Pyongyang watchers have always found reasons not to discuss ideology. According to the first consensus, North Korea was just a mindless satellite of the USSR. The second consensus was that it had a unique doctrine of solipsistic communism no foreigner could hope to penetrate. The current consensus: The North is a “reactive” state where ideology no longer matters.
Although observers still talk of a Juche / communist / Stalinist state, they always mean a failed one, with only enough ideology remaining to hold the economy back.
Thus has the regime’s nationalist commitment to unification been ignored or even denied. Conferences on North Korea took place, have taken place this month – are probably taking place as I write this — without anyone mentioning its ideology. You know you’re at a North Korea conference when you can’t tell the political scientists from the I.R. people.
Meanwhile Korean nationalism has not only energized the North’s march to nuclear armament, but also exerted a growing appeal on people in the South — the ideological discourse of which republic has received even less attention than the North’s. The average American knows only that in the 1980s liberal democracy replaced authoritarianism here.
Academics are not influential enough to deserve all the blame for this. The press talks to us, sure, but the press will talk to anyone. The government is much less keen on hearing our point of view. I bet it’s especially wary of consulting scholars when they say a regime’s ideology is beyond our knowing, or that fabricating sources is nothing to criticize a colleague for, but fields less obviously dysfunctional than “North Korean Studies” get passed over too.
Generally our bureaucrats reach their own conclusions among themselves, and then seek just enough external expertise to cover their rear ends. This was done most notoriously during the Vietnam War. In War and Politics (1973) Bernard Brodie writes:
If there is one practically unvarying principle about the use within the government of outside experts as consultants, it is that they must be known to be friendly to the policy on which they are being consulted. They may be critical of details … but not of the fundamentals. (p.214.)
We may scoff at this, but it’s human nature, and academics are no less prone to it.
In any case, the same tendencies that have made Koreanists shirk discussion of the North’s ideology seem to have induced our government to do likewise. An intelligence community with a serious interest in the subject would not have contented itself with any of the three consensuses summarized above. (The CIA’s research helped shape them all anyway.)
I was mindful enough of Brodie’s words not to get carried away last year when the Washington Post reported that US officials were reading The Cleanest Race. I assumed that the government had come around to a similar view of the North for which it sought external confirmation. I was also encouraged by a few official references to the unification drive.
But when the NSC’s H.R. McMaster spoke of this in December 2017 he described it in terms of an urge to unite the peninsula “under the red banner.” If there had been any change in perception, it was a reversion to the notion of a virulent-communist adversary.
This spring, however, the State Department took center stage again, and with it the more conventional misperception of the North. When Pompeo showed Kim Yong Chol the Manhattan skyline he did so with an air of Cold War oneupmanship, like Henry Cabot Lodge taking Khrushchev around town.
According to a senior State Department official, Pompeo was motioning to “a brighter future” that could be possible for North Korea, in exchange for it ending its nuclear program. (ABC News, 31 May 2018.)
To judge from the North Korean’s high spirits after the meeting, he knew just what fallacy our people were laboring under, and how to turn it to advantage.
No less telling were the photos of Sung Kim’s meetings with Pyongyang’s “diplomatic warriors.” Choe Son Hui looked more relaxed and cheerful than ever. She too must have known what was in the offing: the myth of a failed-red North was about to give the real, ascendant North more time and stature with which to attain its nationalist objectives.
Considering how much of the agreement was obviously worked out before the summit — and with how many portents of American weakening — it’s wrong to blame Trump for what happened on the day itself. His buffoonery was mortifying, yes, but edifying too. All he did was act out the hoary conventional wisdom as if on a pantomime stage. The spectacle was a devastating caricature of all our wishful dealings with the North.
As the day unfolded it became clear that, once again, our side had devoted far more attention to event-planning than to ideological reconnaissance. We saw the usual indifference to the question of how the North could justify its existence after disarming. We saw the lie given to our tough-guy rhetoric. We saw a familiar American combination of credulity and condescension.
All this was as old as the nuclear crisis itself. But for once we got it without any dignifying sheen of sophistication. I suspect many observers who professed to be appalled by Trump’s performance were really only lamenting the lack of that sheen. Their criticism of him for not getting more from Kim in writing makes little sense. Either the regime has changed fundamentally or it hasn’t. If it has, it would indeed be counter-productive to impose a series of hurdles that must be jumped over within a certain time. If it hasn’t, no concessions it might commit to paper are going to have any more value than the last ones.
As for that much-ridiculed video Trump had made for the occasion, what was it, if not a dramatic rendition of the failed-communist model? The moment I realized what I was watching, I waited for that satellite photograph, the nocturnal one we never hear the end of. Sure enough, it appeared at about the 2-minute mark. For how can a country without lights not be failed, broken, looking for a face-saving way out? And America can help.
[How typical that the one source of information on North Korea that requires no reading or background knowledge should be invoked more often by Americans than any other. I get reminded of it when I talk of a unification drive: “How could such a backward country possibly,” etc, etc. But would a satellite shot of divided Vietnam in 1974 have looked all that different?]
Even those who mocked Trump for setting the mission of denuclearization back a step or two said they were glad the summit had taken place. Why? Because talk is always better than war, even if our adversary derives far more benefit than we do. Without debating the merits of appeasement per se (and there were merits even in Chamberlain’s kind), let’s at least acknowledge that such an approach is appeasement.
Pompeo says we can expect major progress toward denuclearization “in, what was it, two and a half years.” That he had to jog his own memory shows how little thought he has given to what Kim and Moon plan to accomplish in that time frame. If we don’t see what we want by the winter of 2020-21, our options will be far more limited than they are now.
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