Imagine you’re Kim Jong Un. You’ve brought to fruition a nuclear program that your two predecessors developed with a view to “final victory,” meaning the completion of a hybrid unification drive unhindered by American meddling. During your rule, prospects for subjugating or at least dominating the rival state have improved steadily. Granted, the pro-North fanaticism of the 1980s protest movement has cooled into support for “symbolic unification,” but getting the upper hand through the envisioned pan-Korean congress in Kaesong would be child’s play. As became obvious in 2018, when the ROK left touted the first stage of North-South confederation to no complaints from the parliamentary right, the hardline anti-Northers who used to call the shots down there are no longer a political force.
In 2019, bad advice from Seoul made you bungle the Hanoi summit. Sanctions remained in place, thwarting the Moon administration’s plans for a tributary transfer of wealth – for ROK-built airports, power plants, railroads, and pipelines. Nonetheless, the Minjoo’s candidate for the presidency in 2022 (during whose Gyeonggi governorship a few million dollars had been sent your way via China) came within a percentage point of winning. Next time around, he or some equally North-sympathetic figure is likely to return to the Blue House.
In the meantime, you can expect another chance to negotiate with Donald Trump. You’ll be in a much stronger position than before, not just because your weaponry has made great strides over the past 5 years, and the vain fool won’t let another summit fail, but because Foggy Bottom’s old dream of luring you out of the Sino-Russian sphere has taken on an added urgency of late. Yoon? He’ll do what Washington says. Your predecessors would have loved to be in your position now.
Maybe you don’t want the headache of ruling a unified peninsula. Maybe you’re wary even of inter-Korean trade. The cautionary example of East Germany looms large. Fine. You can still keep uniting your citizens around the great racial mission while stringing the ROK left along for no end of financial, diplomatic, and personality-cult capital.
So what do you do? You choose this of all times to publicly renounce unification. You abandon the pan-Korean nationalism that has held your country together through good times and bad, that has fueled the collective sacrifices needed for nuclearization. Just as your arsenal has begun putting the fear of God in the Americans, you back down, albeit gruffly, and accept the division they imposed on the 5000-year-old race. You’re prepared to lose the nationalist-left demographic below the DMZ, which is about the size of your state’s population and which (according to a 2019 poll) would even back the DPRK in a war against Japan. What were once your ethnic brethren are now as monolithically alien as Yankees, only worse. If provoked, you’ll show the Pentagon what a real bombardment of the peninsula looks like.
You feel bad for Grandfather, of course. This isn’t what he wanted. But at least you’re keeping his haircut.
End of experiment.
Now, I’m not implying that if a declared policy appears irrational, we must assume it isn’t being carried out in earnest. When it comes to my country’s government, I’m more inclined to think the opposite. But unlike the elected president of a liberal oligarchy, who must often adopt policies that militate against his interests as well as the public’s (see the border crisis), Kim is his own boss. No one tells him what to do.
When, therefore, he makes a portentous proclamation that appears to make sense only as an export-propaganda stratagem — as a way of both warning Washington against a strike and encouraging hope in the long-term viability of a peace treaty — we’re justified in wondering if this isn’t all we’re dealing with.
UPDATE: 29 September 2024: Sure enough?
The former North Korean diplomat Tae Young-ho, who now heads the Peaceful Unification Advisory Council here in South Korea, has given an interview with the Chosun Ilbo in which he remarked:
In the past, when North Korea’s top leaders came up with new theories, experts would explain them in editorials and op-eds to brainwash the North Korean people, but there were no editorials or op-eds explaining Kim Jong-un’s two-state line, even in the Rodong Sinmun, which is read by all North Koreans. The pro-North Korean organization in Japan, the Federation of Korean Residents of Japan (KJRJ), was also thrown into great turmoil. Members of the organization have asked the central committee, “How can you abandon unification like this?” but Pyongyang has yet to explain. There’s no systematic explanation of the two-state line.
It’s too early to say anything for certain, but the above certainly lends weight to the suspicion that Kim’s formal renunciation of unificationist nationalism was conceived primarily as export propaganda.
