to say, things were more complicated than that…. 

One morning, an interpreter who had worked with the British for decades sidled up to me at breakfast and pointed at a young Afghan woman who also worked as an interpreter. In a voice loud enough for her to hear everything, he declared her a “filthy whore”. His reason? She was wearing a pair of jeans and a bright pink headscarf.

I just hope the dear man got on a rescue flight out, don’t you?

That anecdote reminded me of Kim Seong-chil’s brief diary of life in wartime Seoul under North Korean rule. Like most South Koreans then as now, the young and married academic belonged to no political camp in particular. This makes his record all the more fascinating and (I believe) representative.

Between late June and mid-September 1950, Kim went from joy at the sight of the conquering North Korean troops to a desperate hope — as the US Army drew nearer — that they would be driven back out of Seoul. But here’s the thing: Even while yearning for an American victory, he recorded his great pride at how many US soldiers the North Koreans were killing.

Clearly the ostensibly anti-Taliban mainstream in Afghanistan thought along similarly blurred lines; the rapidity of its capitulation speaks for itself. I dare say that the majority of foreigners on whose behalf so many young Americans have fought and died since 1950 — majority does not mean entirety — have been people like Kim Seong-chil and that Afghani interpreter.

In my experience, our young soldiers are more clear-eyed about this than their superiors. When I lecture on North Korean ideology to military audiences here, it’s usually the enlisted who say, “But this sounds a lot like how South Koreans see things.” The top officers on the other hand trust, or pretend to trust, the line put out by the host government at grip-and-grin events. (So I’m less surprised than Lawrence Peck at the news that Christine Ahn, formerly of the North Korea lobby, now of the North-South Korea lobby, has been invited to address the US Indo-Pacific Command.)

Our commentariat is no more inclined to question South Korea’s commitment to liberal democracy than our government is. Not even the ruling party’s attempt in 2018 to alter constitutional mention of “liberal democracy” to “democracy” has deterred our experts and journalists from talking of the liberals in power here. (That attempt failed, by the way; not so the attempt to make the same alteration to history textbooks.)

The refusal to face facts is such that a recent article in the Diplomat on South Korea’s Media Punishment / Muzzling Law (as the new version of the Press Arbitration Act is informally called) bears the self-contradictory subtitle:

South Korea may be the only liberal democracy using a “fake news” law to target large traditional media companies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleasantly surprised when the Western press covers things like this at all. Certainly the writer James Constant, a former editor at the Joongang Daily, offers a solid introduction to the law in question. The whole tone of his article, entitled “The Trouble With South Korea’s ‘Fake News’ Law,” is one of concern and disapproval.

Unfortunately, Constant forbears to mention a very relevant fact: that Moon Jae-in and his party were themselves helped into power by an unprecedented tsunami of fake news. There would have been no “candlelight revolution” in 2016 had it not been for the groundless media assertions that — where to begin? — Park Geun-hye belonged to a bizarre religious cult; was addicted to plastic surgery and drugs; had entrusted her secret love-child to a billionaire gal-pal, who in return was shaping foreign policy; that when a ship carrying hundreds of schoolchildren sank off the coast in 2014 — sank either because Park had ordered its sinking, or because an American submarine had hit it — she was cavorting with a secret lover in the Blue House, the Viagra budget of which…. but you get the idea.

There has been no shortage of fake news from the ruling camp since 2017 either, with TBS radio’s News Factory (sic!) leading the way. Let me mention here only a) the allegations about the wife of the leading conservative contender for the presidency, and b) accusations of sinister ties between the prosecutors’ office and a conservative cable channel. This doesn’t get mentioned in the Diplomat either. Nor does the massive astro-turfing generation of fake internet comments and “likes” that one of Moon’s right-hand men is now in prison for his role in.

Instead we get:

Conservative papers’ articles make up the bulk of content on portal site Naver, where most Koreans get their news. Only 32 percent of South Koreans trust the media…. It’s tempting to link conservative dominance of the press to this low trust, as the Democratic Party is doing.

No qualifying or contradictory statement follows. It’s tempting, and we too should be tempted.

First of all: Conservative dominance? What, no mention of the government’s union-enforced grip on the main television and radio broadcasters? I just looked at Naver’s political news section, by the way, and it bears no relation to the above assertion.

As the supposedly corroborative South Korean article linked to by the Diplomat makes clear, the reason two conservative newspapers enjoy a tiny combined edge in the top four sources to which Naver news users are exposed (21% versus 20.4%) — presuming they still have that edge now, which I doubt — is because they churn out a greater number of daily articles. Many of these are about celebrities, not politics. (The Chosun Ilbo leads an increasingly schizophrenic existence, with the click-baiting side of it in frequent conflict with the print version — as was seen recently when the newspaper argued ludicrously with itself over a female Olympic archer’s short haircut.)

The gist of the Diplomat article seems to be: These South Korean liberals face a real conservative threat to truth and objectivity in media, and mean well in trying to combat it, but alas, they fail to see where things could lead:

This year’s “fake news” bill could redefine the future of the press in South Korea in ways that both opponents and proponents would find hard to predict…. By taking this step to correct what they see as a hopelessly biased media landscape, the Democratic Party could be setting the stage for a severely weakened press.

If any ruling party in the West were to introduce such a bill, would we be hearing that the effect of it was “hard to predict,” or that it “could be setting the stage” for a weakened press? Would the relative popularity of three opposition-minded newspapers be taken at the ruling party’s assessment as top-down dominance the public doesn’t want — and as the main cause of fake news? And all this without a single example of fake news?

The Media Muzzling Law isn’t a Korean quirk unique among the world’s liberal-democratic states. It’s the manifestation of a commitment to a very different sort of political system, all impediments to which (“accumulated ills,” in official invective) are being purged or at least neutralized, one after the other.

Let’s not act like we don’t know what constitutes “fake news” for these people. Just last year it was helpfully defined by a raft of pro-government academics as anything that undermines the peace process or destabilizes the North. The notion that all this is about protecting official corruption from scrutiny is therefore too cynical and too charitable at the same time. The ruling camp must be left alone, however it chooses to reward itself on the side, so it can carry out “the people’s will” or minshim.

The Minjoo Party’s readiness to pass such a law six months before the presidential election, despite the sword’s potential to be turned against it, should in itself give outsiders pause. It reflects great confidence that neither the prosecutors’ office nor the higher courts are going to be giving the construction of a “peace system” much trouble down the road.

Nor does the ruling camp yet see much reason to worry about the conservative party, whose chairman has publicly expressed a reluctance to criticize President Moon. For in this great nationalist community, which knows gradations but no insuperable, unnegotiable divides, the right’s approach to the left is a lot like the left’s approach to the North. But katchi kapshida and all that.

UPDATE: 8 September 2021: Youtube journalists arrested

South Korea has become a country where someone accused of defamation by another citizen, even by a third party, can expect to have several policemen turn up at his door – provided the alleged libel was of someone in or close to the government. I always thought it was naive of the Youtube journalists arrested yesterday to think that the News Factory business model of tossing out new aspersions and insinuations every week could work for opposition media too. Or that they could emulate the other side’s custom of ignoring requests to come down to the station for questioning. It was only last December that one of them was hauled away from his apartment, mid-breakfast, because months earlier he had falsely identified a man shaking hands with President Moon in a photograph as cult leader Yi Man-hee. That he had already publicly apologized for the error was thought beside the point.

The video of one of the arrests yesterday is thumbnailed with the word “Shock!” As an American I’m equally shocked at the idea of simply refusing to open up when the police come knocking, as Kim Se-eui did. He’s lucky that door is still usable.

UPDATE: 9 September 2021:

I see the video posted by the offending Youtube channel has been taken down from Youtube by court order, so here is the YTN report of the arrests:

 

On the Inter-Korean Hotline
[and the Cheongju Spy Case]
— B.R. Myers

If my hypothetical daughter made a great show of buying an extra cellphone purely for calling that boyfriend I hated, and then kept announcing, with remarkable equanimity, that he wouldn’t answer because he was angry at her for siding with me, I’d smell a rat.

But no sooner was an inter-Korean hotline established with fanfare in 2018 than the commentariat began thinking it vital to communication between the two governments. Forgotten was the fact that Moon’s first appointee as spy boss had said his mission lay in bringing about a Kim-Moon summit, read: in conducting secret diplomacy. Forgotten a little later was the fact that his successor Park Jie-won had done prison time in connection with the illicit transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to Kim Jong Il.

The old rivalry and ill will between Moon and Park is well-known; he was appointed because the North is known to trust him. The intelligence agency has since handed off much of the work of spy-catching to the under-equipped police, so as not to complicate the secret inter-Korean diplomacy that now constitutes its core function. By secret I mean primarily: secret from the country both governments regard as the main obstacle to the “peace system.”

President Moon and Director of the National Intelligence Service Park Jie-won, in June 2021.

Even Americans who believe Alger Hiss was innocent wouldn’t necessarily want his calligraphy to enjoy pride of place at CIA headquarters. But the ROK intelligence agency now has a state-loyalty-slogan slab in front of it inscribed, as a wink to the nationalist left, in the distinctive “font” of Shin Young-bok, who did several years for belonging to a North-funded underground party committed to toppling the ROK. (Moon and Kim Yo-jong posed in front of Shin’s calligraphy in 2018.) In short, the last thing these two co-ethnic neighboring states either want or need to depend on are formal liaison lines Uncle Sam knows about.

But because many Americans consider secret diplomacy immoral, sinister, and behind the global-transparent times, and therefore prefer to believe it’s rare, especially among their country’s allies, they respond warily to mentions of it, as if to outlandish conspiracy theories. Perhaps the greater problem is that, as the German Sinologist Harro von Senger has put it, Westerners tend to be “stratagem-blind” —  obtuse to the employment of tricks and ruses by countries that do not share our moral disapproval of them.

So when the South said the North wasn’t answering hotline calls, it could only mean the peace drive was “back to square one,” even if Moon seemed to take the setback remarkably well.

In various interviews with KBS World Radio I differed strongly with this consensus. I also warned (here too) against taking the demolition of the liaison office at face value. To sum up what I said then: The two Koreas’ outward relationship must never get too far ahead of the US-DPRK relationship, lest the Americans doubt that Pyongyang would respond to a US strike by flattening Seoul. The ostentatious freeze of inter-Korean relations after the Hanoi summit (2019) served the same security purpose as the one that followed George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech (2002).

The Biden administration having since allayed Kim’s fears to a certain extent, inter-Korean communication can again be admitted to; the ROK government announced that Kim and Moon have been in epistolary contact for the past three months. We’re to believe that the younger man was moved in some way by an unremarkable-sounding letter Moon sent on 27 April 2021, the third anniversary of their first summit in 2018. The two Koreas needed a plausible reason for his purported change of heart and this was all they had. If the anti-Moon fury the dictatorship displayed last year had been genuine, neither a letter nor the passage of so little time would have assuaged it.

Of course, admitting to discussion is one thing, and filling America in on the things discussed another, as we should remember from the Roh government’s assurances that the maritime border hadn’t come up at the 2007 summit in Pyongyang.

The Biden administration gamely welcomed the restoration of inter-Korean liaison lines, but it must have known for months about the Moon-Kim letters, if not about the “underwater” or mulmit’ talks we can assume went on all along. Last May, when our president first expressed support for inter-Korean agreements that commit our ally to the pursuit of confederation with our enemy, I wondered if he’d done so in the innocent confidence that Kim would never answer Moon’s calls anyway.

Now I find his endorsement even harder to understand, though perhaps he and his people merely skimmed the relevant ROK-DPRK declarations; Washington has always had the collective philological instinct of a block of wood. In an interesting NK News interview the other day Wi Sung-lac, who was the ROK’s nuclear envoy under Lee Myung Bak, said that no US president but Trump could have signed a deal as obviously bad as the Singapore agreement. I sure hope he’s right.

Pak Byeong-seok, the speaker of the National Assembly, responded to the hotline news by saying that “a meeting of the North and South Korean assemblies is always possible.” For years now nationalist-left thinkers — including Moon’s mentor Paek Nak-cheong — have advocated just such a coming-together of the South’s elected lawmakers and Kim Jong-un’s rubber-stampers as a crucial step on the road to confederation.

It would indeed be hard to promote confederation without first presenting the Kim dictatorship as something within hailing distance of the South Korean political system. (Not that some people here — including election officials in what conservatives wryly call A Certain Region — don’t already argue that it’s a democracy.) The ROK intelligence agency’s effort to arrange a papal visit to North Korea, thereby creating an impression of religious freedom, is another part of the endeavor to legitimize the regime as a partner. By the way, it was that same agency which handled the technical side of restoring the hotline, and not its front organization the Unification Ministry.

Prominent conservatives here have been saying that the alleged resumption of dialogue is of no great importance; there may be another empty “peace show” or two staged (as the 2007 summit was) with a view to boosting the Minjoo candidate in the presidential election, but the North will not disarm. Well, of course it won’t, as Moon knows fully well, but asserting the unbridgeable distance between the two governments is very different from warning against their dark collusion, which was the opposition strategy in the Sunshine Years.

Why the change? Because the unprincipled parliamentary right and the three conservative newspapers want to see the patrimonial feeding-trough widened through constitutional revision, which cannot be negotiated with the ruling party in an atmosphere of fundamental ideological conflict. Taking these people for staunch defenders of the US-ROK alliance would be as foolish as taking the Moon camp for liberals.

 

UPDATE: 3 August 2021: Park Jie-won resigns?

For what it’s worth the conservative Youtube channel Garosero Research Institute has just announced (9:46 am) that Park Jie-won has resigned from his post as director of the National Intelligence Service. Yet Park is to address the National Assembly this morning.

Six hours later (3:45 pm) there is still no confirmation of Garosero’s story, though it may be relevant that a ruling party lawmaker at this morning’s hearing characterized Park’s testimony, in which he called for a “flexible response” to Pyongyang’s demand for cancellation of US-ROK military exercises, as the director’s personal position and not the official one of the NIS. On the other hand it is common for the ruling camp to try to have things both ways; the government has in the past responded to Moon Chung-in’s provocative brusqueries by claiming the special envoy was speaking as a private citizen. If Park has indeed handed in his resignation, it would seem that President Moon has yet to accept it.

UPDATE: 5 August 2021: NIS denies reports of Park’s resignation

The National Intelligence Service has dismissed Garosero’s report as “groundless,” but the Youtube channel, which has quite a good track record over the past year or so, has since altered its story only to the effect that Park handed in his resignation some time ago. We should perhaps keep in mind here that Justice Minister Choo Mi-ae handed in her resignation weeks before Moon finally let her go.

What I found interesting was the government’s contradiction of Park’s rather obvious assertion in the Tuesday hearings that the impetus to reconnect the hotline came from Kim Jong Un. It was, we’re told, a decision made in mutual consultation. This seems an odd correction, inasmuch as the South had allegedly been asking for re-connection for some time; surely it was Kim’s decision that then made it reality. But as the election nears, the government is growing more sensitive to the charge that it takes orders from the North.

As for the official emphasis on Park’s having spoken as a private person, it may have resulted largely from his undiplomatic disclosure of the North Korean elite’s urgent need for imported liquor and suits. (The usual strategy in DPRK-sympathetic circles is to argue that sanctions are only felt by the poor.) We’re reminded here that while Park has hitherto got on famously well with the Kim clan — first the Dear Leader and more recently Kim Yo-jong — he’s not a true-blue nationalist leftist, but a former US-based businessman who became involved in inter-Korean relations through his connection to Kim Dae Jung. In contrast the de facto # 2 in the NIS, Park Seon-won, led the Yonsei branch of the revolutionary pro-North group Sammintu, and did a few years in prison in the 1980s for his role in the occupation of the US Cultural Center in Seoul. That, combined with his more recent record of loudly denying the North’s role in sinking the Cheonan, makes for a superior background from the ruling camp’s perspective — and perhaps now from Pyongyang’s too.

Update: 10 August 2021: The Cheongju Four

Predictably enough, some Moon-supportive Korea watchers on Twitter have been trying to present the news of the recent arrests in Cheongju as a sign that their man is security-conscious after all. The first and most obvious thing to be said here is that the rank and file of the NIS did not sign up to provide support for “underwater” inter-Korean diplomacy and are still more conservative than their top officials. Second, the green light to investigate at least one of the Cheongju suspects was allegedly given before Moon took over in May 2017, and considerable evidence was amassed before Park Jie-won became NIS chief last year.

Considering its penchant for appointing people who did prison time for violating the National Security Act, and its determination to have the police take over all the work of spy-catching by 2024, the Moon administration is unlikely to have had much interest in seeing this investigation carried to term. Especially not a) with an election in the offing, b) the accused having been active in a formal capacity in Moon’s campaign in 2017, c) their North Korean handlers having exhorted them to whip up support for the official “reform” drive, and d) a lot of the sleuthing having been of a kind the police couldn’t have done.

This last is usually the case in ROK counterintelligence, for the simple reason that most illicit inter-Korean encounters take place in China. Which I suspect is why the police must get the job in the nascent “peace system,” though the official spin, as I understand it, is that the intelligence agency has too notorious a record of abusing power. (As if the police’s record weren’t just as bad.)

But it isn’t easy yet to kill an official investigation of illegal activity once it’s well underway and yielding incriminating evidence. The police’s new “security investigation office” had no choice but to get involved in January 2021. The main charge against the Cheongju Four, apparently, is “accomplishment of purpose,” the carrying out of North Korean instructions by, among other things, delivering information about members of the (pro-North) Minjung Party.

The irony is that while Park Jie-won naturally tried to keep all this from becoming a big news story, the openly pro-North press complained while the suspects’ domiciles were being searched on 27 May; it even named all four, as the mainstream media are yet to do, and left online an older article with a photograph of one of them protesting (as allegedly instructed by the North) against deployment of the F-35A Stealth. What’s more, the man in question was bold enough, or confident enough of support in high places, to use his own little news outlet (since shut down) to criticize Park Jie-won. Even at that late time, allegedly, reports were still being sent to the North, including — a sign of disunity in the NIS — the names of the agents investigating the group.

If the rumor of Park’s having tried to resign is true, his failure to impress the “people’s will” on the NIS might have something to do with it, as some on the right have already asserted. All this takes me back to how the intelligence agency ruined the Roh administration’s plan to install Song Du-yul at Seoul National University by letting the South Korean public know that he was, in his other life, a Workers’ Party official of some importance.

The question now, according to Yeom Don-je, a former NIS man who’s been very critical of the government, is whether anything is heard in the next several months about the dozens of other people allegedly investigated in connection with the Cheongju Four. As for our Korea watchers’ claims that the Blue House remains committed to counterintelligence despite wanting the police to do it, I suppose I’ll believe this when people are caught who came under suspicion after the first Moon-Kim summit.

UPDATE: 12 August 2021: Sure enough? 

The Kookmin Ilbo reports that the National Intelligence Service’s investigation into the Cheongju spy group was downsized and put on a back burner by Moon’s first NIS chief Suh Hoon, a man appointed in large part, as I said at the time, for his famous rapport with North Korean officials. The article says too little about that alleged downsizing, and deals too heavily in the word atmosphere, for me to ascribe much weight to it. The “atmosphere of inter-Korean reconciliation” in 2018 resulted, both in the NIS and the prosecutors’ office, in an “atmosphere of trying to block the investigation,” but the responsible team kept amassing evidence regardless, and this year it took advantage of the shift in public perceptions of inter-Korean relations (or was it the decline in Moon’s poll numbers?) to speed up things.

I see nothing at all in this report to indicate that Suh Hoon or Park Jie-won obstructed the investigation. Doesn’t every bureaucracy intuitively shift its priorities when a new administration comes in? Then again, the NIS would likely have encountered more than just a discouraging atmosphere had it focused on people of more importance. Anyone conversant with a) East Berlin’s complete infiltration of the West German power elite and b) the ideological leanings of South Korea’s ruling camp will understand that the extent of infiltration is likely to be far greater here. Seeing as how the North Koreans were able to afford $20,000 for the relatively trivial services of the Cheongju Four, and that’s only the payment the NIS found proof of, they still have as large a budget for covert operations as ever. (The dictatorship was throwing spy money around even in the famine years.) If the NIS needed so much time just to catch this amateurish quartet, it’s hard to see how the police could do a much worse job.

17 August 2021: The plot thickens   

The prosecutors only have about a month left in which to bring charges, which is very little time to ascertain the full extent to which the suspects carried out instructions allegedly received from the Kim regime. Now seen as more important than the order to protest against F-35 deployment are the instructions to the group to a) make use of its contacts in the ruling party and b) recruit some 60 people into serving the North.

The natural assumption is that at least some of the targets of recruitment were members of the Minjoo Party and the administration. But the last thing the Moon camp wants in the run-up to presidential elections in 2022 are any embarrassing revelations on this front.

Since the Druking affair was uncovered in early 2018, candlelight-revolutionary strategy has been to slow all unwelcome prosecutorial and judicial proceedings down to a crawl, so that cases drag on until after the public has lost all interest. See for example the keywords: Ulsan mayoral race; embezzlement of donations to former “comfort women,” Wolsong-1 nuclear reactor. When trials finally get underway they are adjourned at the drop of a hat for weeks at a time. The Jarndyce v. Jarndyce pace is in sharp contrast to the speed with which veterans of the last two administrations (aka “forces of accumulated ills”) were whizzed through the courts and into prison in 2017-18.

It’s not all that surprising, then, that Seoul has apparently denied the Cheongju prosecutors’ request for reinforcements. Nope, not a single extra prosecutor with relevant experience shall the sleepy provincial city get to handle the biggest spy case since Wangjaesan in 2011.  (I have a hunch this will change if the newspapers raise a big enough fuss.) The man now expected to lead the investigation is one Song Gang. Formerly of Seoul, he was only recently relegated to Cheongju after helping investigate — bad career move — a particularly embarrassing ruling-camp scandal: the illegal imposition of a travel ban on a veteran of the Park administration.

UPDATE: 11 October 2021: BBC report on former North Korean intelligence official

The BBC’s Laura Bicker has interviewed Kim Kuk-song, a former North Korean official who defected to South Korea several years ago.

“I can tell you that North Korean operatives are playing an active role in various civil society organisations as well as important institutions in South Korea.”

The BBC has no way of verifying this claim….But NK News data suggests that far fewer people have been arrested in South Korea for spy-related offenses since 2017, as the North turns to new technologies, rather than old fashioned spies, for intelligence gathering. (Laura Bicker, “Drugs, arms, and terror: A high-profile defector on Kim’s North Korea,” BBC, 11 October 2021.)

I can think of a more plausible reason why far fewer spies have been caught since 2017, and I dare say Kim Kuk-song — whose statement was in the present tense after all — would have given it, had he been asked.

On Lee Jae-myung
— B.R. Myers

Considering all that has come to light in South Korea since 2019, and the Porsche-bribe allegations that just ruined the special prosecutor who worked up relatively tenuous charges against Park Geun-hye, this is the most scandal-ridden ruling camp in post-democratization history. Yet all will be forgotten if Moon Jae-in himself can retire in peace to his spread in Yangsan. Naturally almost the entire Minjoo Party wants to see this happen. It’s therefore wary of Gyeonggi governor Lee Jae-myung, who is now the country’s most popular contender for the presidency.

Moon and Lee were never close, and are known to have fallen out in 2017 (to put things mildly) when Lee challenged the older man in the Minjoo primaries. Rightly or wrongly, it’s widely assumed that Moon would be safer from prosecution under a different Minjoo successor.

Lee and the UPP’s Kim Mi-hŭi in 2010 (Photo: Seongnam Daily).

That’s not Lee’s only problem. Winning the full trust of the nationalist left without having done prison time for National Security Law violations is like becoming a made man in the Mafia without Italian heritage. On the other hand, Lee has the best possible excuse: being from an exceptionally poor and large family, he had to work his way through college in the 1980s, leaving him no time for the protest movement.

He has since done much to compensate for that hole in his resume. He was on exceptionally  good terms with the pro-Pyongyang, now-banned United Progressive Party, whose candidate stood aside in 2010 so he could win the mayoral race in Seongnam. Since he became governor of Gyeonggi in 2018, the province (which abuts the North) has led the ROK in declarations of eagerness to engage in inter-Korean cooperation. Lee has also shown fewer qualms than Moon about criticizing America, especially in regard to THAAD and sanctions on the North. When he complains about how conservatives keep questioning his loyalty to the republic, he is really signaling to fellow party members his suitedness to lead it.

The inter-Korean stuff is by no means the entirety of Lee’s platform, but it seems the most constant plank. His advocacy of a basic income has wavered of late, and to judge by his recent calls for a transfer of the capital to Sejong, he now supports the constitutional revision he professed not to consider urgent.

Speaking of American sanctions, they are turning out to be a godsend for the ruling party. It’s because none of the quiet confederation-building of the past four years has cost anything significant that tax-payers have paid no attention. The ROK opposition can no longer assail the government’s North policy by saying, as was said to great vote-getting effect in 2007, that the South should take care of its own citizens first. The People Power Party must now avoid the topic, or else be seen by younger voters as behind the times.

It’s a remarkable state of affairs, considering that in South Korea, where there has always been agreement on the need for social welfare, dislike of the North and a concern for security used to be the main distinguishing marks of the conservative. Nowadays the opposition party stands only for a vague promise to do things better — and to stay cleaner while doing them. The past few weeks have shown how vulnerable this image is to scandals anywhere in the PPP camp, even if the ruling party is also implicated (see the seafood fraudster); vulnerable also to whatever screw-ups can be attributed to conservative governors or mayors (see the COVID surge in Seoul).

Meanwhile the left is going strong despite this administration’s abysmal track record precisely because it stands for something that transcends the technical and mundane. “Belief is power,” Leslie Stephen said, “even when belief is most unreasonable.”

As I asserted in my last post, the transformation of inter-Korean cooperation into a neutral topic and the reduction of the right to a mere critic of official incompetence and corruption can be regarded as a political-cultural revolution of sorts. It may go down in history as the Moon administration’s most significant achievement on the road to the “peace system.”

Back to Lee Jae-myung. Early this month he revisited the conventional myth (popularized in the West by Bruce Cumings) according to which South Korea was stymied at birth by its retention of pro-Japanese elements. Lee left out the usual contrastive part — unlike North Korea, which conducted a thorough purge — but the left understands the need for such omissions. Moon himself kept mentions of the North to a minimum during his last campaign, when he pretended to be fixated on job creation instead.

In fact Kim Il Sung gave all but the worst ex-collaborators (read: biggest landowners) a second chance, as DPRK historians state with approval. In later years the Great Leader told Erich Honecker he couldn’t have run the country without their help. Honecker must have understood, considering all the ex-Nazis in the SED. I can’t help wondering, though, if the “North Korean revolution” — as I love hearing it called — really needed such front-row cheerleaders of the Japanese war effort as Song Yŏng, Ch’oi Sŭng-hŭi and Cho Myŏng-am?

The thing is, most South Koreans want to believe that former lackeys of the colonial government were few enough for Rhee to have purged them with no adverse consequences had he only made the effort. It’s like how German movies about the Third Reich reduce the Nazi element to one reviled brownshirt per neighborhood. The fallacy of North Korea’s clean break with the past is thus given a grudging pass even by many on the right.

Yoon Seok-yeol, now the main conservative contender for the presidency, unwisely took greater issue with Lee’s talk of how the US military helped the colonial-era elite remain in power. (Worse, Yoon seemed to object to the term occupying troops itself.) He forgot that the opposition party, which he is yet to join, has done quite well over the past year or so by avoiding ideological disputes of this sort.

Needless to say the nationalist left approves of what Lee said, and even the mainstream likes his sniping at the Suga administration. The South Korean public’s receptiveness to Japan-bashing waxes and wanes in roughly two-year cycles, the last high point having been in the summer of 2019. The Tokyo Olympics bear rich potential to take things up several notches. If this happens it will give Lee another boost at a perfect time.

So too will the profile pieces we can expect from the American press if the arch-nationalist Lee officially becomes the “liberal” nominee it must root for. His politics, like Moon’s, will be explained in terms of childhood biography. “The son of a rest-room attendant….” will be the new “The son of a North Korean refugee….” Such friendly US coverage will in turn be invoked here to persuade voters that the scandals attached to Lee’s name are old hat and beneath notice.

(South Korean voters’ tendency to trust the judgment of observers who don’t even speak their language has long helped the left here, though it results from an inferiority complex the left criticizes the loudest.)

I suppose I should say something about the best-known scandals. (Others are described on Lee’s wiki page.) It has been alleged a) that in 2007, when he was a lawyer, he had an extramarital affair with an actress whom he deceived into thinking he was single (a punishable offense); b) that while mayor of Seongnam, he tried forcibly to commit his older brother to a mental institution, which the latter’s family attests was an effort to muzzle a healthy accountant who had criticized him in public, and c) that he subjected his sister-in-law to a stream of filthy misogynist abuse over the telephone; a sound file is online. At present he is under police investigation for allegations of bribery relating to money gathered from businesses in 2015 for the ostensible purpose of supporting the Seongnam football club.

There is also abundant video evidence of Lee’s irascibility under critical questioning, to mention here only the most recent exchange with his Minjoo rival Jeong Se-gyun who, having called in a debate for scrutiny of Lee’s past, received from him the retort: “Must I drop my pants again?”

Thus did the governor publicize the fact that the investigation into the actress’ allegations had entailed… but why insist on these details? What I want to stress is that none of the above seems to hurt Lee much with Gyeonggi voters, among whom he is generally popular, or with the nationalist left rank-and-file around the country, which sees him as just the kind of scrappy fighter the Cause needs. Here’s a man, they feel, who will resume the purge of the right with the necessary rigor, and forge ahead with Kim Jong-un whether Biden likes it or not.

It’s ironic that by keeping his foe on the margins of the Minjoo, President Moon has saved him from the taint of failure and hypocrisy that now attaches to the party establishment. Lee thus seems much more attractive to young voters than other Minjoo candidates. A new poll positing a two-way match-up puts him at 43.9%, the conservative Yoon at 36%.

Even if he bears grudges of his own, a President Lee would certainly be better for Moon, Kim Jong Un and the confederation project than a President Yoon. It might never happen; there are rumors of vastly more incriminating “X files” being kept in reserve against the governor. Other variables include the pandemic, the economy, and that bribery investigation.

There is also a possibility of Yoon’s campaign collapsing this summer, which would make the right more interested in the trough-sharing semi-presidential system that many in the Minjoo, including Moon, are known to favor — meaning that after an interim the ROK would get a conservative figurehead president (Yoon? Ban Ki-moon? Choe Jae-hyeong?) and a powerful nationalist-left premier.

Both right and left-wing media have been trying to build support for just such a dispensation. Candidates for the presidency are praised or criticized depending on their apparent interest in “integration” (t’onghap), a word now functioning as code for the semi-presidential system, just as “peace system” means confederation. If things move in that direction over the summer, as some observers say they are already moving, Lee’s lack of a strong parliamentary faction will hurt him and help his Minjoo rival Lee Nak-yeon.

Be all that as it may: at present South Korea looks more likely to stay under nationalist-left rule in 2022 than to move in the other direction.

UPDATE: 14 September 2021: Sure enough:

Above I talked of

the profile pieces we can expect from the American press if the arch-nationalist Lee officially becomes the ‘liberal’ nominee it must root for. His politics, like Moon’s, will be explained in terms of childhood biography…. Such friendly US coverage will in turn be invoked here to persuade voters that the scandals attached to Lee’s name are old hat and beneath notice.

But I hadn’t expected London-based Reuters to lead the way, as it has done with a remarkable puff-piece on “S. Korea’s ‘Bernie Sanders’.”

Born to an impoverished farming family in a remote mountain village in the country’s southeast, Lee, 56, attributes his focus on economic equality to an early life as a child labourer in chemical factories that left him with impaired hearing and a wrist deformity….

Lee, who came in third during the Democratic Party’s last presidential primary in 2017, has been dogged by personal controversy while in office….

Yet the only controversy mentioned is the one Western readers are most likely to shrug off:

…including allegations of an affair with an actress, which he has denied. As proof of their alleged relationship, the actress said the governor had a large mole on his body. In 2018, Lee publicly undertook an examination to refute that claim, with doctors concluding he had no such mark.

Lee can expect a lot more coverage in this supportive vein in the months ahead.

UPDATE: 13 October 2021: How’s this for supportive?

NK News has gone one better than Reuters with a long profile piece on Lee Jae-myung that refrains from mentioning any of the scandals surrounding him — including the land-development scandal that for weeks has been engulfing the South Korean media and complicating his political aspirations.

On Media-Induced Ennui
(or Foreign Coverage of Moon, Part II)
— B.R. Myers

If I may adapt something G.K. Chesterton said about the English and Ireland: Americans will speak to Korea, and speak for Korea, but they will not hear Korea speak. Least of all do they care to hear Koreans speak to Koreans. Our journalists present President Moon’s approach to the North not in the context of a decades-old movement and ideology, but as the product of his personal commitment to peace. Because everything must revolve around America, this commitment is often explained — though I don’t get the logic myself — with a backstory about how the US military helped Moon’s parents escape the North.

The following is from the latest TIME cover story on the man. The headline: “South Korean President Moon Jae-in makes one last attempt to heal his homeland.”

Moon’s parents and eldest sister fled North Korea on Dec. 23, 1950, aboard the S.S. Meredith Victory…. The boat docked at South Korea’s Geoje Island, where Moon was born two years later. Today, the refugee camp his family called home has been turned into a memorial park; diorama displays surround rusting planes and tanks, an enormous concrete flyover looming overhead. The scars of this tumultuous background guided Moon into student activism, human-rights legal work and ultimately the Blue House….

I sense a little confusion with the POW camp for which Moon’s father did manual labor during the war. In any case, Moon was in fact born in a house in Namjeong, a village on the island where he lived for years until the family moved to Busan. Having enjoyed an island childhood myself, I’m curious as to how his parents’ background translated into scarring tumult for the boy. That according to Moon’s memoirs (2017) his parents traveled not on the famous Meredith Victory but on a US military LST or tank landing ship; that his most famous “human-rights legal work” was done for perpetrators of a deadly arson attack on the US Cultural Center in Busan; that as president he sent two North Korean fishermen back to North Korea, where they were certain to be executed on murder charges: these pertinent facts are of course omitted. Then again, it’s always easy to fault someone for leaving things out.

Much of the article reads like the ones we got from the Western press in what for Moon were happier times. He’s a good ally who wants what we want; he just has a different way of going about it. Alas, he is “so invested in rapprochement … that he has lost support from those who put him in power.” Once again, then, we have a foreigner putting a more flattering spin on things than even the Hankyoreh would now attempt. The consensus here is that the administration was undone to a much greater degree by its unpopular war on the prosecutors’ office. It began in 2019, right after the chief prosecutor turned his attention to Moon’s inner circle. A left-wing and now anti-government legal activist has just put out a book on this subject. (The TIME article makes no mention of the Cho Kuk saga.)

But I write this post to take issue with the final paragraph:

Certainly there are few original ideas on how to break this [inter-Korean] cycle: engagement, negotiation, provocation, estrangement, rapprochement. The next attempt, when it comes, will be clouded by the inevitable sigh of ennui. “There’s no real solution to this problem,” says [CSIS analyst Sue Mi] Terry. “It’s been like this for over 30 years.” That might, after all, be Moon’s true legacy—the grim realization that if he couldn’t fix things, perhaps nobody can.

This seems to be the current orthodoxy among Western journalists and pundits, most of whom, I suspect, will sing a different tune the moment another summit is announced.

For now of course their ennui is very real. Infectious too; how dull they make even North Korea seem! Kim Jong Un tightens, loosens, tightens control of the economy; his sister is more, less, more powerful; the regime wants, doesn’t want to talk to Washington – around and around the speculation goes, through stations that were once exotic and are now drearily familiar, often calendar-predictable: New Year’s address, missile test, party-gathering, anniversary parade. Neither infusions of fresh trivia (“Kim’s floating amusement park appears headed for Wonsan”) nor the occasional 9-day wonder (is he in a coma?) can dispel a mounting sense of otioseness — the sense that one could skip the coverage for months on end and be no worse off.

The South Korean news delivered in fits and starts to the American public is hardly compelling either: inaugural promises of reform, of a new approach to North Korea, setbacks on these fronts, a string of ruling-party scandals, crushing electoral defeat – how many times have we seen this play out since the 1990s?

But the impression of an eternal peninsular return results in large part from the commentariat’s refusal to discuss Korean nationalism. Beating around the bush is an inherently circular and boring affair, even when, or especially when, the bush itself is flourishing in fascinating ways. The truth is that in only four years Moon has transformed South Korea’s political culture, perhaps irrevocably. From mid-2017 to mid-2019 his administration made full use of its power and popularity to control the discussion of North Korea in media and in education, and even to shape the depiction of it in government-subsidized movies and television dramas. Meanwhile principled critics of the drive for a “peace system” were excluded from television news panels and hounded from the boards of broadcast companies. (They have not returned.) In this manner the administration succeeded in framing opposition to North Korea as the anachronistic, nation-dividing obsession of the “pro-Japanese faction,” a largely mythical caste supposedly comprised of former supporters of colonial rule and their descendants.

Conservative politicians’ Pyongyang-bashing had long been more of a vote-getting device than the reflection of deep conviction, as I tried to make clear in a blog post last year. After some early failed efforts to whip up public anger at Moon’s appeasement policy, the right concluded that it could gain more votes — and television viewers and newspaper readers — by adjusting to the times. I knew a big change was afoot in April 2018 when the Chosun Ilbo carried a friendly interview  with Kim Jae-yeon, one of the most prominent pro-North radicals in the country.

The opposition party did so well in the April mayoral elections precisely because it steered away from ideological issues, instead presenting itself as a more competent, less corrupt alternative to the ruling party. Hardly did the new mayor of Seoul take office than he expressed support for his predecessor’s proposal for a Seoul-Pyongyang Olympic Games in 2032. He has also allowed the country’s leading nationalist-left demagogue to remain on the city-funded radio station — another sign that while the right may slow down the cultural revolution in progress, it lacks the will to reverse it. Busan now has a conservative mayor too, but when I went to City Hall a few weeks ago the same anti-USFK activists were still ensconced in the center of the lobby — with no counter-force in sight.

“US troops out!” Part of the anti-USFK installation in Busan City Hall. Photo (B.R. Myers) taken in May 2021.

A few months ago, 30 conservative parliamentarians – including the defector Thae Young-ho — voted with the ruling party to amend an inter-Korean cooperation law so as to allow projects to bypass the Ministry of Unification. Meanwhile provinces and municipalities continue pledging  to strike deals with North Korean entities as soon as the Americans say it’s okay. Joe Biden’s signed expression of support for inter-Korean cooperation, marked as it was by the sort of “affable imprecision” that Harold Nicolson warned diplomats against, may come back to haunt the alliance.

Arguably the most important division in South Korea’s political class right now runs through left and right, not between the two camps: I mean the division between supporters and opponents of a semi-presidential system. If the former carry the day, the constitution will be revised in more ways than one — and South Korea will take a big step toward the “peace system” Moon envisions. Whether our media will cover it is another matter.

UPDATE: 8 July 2021

Never has the commentariat’s respect for its central taboo been made more comically obvious than it is in this Joongang article, in which a CSIS pundit endeavors to explain Moon’s high opinion of Kim Jong Un without once mentioning ideological matters. Evidently we’re to consider it more likely that Kim really is a wonderful fellow than that Moon’s judgment is colored by nationalism.

On Foreign Coverage of Moon Jae-in — B.R. Myers

In November 2019, shortly after making the scandal-ridden Cho Kuk his Justice Minister, Moon Jae-in was described in the sub-heading of an Asia Times article by Andrew Salmon as “Mr Clean, Mr Nice Guy.” (The headline: “Defying Darkness, Moon Shines On.”) In 2020 Salmon called the president “probably the nicest fellow ever to inhabit the Blue House,” and a “people person …. always ready to pose for a selfie with a fan.” A week or so ago the correspondent referred in another Moon article to “Mr Nice Guy,” the appellation doing additional service as a sub-heading.

And why not, eh? Heaven knows the partisanship on the other side of the discussion is just as obtrusive. (May I call a halt to “Bad Moon Rising/Falling” headlines?) The interesting thing is that the above type of cheerleading is more common in the foreign press than in the Hankyoreh, the de facto organ of the ruling Minjoo Party. I don’t necessarily mean talk of “Mr Nice Guy,” but the tendency of even experienced journalists like Salmon — the author, by the way, of an excellent book on the Korean War — to praise Moon on naive, moralizing, emotionalist or (to use a more neutral word) apolitical grounds. My readers will recall the Economist article last year that stated matter-of-factly, as if the point were self-evident, that he “wants to take politics out of prosecutions.”

I see here a confirmation of what Hannah Arendt and others have noted in very different contexts: outsiders are often more willing to take a leader’s cant at face value than his followers are. Having a longer and deeper acquaintance with him, and sharing as they do his ideology, the latter know better when — and for what strategic reasons — he’s putting on an act. (James Mattis is quoted in Bob Woodward’s book Rage as saying that Trump’s supporters “somehow believe in him without believing what he says.”)

Another factor at work: Your Western news junkie focuses on the collective dealings of governments and oppositions, and knows the biographies (potted ones at best) of only a few people at the top of the ladder. This conduces to the attachment of great hope and faith to “new” leaders, even when they’ve been none too gloriously active in politics for decades already. The South Korean political buff, on the other hand, takes a genealogical view, showing a strong interest in the backgrounds of dozens of people. “If you want to understand politics here,” I was told a few years ago, “you have to know the family registers” (kyebo). This is meant literally and figuratively. Journalists can tell you off the cuff which university and even which high school a politician went to, who was a year above or below him, who his in-laws are, when he went to prison and for what, which faction he belonged to before switching to the current one, and so on. They cannot unlearn all this — which they would have to do to attain to the untroubled, guileless simplicity of Western Moon-puffery.

Neither, of course, can South Korean journalists omit all reference to unfavorable things about Moon, these being too well-known to the local public. They must be spun instead. The nationalist-left reader is looking for that spin: for arguments with which to defend the president against critical family-members, co-workers, his own creeping doubts.

The average Western reader’s need for phatic punditry, and the illusion of understanding a foreign political culture in a matter of minutes, is more easily satisfied — can only be satisfied — with one-sided information dished out on a “need to know” principle. Mr Clean in power in South Korea? There’s hope for the region yet, I wish we had a leader like that, etc. “He liked his newspaper,” Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, “for the slight haze it produced in his brain.”

To make the most obvious correction first: A “people person” Moon isn’t. In a not unsympathetic profile piece in 2011 the Weekly Chosun singled out his introversion, with corroborative quotes from the man himself, as the main hindrance to his political aspirations. In recent years left-leaning TV pundits have lamented the similarity between his personality and Park Geunhye’s, and urged him to stop hunkering down with yes-men like she did.

Introversion is no bar to niceness (or to selfies with fans). Most South Korean progressives, however, would reflexively say that the nicest occupant of the Blue House wasn’t Moon but Roh Moo Hyun. I remember how scathingly the former was described in some left-wing circles before becoming a president the whole camp had to rally around. (See for example the account of his “candlelight opportunism” in a book put out in early 2017 by Kim Uk, a very readable writer on the Jeolla left.) 

Negative comment can be found, for example, on how Moon 1) refused to assist his friend Roh’s presidential campaign, then seated himself front and center when Blue House jobs were being handed out, 2) promised to relinquish leadership of his party if Jeolla didn’t support it in parliamentary elections, and then shrugged off his pledge as the “result of various strategic judgments,” 3) wrote a thank-you note to the children who drowned in the Sewol sinking, their deaths having boosted his cause as — he seems to have assumed — they would have wanted, 4) tried to interest Park Geun-hye in retiring with honor, lest impeachment result in an inopportune constitutional reform, then jumped on the candlelight bandwagon, finally presenting his election to the presidency (with 41% of the vote) as the triumph of the popular will.

The front of the satirical leaflet (2019) that President Moon sued a young citizen for disseminating. Top right: “Are you prepared to go with me to a strong, prosperous and socialist country?” The term is a North Korean slogan. Note also the Kim Il Sung badge.

Since taking power, Moon has appointed numerous people to top posts in the face of public anger at their records of corruption, pushed for bans on the heterodox discussion of modern history, suggested that adoptive parents exchange their kids for different ones if they don’t like the ones they got, and taken legal action against a young man who distributed satirical leaflets about him; the suit was dropped over a year later after criticism from the right and left.

I mustn’t over-correct. All I’m driving at is that this is no Gandhi or Mandela but a politician, a vain and calculating power-person like the rest of them. Not that his base wanted a saint for president. It wanted someone who would purge the political class of “accumulated evils,” read: conservatives likely to obstruct the creation of a new peninsula. The vision of a society purified of this or that group of people (be they “reds” or “pro-Japanese”) is inherently anti-democratic, but even those who look back approvingly on the purge of 2017-2019, which lost all legitimacy and momentum when the Cho Kuk scandal-cluster emerged, will admit that a nicer president would have lacked the stomach for it. Roh Moo Hyun? He would have pardoned Park years ago.

I have already adduced a few explanations for the peculiar quality of foreign observers’ praise for Moon, but the most important one, in my opinion, is their aversion to discussing his ideology. This although it can be very easily reconstructed from his frequent talk of mentors as well as from a study of his holiday speeches (1 March and 15 August), which make the same simple points over and over.

Because foreign correspondents can’t or won’t talk about Korean nationalism, yet cannot assume their readers’ awareness of it like local journalists do, they must explain Moon’s central preoccupation in pacifist or humanitarian terms instead, or with reference to his personal wonderfulness. His tolerance of North Korean abuse and provocations is set down to his being too nice for his own good, when ideology affords a much more credible explanation — particularly in view of his lawsuits against South Korean critics. All this redounds to the advantage of his image overseas, where the countervailing facts are unknown.

Here the praise for Moon is implicit:

For the US, North Korea is at best a secondary concern. Yet for Moon and future South Korean presidents, there is no more important foreign policy issue than North Korea. Entire families remain separated by the 38th Parallel. Both countries face the prospect of violent skirmishes and all out confrontation at any time. (Dan DePetris, NK News, 20 May 2021.)

We’re to infer that a key driver of Moon’s interest in inter-Korean relations is his desire to bring together separated families. It isn’t. The urgency went out of the reunion process when both governments realized that these brutally short and final get-togethers do nothing for the North’s popularity in the South. Nor has the general public paid much attention since the first few rounds of reunions. The number of people awaiting a turn to participate is shrinking fast. As for the return of abducted South Koreans, Moon has shown no more inclination to discuss it at summits than Kim Dae Jung or Roh Moo Hyun did. Meanwhile Tokyo’s unrelenting effort to get abducted Japanese out of the North baffles the nationalist left here. Nationalism is a concern with the nation’s stature on the world stage, not the welfare of individual citizens. 

Yet Moon and his camp know that the plight of divided families tugs at the hearts of Americans like no other Korean issue — as well it should, considering our country’s role in dividing the peninsula. The hope of many here is that by projecting great impatience for family reunions, and talking up a need for related outlays and projects, Uncle Sam can be pressured into relaxing restrictions that now prevent bigger forms of inter-Korean cooperation. A relevant quote from Yi Gi-beom, the chairman of a North-sympathetic NGO, in the Hankyoreh:

If people are to go back and forth between North and South … [there] have to be medical facilities to deal with COVID, with emergency situations. There has to be the possibility of rail and highway travel between North and South. If one proceeds from the problem of family reunions, at a time when North-South travel has come to a complete halt, can’t it become an opportunity to expand things to inter-Korean relations as a whole? Because the issue of family reunions brings with it a moral justification for the Biden government, which emphasizes humanitarianism and human rights, it can receive a magnificent appraisal as a first step of his North Korea policy.”

In the NK News article excerpted further above the American writer implicitly attributes to Moon a fear of “all-out confrontation at any time.” Yes, but between which states? It was traditionally the rightists who warned against the threat of another civil war, and the nationalist left which — refusing for decades to acknowledge who started the first one — dismissed all such talk as scaremongering. Moon, it will be remembered, was among those who refused to accept even the North’s responsibility for the Cheonan sinking in 2010.

He had to change that particular tune to get elected, but there’s no reason to believe he now perceives a real and present threat to the South. His almost comically serene declaration in 2017 that no military action can take place on the peninsula without his consent shows that the prospect of North Korean aggression is outside his field of vision; it’s an American strike on the North that he and his camp are determined to prevent. As I’ve written here already, Moon’s brain trust makes plain that a central goal of the envisioned “peace system” (the official euphemism for confederation and economic union) is to guarantee the North’s security from American attack — before it gives up its nuclear weapons.

Confederation may seal a lasting peace, but it may have the opposite effect, as the cautionary example of Yemen’s transition to unification suggests. In any case we are not dealing here with a principled, absolute peace-mindedness. Moon seems keen on pounding the racial tom-tom, rehearsing the defense of Dokdo (that kind of military exercise is always all right), and letting close associates dispense belligerent anti-Japanese rhetoric at times of tension — like Cho Kuk’s invocation of the “Bamboo-Spear Song” in August 2019. I repeat: What actuates Moon Jae-in’s preoccupation with the North is Korean nationalism and not humanitarianism or pacifism, let alone exceptional niceness. Judging from Joe Biden’s pledge of support for the Panmunjom Declaration of 2018, in which Moon and Kim Jong Un renewed the commitment to confederation signed in 2000, foreign journalists aren’t the only ones who fail to understand this.

On the Mayoral Elections — B.R. Myers

The press is always behind the times, as T.S. Eliot noted, and it’s only natural that the foreign press should be further behind, but the lag seems especially great in South Korea. Bias plays a larger role than the language barrier. Until this spring most correspondents for foreign media avoided reporting on ruling-camp corruption and incompetence much more assiduously than the locals did.

The conservative mayoral-election landslide of 7 April has finally forced them to acknowledge that Moon Jae-in is seen far less favorably here than overseas. The New York Times’ Choe Sang-Hun had to do an explanatory dash through scandals and failures in which he had hitherto shown little interest. There was great rejoicing on the South Korean right at seeing him introduce the political catchphrase naero nambul to American readers, though it seems a little stale now. I discussed it on this blog in February 2018:

Upon his election [in 2017] Moon appointed several Gangnam leftists with records of tax avoidance, real-estate speculation, and the … pulling of strings on relatives’ behalf. This prompted much use of the crypto-Sinitic compound naero nambul, short for “When I cheat, it’s romance, when others do, it’s adultery.”

Incidentally the electoral commission, which ensures that election propaganda is kept within narrow limits — especially the conservative kind — made clear a few weeks ago that pseudo-neutral banners bearing this anti-hypocrisy slogan would not be tolerated. The reason given: everyone would know which party was being criticized.

It won’t be much of an improvement if the foreign media, having fallen for the government’s posturing for so long, starts taking the opposition’s at face value. The Deutsche Welle headline “Mayoral elections sink Moon’s North Korea peace drive” will be proven wrong in short order if it hasn’t been already. Still a tiny minority in the National Assembly, albeit an invigorated one, the People Power Party is in no position to make this remarkably obstinate president change course.

Nor is it especially interested in doing so. Of all the things the Western press gets wrong about South Korea, the misperception of the conservative opposition as a bunch of hardline Cold Warriors may be furthest from the mark. Having triumphed last week in no small part because it jettisoned most conservative principles years ago, the PPP is at least as far to the left as Kim Dae Jung’s administration was. It says a lot that when Na Gyeong-won and Oh Se-hoon were vying for the PPP nomination last February, each claimed to be more moderate than the other. The ensuing run-up to the elections in Seoul and Busan saw both sides argue over which one was morally and technically better qualified to do the things everyone considers necessary.

Along with a few dozen other Busanites, I now sit on a committee, established days ago by the new mayor, which is meant to explore ways for the city to become greener, more international, and so on. The first speaker invited to address us, I see, is Kim Kyung-soo: the governor of South Gyeongsang Province, a member of President Moon’s innermost circle, and a key player in one of those big stories the New York Times thought readers needn’t know much about. In American terms this would be like a new Republican mayor of New York inviting, say, Andrew Cuomo to kick off a lecture series.

Busan is famous in Korea for its lack of a sharp left-right divide, but even in Seoul the ideological polarization is mild by American standards. It takes much longer than 10 seconds, which seems to be the current norm back home, for encounters between the unlike-minded to turn ugly. Personally speaking, I’d sooner engage with the far-left or far-right here than have to reason with an American wokester or gun nut.

The average Korean’s response to encountering fundamental disagreement is to change the subject. After I spoke on North Korean culture to nationalist-left researchers the other day, the kind lady running the Zoom conference began with, “You said some debatable things we needn’t discuss right now.” Meaning of course ever; still, they heard me out. I admit that the foreigner enjoys a sort of court-jester’s freedom which the native doesn’t, but I received more threats while holding an animal-rights sign in front of a KFC in Albuquerque than I’ve heard go back and forth between “clashing” demonstrators in Seoul.

Even if South Korean conservatives were willing and able to put pressure on Moon, he would stand firm. What choice does he have? Kim Ŏ-jun, the government-loyal host of the aptly-titled radio show News Factory, is correct in saying that any rightward shift would be the end of the ruling party. The main reason for this, which he forbore to mention, is that alienating the southwestern Jeolla region means political suicide for any progressivist force, as Moon’s old boss Roh Moo Hyun found out.

From the start, the current government has rested on this demographic base, which includes the enormous Jeolla diaspora in other parts of the country. (The region proper only holds about 10% of South Korea’s population.) It was in order to get out this crucial part of the vote a few years ago that the ruling party chose Jeolla people to run for district chief in most of Seoul’s 25 districts, all of whom were elected.

Yet discussion of the ideological distinctness and monolithicity of Jeolla is a taboo topic in South Korean political discussion. It’s always in geography-free language that the media tell us of Moon’s “hardcore supporters,” of a “concrete” base that keeps his approval ratings from sinking too far — as if the bulk of that 30% or so were not also the bulk of the roughly 25% who plan to vote next year for his old foe Lee Jae-myung, a man not unlikely to seek prosecution for key Moon-camp members and maybe (the Korean tradition being what it is) Moon himself.

Public opinion in Jeolla now diverges more markedly from that of the rest of the republic than ever before. It’s not as if the economy were any better there, the new tax burden lighter, the pace of vaccinations less glacial, or the big corruption and sexual-harassment scandals less common knowledge. Its support for the ruling party can be explained only with reference to ideological matters that must never be publicly discussed. I suspect this is why, in coverage of last week’s elections — in which the PPP mayoral candidates took every last district of Seoul and Busan — the ruling party’s victory in four Jeolla by-elections went almost completely undiscussed. (In none of those races were conservatives even contenders; the Minjoo candidates ran against nationalist-left independents.)

Let’s just say, if I may touch very lightly on the forbidden topic: Jeolla has a uniquely strong interest in the improvement of inter-Korean relations. Hence also its support for Lee Jae-myung, the governor of Gyeonggi Province, who bangs that particular drum more often than any of the other likely contenders for the presidency, and makes sure the mayors on his turf bang it too. A look into his power-base in Seongnam is enlightening.

To return to the conservative party: its real focus, now as during the impeachment drive of 2016, is on bringing about a semi-parliamentary system through constitutional revision. As I explained in 2018, here and here, this is something many on the nationalist left also want, albeit for very different reasons. Mind you, the PPP’s current aversion to the “imperial presidency” may dissipate if it reckons it can wrest back that institution next year. The party’s chances still look pretty dismal, due to the likelihood of a three-way election in which the moderate and conservative candidates would split the non-left vote. On the other hand, if South Koreans continue being vaccinated at one of the slowest rates in the developed world, and must walk around in masks while other countries go back to normal, the conservatives might be able to win even without a personally popular candidate.

Suffice for now to observe, however, that if a semi-parliamentary system were to come about while the National Assembly is under Minjoo control, it would create very favorable conditions for constructing the “peace system” Moon and his circle have long envisioned: an inter-Korean league or confederation. He’s not quite a lame duck yet.

UPDATE: 22 April 2021:

Sure enough; just in the past week there have been ample indications that neither the president nor the ruling party intends to change course. More interesting than the relevant inter-Korean news was Moon’s decision to appoint to the newly created post of presidential secretary for disease control Ki Moran, the former leader of the COVID-19 task force, who until late 2020 had assured the public that there was no urgent need for South Korea to secure vaccines. The promotion of such a person a few weeks after the conservative electoral landslide, as the full scope of the vaccine debacle dawned on the public, reflected a level of ideological commitment such as one rarely encounters in late-term presidents here.

I bring up ideology because Ki Moran (nomen est omen, the peony being a flower associated with….) is the daughter of Ki Se-ch’un, a veteran of the DPRK-loyal, DPRK-funded underground Unification Revolution Party of the 1960s, which puts her in the “core class” of the nationalist-left’s de facto sŏngbun system. President Moon’s favorite thinker, as he told Kim Yo-jong in 2018, was the long-imprisoned URP cadre Shin Young-bok. The ruling camp’s determination to overturn the bribery conviction for which former prime minister Han Myeong-sook recently served a few years in prison has much to do with the fact that she married into the exalted URP family.

But Moon’s readiness to appoint Ki in the face of growing public criticism of his administration may also reflect confidence that a semi-presidential system can be brought about before he leaves office. (A weakened Blue House and a strong, assembly-appointed prime minister would be more likely to keep Moon from meeting the same fate as Lee Myung Bak and Park Geun-hye.)

Meanwhile, however, there are signs that the People Power Party is indeed having second thoughts about constitutional revision. A leading member has said publicly that this is not the time for it. Now, the PPP could simply be playing hard to get before entering into the relevant negotiations with the Minjoo. But it may well have concluded that South Koreans will be even angrier at the ruling camp by March 2022 than they are now, thus more likely to vote for one of the lackluster PPP politicians who now poll in single digits.

UPDATE: 23 April 2021: 

Having  engaged in confederation-drive denial for the past few years– “absurd fantasy … right-leaning conspiracy theory,” etc, etc — NK News reported yesterday on Unification Minister Lee In-young’s public call for a “one nation, two states, two systems, and one market” model on the peninsula. (That’s my translation; NK News talks of “one people, two countries,” etc.) I suppose a mention of confederation would have been too much to ask, even if the context did scream out for it, but readers had a right to expect some discussion of the implications of Lee’s remarkable words. Instead NK News placidly added what the Unification Ministry told it: that the minister had expressed his “personal opinion, not the official stance on unification of the South Korean government.” This would be implausible enough even if “his” vision, right down to the European Union analogy, hadn’t been standard among government officials, presidential appointees and even provincial inter-Korean cooperation committees for quite some time already. (I mentioned it six months ago.) I see that no such disclaimer has been added to the Seoul Shinmun article in which Lee’s remarks originally appeared.

On Kim Yo-jong — B.R. Myers

“The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure,” said Hannah Arendt, “is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry.” Or as Friedrich and Brzezinski wrote of such systems, the “prerogative state” always takes precedence over the “legal state” of public organigrams and formal procedures. These rules and their corollaries apply a fortiori to the North Korean regime, which is more secretive about its inner workings than Nazi Germany or the USSR.

Unfortunately much of the insight into dictatorship that was gained in the 20th century now goes unheeded. Our technology worship is such that a journalist in search of soundbites on North Korean politics is more likely to call on a nuclear expert than a political scientist. Even Kim Yo-jong’s recent “demotion” was thus widely regarded as a change, however minor, temporary, or hard to interpret, in the actual power structure.

For what it’s worth, the young woman is now said to be First Deputy Director of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party. Her main function in export propaganda, however, is to make plausible the myth of internal hawks-vs-doves struggle, which — as we know from John Bolton — her brother trotted out in Singapore when asking for military exercises to be cancelled. Trump seems to have fallen for it then, but when pressed for a larger concession in Hanoi, he reminded Kim Jong Un who “calls the shots” in the DPRK. (“If I can ignore all my subordinates,” Trump probably reasoned, “why can’t he?”)

According to Bolton’s book The Room Where It Happened (2020), the North Korean replied that “even a leader who controlled everything still could not move without providing some justification.” This is a perfectly valid point, and need not have been a reference to the hawks-doves myth; no dictator can flout the ideology from which his legitimacy derives. (This alone is reason to dismiss some Americans’ fantasy about turning North Korea into a second peninsular ally.)

But the Hanoi debacle may well have turned Kim’s attention to the problem of how to restore the hawks-doves myth to the power it exerted over US negotiators a hereditary succession or two ago, when it was still possible to believe that the DPRK was something other than an absolute monarchy.

For such talk to do the intended work in arms negotiations, as the Soviet Union knew, the warlike faction must always be presented as less powerful than the peace-craving leader. Otherwise the enemy will balk at making a concession the hawks will exploit. On the other hand, the hawks may not be posited so low in the command structure that the leader’s professed fear of angering them seems fake. An especially fine touch is needed here, for Kim Jong Un has to project reasonableness southward while projecting to America an undiminished readiness to destroy the ROK if attacked. (It’s thus impossible for inter-Korean relations to get too far ahead of US-DPRK relations, as I’ve said before.)

How to stage a hawks-doves act plausibly in a family-owned state? You make a prominent family member the leading hawk, then formally “demote” her, so as to put just enough apparent distance between her and the leader. Thus has the woman the foreign press touted as “peace messenger” during the 2018 Olympics become the main source of belligerent rhetoric. Her role turns the leader’s notoriously ill health to advantage; we must make a deal before someone less reasonable takes over. If you think such tactics could never work on American officials, you haven’t read Don Oberdorfer’s approving account (in The Two Koreas) of how the Agreed Framework came about.