The fact that prospects for grants, think-tank jobs, conference invitations, op-ed slots and CFR membership have always been far better for softline Pyongyang watchers than for hardliners shows you which way our agenda-setting class has leaned so far. I know from my own visits to Washington how passionately the State Department has yearned to — as Jane Austen might have put it — detach Kim Jong Un from his bad acquaintance and introduce him into good society.
But if I’m not mistaken, the center of the discussion has moved distinctly hawkward in the past few years. I’ve already discussed the scenarios of North Korea unleashing an all-out attack on South Korea to achieve things, like confederation, that I believe it can get with much less risk and bloodshed.
And in Foreign Policy last month, Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker wrote that
Kim’s move toward Russia is neither tactical nor desperate. Rather, it is the result of a fundamental shift in North Korean policy, finally abandoning a 30-year effort to normalize relations with the United States. Without understanding how persistent Pyongyang was in pursuit of normalization from 1990 through 2019, there is no way of understanding the profundity of the current shift and what it portends.
Non-stop anti-American rhetoric, periodic threats to destroy us all, the dogged acquisition of a nuclear capability in the face of our opposition, and two deadly military attacks on our South Korean ally were compatible with the long effort to make friends with America, but a move toward Russia? It’s over, finally over. They don’t like us anymore.
Elsewhere in the piece, Pyongyang’s expression of support for China in regard to Taiwan is presented as something ominously new. The implication is that North Korea drifted away from its two neighbors prior to this earthshaking “realignment.” In fact it’s America’s attitude to China and Russia that has changed over the past 10 years. Kim is just keeping up his side of a long-existing relationship.
It appears that Pyongyang has concluded that long-term geopolitical trends call for a realignment with Moscow and Beijing…. If that means opening North Korean airspace to Russian reconnaissance overflights, ports to the Russian Navy, and airfields to advanced Russian fighter aircraft—all of which happened before, in the mid-1980s—then Pyongyang will likely agree. If it means enhanced North Korean military support for Russia’s war in Ukraine and enhanced Russian nuclear and missile support to Pyongyang, we should not be surprised.
No, I guess we shouldn’t, but the door never counted as shut for these two Pyongyang watchers before. Why now? Aren’t times of hawk-induced crisis, according to their usual logic, the perfect time for Uncle Sam to bolster the regime’s doves with a show of good will?
And in last week’s New York Times, Choe Sang-hun reported in surprisingly uncharitable tones on North Korea’s decision to deport Travis King. Had such a thing happened 5 years ago, readers would have got soundbites from John Delury and Moon Chung-in touting the gesture as a wonderful olive branch. The world having changed in the interim, Choe quotes not only Prof. Lee Sung-Yoon, perhaps the most conservative Korea scholar in the US, but also two defectors from North Korea, both of whom draw attention to, well, the Cleanest Race aspect of things:
Mr. Kim [Dong-sik] also noted that in North Korea, where the government has long touted a supposed racial “purity,” anti-Black racism is even stronger than anti-white racism.
That might have essentially ruled out the idea of letting Private King settle in the country, said Ahn Chan-il, a North Korean defector who runs the World Institute for North Korea Studies in Seoul. The North arranged marriages for the Cold War defectors — none of whom were Black — but only to North Korean women who were thought to be infertile, or to foreign women whom the government had apparently abducted, according to the memoir of one American defector, Charles Robert Jenkins.
“If they let him stay, they will eventually have to let him have a family,” Mr. Ahn said of Private King. “Given the pure-blood racism of the Kim dynasty, it’s hard to imagine” that being allowed, he added.
I agree of course, but this makes me uneasy anyway, because if Choe didn’t know how evil it would make North Korea sound to the NYT’s woke-interventionist readership, his editor sure did. Either the daily organ of the Council on Foreign Relations is suddenly content to let the chips of coverage fall where they may, or it’s writing the country off at last.
As my readers know already, I support sanctions on North Korea, oppose unilateral concessions, and place no hope in agreements with Kim Jong Un. But for years now I’ve also urged that America compel its ally to publicly disabuse Pyongyang of hopes for unification by confederation. It’s this process — begun by Moon in 2018, as his power base noted with approval, and to be resumed after Yoon — which the North’s nukes were developed to keep us from meddling in the final, probably turbulent stages of. At the very least, America should make clear to the South Korean public that confederation-building must mean the end of the US-ROK alliance. Such a statement alone would do much to keep this country from stumbling unseriously into a mess from which our troops might have to extricate it.
Yet our government shows no interest in the matter. Nor even do the ostensible conservatives in the discussion. When Victor Cha mentioned South Korea’s pursuit of a “confederacy” with the North during Senate hearings in 2019, neither he nor the listening senators registered any concern. You’d almost think the weakening of nation-state borders were an inherently good thing — and that our own endless power-expansion project could benefit from a crisis on the peninsula.
So you see why I fear being overtaken in the hardline lane by Pyongyang watchers who have hitherto preached accommodationism or even appeasement. When Uncle Sam starts beating the war drum against a country, expert discussion of it tends to get monolithic fast. We’re not quite at that stage with North Korea, but it’s not too early to wonder if our field would offer meaningful resistance if it came to that. I’m pessimistic, considering how little nuance Russia scholars have managed to contribute to the Ukraine discussion, and how much more deeply embedded Korean Studies has always been in the corporate-government complex. I suppose we’ll find out whose dovishness is sincere, and who has just been singing for his supper all along.
