“Only countries with a fairly liberal government can be repeatedly visited as well as criticized.” — Stanislav Andreski, The African Predicament (1968)
I used to talk of the “Air Koryo Mileage Club” when discussing Pyongyang watchers who claim expertise on the basis of their visits to North Korea. Now that they’re going through a rough period, for reasons I’ll explain, the moniker seems a bit strong. I need a concise term all the same. In the following I’ll stick to the acronym AKMC, much as Honecker used to say DDR while avoiding the word deutsch.
First, some exposition, from a chapter of mine on the late Kim Jong Il era:
For decades, selected Westerners had been invited to Pyongyang for status-enhancing tours and meetings with officials…. In this way [North Korea] had helped school the people to whom governments and media outlets now turned for information…. By 2010 they were setting the tone even of academic discussion of the DPRK. They sat on conference panels, and on the editorial boards of journals; they wrote op-ed pieces for the Washington Post and New York Times…. Almost to a man, they preached the fine-line message Kim Jong Il wanted preached: The DPRK was now too dangerous not to be talked to on its own terms, yet not so dangerous as to merit anyone’s hostility. (North Korea’s Juche Myth, 2015.)
Siegfried Hecker carries on this tradition in the new book Hinge Points (Stanford University Press, 2023). A 7-time visitor to the DPRK between 2004 
and 2010, he’s director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. My readers may know him better as the man to whom the North Koreans showed a half-pound of plutonium in January 2004.
I should make clear from the outset that I learned a lot from Hecker’s account of his Yongbyon experiences. I’d read about the big events before, but there’s nothing like a front-row account to fix the sequence and logic of them in your mind. Hinge Points was co-written by Elliot Serbin, who may have helped Hecker break down the technical stuff for people like me, no easy task. I also enjoyed the scientist’s recent podcast interview with NK News. But a blog post can only be so long. I’d rather not shorten my criticisms to make room for compliments others have already made.
The book’s title reflects Hecker’s belief that the course of things could have been changed at various key junctures — that if America had met its Agreed Framework obligations in a timely manner, and been more accommodating of the North’s violations of the deal, Kim Jong Il wouldn’t have developed nuclear weapons. The scientist considers their side more to blame than ours, but for the most part his view of things is the AKMC’s. So is his canon: Wapo reporter Don Oberdorfer’s The Two Koreas, CNN reporter Mike Chinoy’s Meltdown, the usual titles. What I expected to find here was some engagement with the defense of US policy laid out at length in Victor Cha’s The Impossible State (2010). Hecker mentions it only once, when citing a piece of information that serves his own view. As a result, the older book works all too well as a rejoinder to the brand-new one.
If anything, Cha understated the case when saying, inter alia, that we’ll never know if a different American approach would have changed matters. Either we attribute state-suicidal tendencies to North Korea, or we assume that it never intended to keep its word; one or the other. The definition of the enemy is the definition of the political (Schmitt), and never more so than when two half-nation states are contending for legitimacy. A friendly relationship with South Korea’s ally would have deprived the North of all reason to exist. We do Kim Jong Il an injustice if we think he was as blind to this towering problem as Foggy Bottom was.
By the DPRK’s own account, the military-first policy was proclaimed domestically in January 1995, less than 3 months after the signing of the Agreed Framework. The rest of that decade saw the regime crow domestically that its “diplomatic warriors” had outsmarted the Yankees, that they’d signed the deal only for tactical reasons, and that the nuclear weapons program was unstoppable. It thus seems highly likely that the years of quiet on that front had more to do with the famine — with which the lull largely coincided — than with a commitment to abiding by the Agreed Framework.
In none of this does Hecker show interest. We get the usual I.R.- minded, America-centric, patronizing view of a reactive state. “Accommodation with Washington was in [Kim Il Sung’s] view the best path to survival” at a time when “North Korea felt abandoned.” The source for this confident assertion? Here’s the citation in full:
Mike Chinoy, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009), 3. (Chinoy’s assessment of what Kim Il Sung said at a Pyongyang meeting he attended with evangelist Billy Graham).
I’m afraid that’s the level the political parts of the book are on.
I recall comparable discussants of comparable governments. Long before the AKMC came into being, Guy Debord had the relevant human type figured out:
[The] scraps of information offered to the familiars of a lying tyranny are normally infected with lies, manipulated and uncheckable. They are, however, pleased to get these scraps, for they feel themselves superior to those who know nothing…. They constitute the privilege of first-class spectators: those who … believe they can understand something not by making use of what is hidden from them, but by believing what is revealed to them! — (Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 1967.)
Why, you may ask, does our country produce so many of these “familiars”?As I said in 2017, “We Americans have such boundless faith in our likeability as a people, in the power of our cheerful presence to break down barriers, that we expect to get honest answers even from foreigners who have every reason to hate us.” When Trump fell for Kim Jong Un in Singapore in 2018, he was, as I explained, thinking just like an AKMC man — thinking “that the presence of a sufficiently wonderful American works on North Koreans like a truth serum.”
Not that Hecker, who comes across as a very likable person in that podcast, attributes any wonderfulness to himself. It’s his friends whom he presents as supreme authorities. These sentences appear, sans irony, with only a paragraph break between them:
I found [Professor John] Lewis and his colleagues to be indispensable tutors on politics and diplomacy. I learned quickly that Lewis and his team were highly respected in Pyongyang and had access to key government officials.
The following is an account of a meeting in California between DPRK Vice Minister Kim Gye Gwan and the Stanford team to which Hecker then belonged:
At one point when discussing the motivations of the different players on the Korean Peninsula, [Vice Minister] Kim [Gye Gwan] lauded the Washington Post op-ed piece that [Robert] Carlin and Lewis had recently written in which they stated that what Pyongyang really wanted was a long-term, strategic relationship with the United States to buffer the heavy influence their neighbors already had, or would soon gain, over their small, weak country. Kim said that was “exactly right.” I thought this was more than just a nice gesture to Carlin and Lewis —it sounded genuine.
I don’t doubt it. What had the two gentlemen done, except deliver the shrewd appeal to American wishful thinking with which they’d been entrusted? These excerpts make clear what kind of analysis Hecker considers authoritative: the kind that opens doors, leads to exclusive get-togethers, and wins praise from the North Koreans themselves.
This in turn goes to confirm that a nuclear scientist’s judgment of political matters isn’t necessarily superior to anyone else’s. Notoriously, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the genius who first headed Los Alamos National Laboratory, had all the political acumen and moral consistency
of a ten-year-old. It’s plain from Hinge Points that Hecker’s own brilliance makes him no savvier about North Korea — no better able to distinguish the real from the sham — than the novelist Luise Rinser was. In his case as in hers, it was because insight wasn’t gained that the welcome mat stayed out. That may seem unfair, to the New Mexican if not to the German, so let’s briefly consider the travelogue aspect of the book.
By the way, I used to live in New Mexico too, in the small town of Los Lunas, which is now less famous for having had Bo Diddley as deputy sheriff than for being the site of the hardware store in Breaking Bad. I took the 2-hour drive up to Los Alamos circa 2000, when I delivered an abandoned husky to the state’s only husky rescue service. My memory of that very highly-educated community made me more than usually skeptical upon encountering, at the start of Hinge Points, the requisite “I went to North Korea expecting to find automatons” bit. (Our well-traveled American-Polish-Austrian was 60 at the time of this first trip.) He also gives us the “Everybody warned me against So-and-so, but I had no problem with him” bit, like all those saintly travelers who respond to complaints about French rudeness, Death Valley heat, etc, by professing not to know what you’re talking about.
As is par for the course, Hecker gets taken to the Mangyongdae Children’s Palace, where heavily drilled and rouged kids play music for a stream of tourists. Dickens would have satirized it in a fury. My little delegation in 2011 was in and out in about two minutes, hard on the heels of some equally appalled Africans. Hecker? Deeply impressed. When he goes to another show-school, he thinks he’s walked in on an average class. Beaming, he crouches down next to some girls for a photo included in the book. It reminded me of that Yeats poem in which the children “In momentary wonder/Stare upon a sixty-year old smiling public man,” only these ones, being all too accustomed to visitors, look stiffly and incuriously in the other direction. Not even the “beautiful calligraphy” of one girl’s English notes (on Edison) can arouse Hecker’s suspicion. Can anything? I see no ideological blindness here. Some people are just the trusting sort. But I’d prefer assessors of nuclear sites — everywhere in the world — to know a dog-and-pony show when they see one.
Hecker seems at times to be under the mistaken impression that his tutors rang the alarm bell for decades, urging Uncle Sam to get serious about negotiating, pronto, or face the inevitable prospect of ICBM’s aimed at California. “While North Korea’s leadership remained focused as it transitioned from one Kim to another, Washington vacillated.” In fact, the AKMC bears a lot of blame for that vacillation, and for the general failure to grasp the consistency of the North’s focus. It sure hasn’t been our hardliners who’ve dominated op-ed pages, academic discussion, and Beltway conferences up to now.
For several years after the turn of the millennium, Leon Sigal and others angrily dismissed the Bush administration’s suppositions that uranium was being enriched. (Hecker’s claim that the North’s display of a modern centrifuge facility in 2010 “surprised us and the rest of the world” is therefore misleading.) I also remember widespread American agreement with Kim Dae Jung’s assurances — which continued right up to the first underground test in 2006 — that the dictatorship had no serious intent to develop nuclear weapons. At two State-sponsored Beltway conferences (2008 and 2010), I contradicted the trendy view that Kim Jong Il was hoping to exchange his nuclear program for a big aid deal, economic package and/or US embassy. All I got from the Air Koryo flyers with whom State had stuffed the place was a “who invited this guy” look.
From 2010 (before the succession) to the end of 2012, there was a widespread consensus that “Swiss-educated” Kim Jong Un would embark on Deng-like reforms, which would compel economic cooperation with the US. At the height of the regime’s saber-rattling in 2013, Carlin and others talked up the possibility of imminent reforms courtesy of the North’s new premier. (This PBS interview is classic.) The hawks-doves fallacy? We’ve been hearing it since Selig Harrison’s heyday in the 1990s.
To be fair, the same people always urged our government to keep North Korea on the front burner. That was good counsel. Ineffective too, for the obvious reason; Paul Revere wouldn’t have got many people out of bed by crying, “The unfairly maligned British are coming!” Had the AKMC been less afraid of offending the North and losing access, it might have imparted more of a sense of urgency.
In the end the invitations stopped anyway. Hecker hasn’t been back since 2010, though not for want of trying. The North has became strong enough to dispense with smiling American downplayers of its unity and resolve; it wants to be feared. We probably haven’t seen the end of mysteriously funded Track 2 meetings in Europe, but good luck claiming authority on that basis, now that various hardliners — John Bolton included — have met with Kim Jong Un himself. Thank God the AKMC didn’t get there first. We’d never have heard the end of it.
UPDATE: 10 April 2023:
A reader has helpfully suggested that I make the nature of my position clearer to those who’ve only recently begun following this blog, not least because my Revere remark (above) seems at odds with the title and gist of the preceding post. Simply put, I’m as critical of a) the notion that the North Koreans develop nukes with a view to an all-out, possibly even nuclear attack on the South as I am of b) the notion that they merely want to guarantee the security of the half of the peninsula our troops forced them back up on. As I see it, the program is, as the North’s ROK-oriented propaganda explicitly stated in 2017, “a means for securing peaceful unification.” (See the relevant NK News report.) Note that the line the South Koreans get — not in summits, of course, but in “underground” propaganda the ROK used to try to block the consumption of — has always been closer to the North’s inner-track line than the pap spooned to visiting Americans. In other words, the nukes are a means to ensuring that the US stays out of the final and probably rocky stages of a North-dominated unification-by-confederation. To be perfectly clear: “peaceful unification” must be understood in the traditional inner-track sense in which, for example, Kim Il Sung used it in the so-called Juche speech of 1955: a process likely to entail mass violence in the South, not excluding what we would now call “hybrid” North Korean aggression.
UPDATE: 20 April 2023:
Another reader has kindly written to alert me to what he considers an error: In contrast to my reference to the North’s announcement of a “military-first policy,” the North has itself never spoken of 선군정책, only of 선군정치, 선군사상, etc.
My response: 1) although the Korean word 정치 is usually translated as politics, it can be used to mean policy, if the policy in question is far-reaching enough (see the not uncommon formulation 햇볕정치), and 2) our word policy is much closer to the North Koreans’ understanding of 선군정치than is our word politics, which implies power relations, debate, group decisionmaking, and other things the dictatorship has no interest in implying. (As for Military-First 사상 or Ideology, this is now alleged in North Korea to go back to Kim Il Sung’s guerrilla activities in the colonial period.)
