It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments. –- David Hume, “Of the First Principles of Government,” 1741
[In Suez in 1956 and the Bay of Pigs in 1961] the chief Western errors were failures of theoretical and ideological omission….What is the political nature of our opponent? That question was either not raised or inadequately answered. Ideologically, both cases involved failures to assess the long-range and more basic forces at work. — Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics, 1964
Whenever I’m told that a certain combination of sticks and carrots can induce North Korea to give up nuclear arms, as I’m hearing now, I always respond by asking: “Let’s presume that does happen. And then what? How does the regime go on justifying its existence?”
In my decades of raising this question in discussions, op-ed pieces, blog postings and interviews, no more than one person every two or three years has attempted an answer.
Each of those rare times I have encountered combinations of the following wrong assumptions:
- that North Korea is a communist or Stalinist state, and can therefore legitimize itself all the more effectively by raising the masses’ standard of living and improving the welfare system;
- that the national mission is self-reliance, and therefore compatible with the exchange of nuclear might for energy autonomy and other prizes;
- that North Korea is already a post-ideological, “reactive” state that reconstitutes its politics according to stimuli from without;
- that the object of a personality cult is so godlike he can change the national mission at will;
- that by compelling America to abandon its hostility, the regime will score a propaganda victory it can milk indefinitely;
- that North Korea can maintain mass support even as the poorer of two economy-first Koreas;
- that unlike the East Germans in 1989-90, North Koreans will be content enough with annual rises in their living standard not to want the greater, faster improvement that would come with absorption into the richer co-ethnic state;
- that dictatorships can rule by coercion alone, and thus do not need legitimacy.
These errors (on all of which I have expended plenty of ink) reflect not just an ignorance of North Korea, and of dictatorial governance in general. They also show a lack of political common sense: a failure to grasp that every country has an inner political life, which reflects its citizens’ need for transcendent significance — for something beyond mere incomes and calories.
When Western “experts” invoke Kim Jong Un’s alleged fear of ending up like Gaddafi, they do not mean, “He’s afraid that if he compromises with the unifying enemy in the hope that economic growth will keep everyone happy, and embarks on reforms no dictator can carry through on, he will lose so much support at home, and then regional stature, that the US will feel emboldened to finish him off.”
No, they mean only, “Kim is afraid that if he disarms, the US will attack.”
Political science, by which I mean nothing more abstruse or academic than consideration of a foreign country as a country in its own right, seems to have been almost completely supplanted by a preoccupation with international relations. What is thought irrelevant to that side of things (often wrongly) is considered beneath notice. This can be seen by the reflexiveness with which journalists now contact I.R. professors or nuclear specialists for comment on North Korea’s motivations, party conferences, personality cult, etc — and the perfect confidence with which that comment is supplied.
This is not to say that discussion of the current crisis does justice to international relations as a discipline. Usually it is conducted in a very simplistic, moralizing, America-centric fashion, with no apparent sense of history. Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority to Donald Trump. For all his unsuitedness to be president, the fellow is no more ignorant of North Korea’s political nature than most of his critics are.
UPDATE: 6 June 2018
The transcript of a recent 38 North press briefing is replete with parenthetical references to the audience’s “light laughter,” though not at the parts I found amusing.
Joel Wit:
We often hear that, without nuclear weapons, Kim Jong Un couldn’t stay in power. Sorry, but haven’t they been in power before they had nuclear weapons? I mean, his father, his grandfather.
The sources of power in North Korea, the sources of legitimacy, are not nuclear weapons. They’re much deeper and broader. And, if you go to North Korea, you get a good picture of that, by talking to people.
Certainly, the weapons are important in terms of dealing with external security threats. But you saw recently how they sort of make a U-turn. Right? After years of extolling these technological advances, they said “Okay, we’ve accomplished what we needed to. Now we’re going in a different direction.” That’s the kind of system it is.
In the first paragraph the speaker appears to concede that nuclear weapons were never necessary for the North’s mere self-defense against a hostile nuclear power.
At the same time he overlooks a problem at the crux of this crisis. The surrender of something attained heroically and at great cost — something to which the well-being of entire generations has been sacrificed — is far more dangerous to a government than not having it to begin with.
The second paragraph is a feigned missing-of-the-point, followed by some classic Mileage Club bluffing. No one ever said the regime’s legitimacy reposes in the nukes themselves. It rests on a commitment to the unyielding defense and unification of the Korean nation. Such a regime cannot give up arms with a “been there, done that,” and turn to more benign pursuits. That’s decidedly not the kind of system this is.
Mix America-centricity with wishful thinking, and you get the belief that the regime in Pyongyang speaks more honestly to Washingtonians than to its own people. One of Wit’s recent articles is called: “What the North Koreans told me about their plans.” If the headliners at the Atlantic came up with that, it was a good nut-shelling of its whole claim to significance. We know on which syllable the emphasis falls.
But the excerpt above implies that the seasoned visitor to Pyongyang can gain initiation, just “by talking to people,” even into the central mystery of the nuclear crisis: How can the North hope to maintain mass support as the other, much poorer, economy-first Korea?
It’s a shame Wit won’t spill the beans. Are we perhaps to expect — emblazoned on wall-posters, held up on mass-game tiles — a political transposition of “underdog advertising,” à la Avis?
Until someone can provide a plausible answer to such questions, by which I mean an answer that does not impute stupidity to the regime, or an urge to commit political suicide, I have to assume Pyongyang’s “diplomatic warriors” are negotiating in the same bad faith as always.
