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North Korea: Desperate and Dangerous

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Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

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Ben Wattenberg: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Few nations are as mysterious, isolated, and defiant as North Korea. Confronted in October 2002 with hard evidence of a secret nuclear weapons program, the North Korean government readily confessed. Within weeks it was threatening nuclear war. Meanwhile the North’s economy is in collapse and people are starving. Can this dangerous regime be stopped?

To find out, Think Tank is joined by:

Victor Cha, professor with the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and author of 'Alignment Despite Antagonism: The U.S.-Korea-Japan Security Triangle' and the forthcoming book, 'Nuclear North Korea?'

And Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Scholar in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute and author of 'The End of North Korea' and the forthcoming 'North Korean Economy.'

The topic before the House: North Korea: Desperate and Dangerous. This week on Think Tank.

Ben Wattenberg (voiceover) After the Second World War, Norea emerged as a divided nation. In 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, America successfully led the opposition. More than 36,000 American soldiers were killed in action.

North Korea then withdrew into regional isolation. Since 1994 the nation has been led by the communist dictator Kim Jong Il. Much of North Korea’s hard currency comes from exporting missile technology to other rogue states. The North has had a biological weapons program underway since the 1960s. Chemical weapons are trained on South Korea. Now U.S. intelligence has exposed efforts by North Korea to build more nuclear weapons and to develop a three-stage long-range missile, which the North Koreans brag will be able to hit Seattle, in the U.S.A. The situation is weird enough to be fictional: a collapsing Third World country serving as a shopping mall for thug terrorists.

Ben Wattenberg: Nick Eberstadt, Victor Cha, welcome to Think Tank. I thought what we might do is look at the North Korean situation sort of from two points of view. First the socio-economic, demographic point of view about actually what we know, and then move over to this bizarre geo-political situation engendered by the nuclear weapons threat. So Nick, why don’t you give me a little sketch of what we know, what’s going on.

Nick Eberstadt: It looks as if North Korea started out being more industrial and more successful economically after the Korean War than South Korea. Rapid economic growth and lots of social change in the Fifties and Sixties, in the Nineteen Seventies, the state hyper-militarized, economic development started to falter. By the Eighties, North Korea had fallen way behind South Korea. North Korea went into a downward economic spiral and in the mid-Nineteen Nineties a famine erupted, officially announced and acknowledged by the government, which put out an all-points bulletin for aid. The food crisis is still underway. We don’t know how many people died in this catastrophe, but some researchers and the U.S. Census Bureau did some very interesting work suggesting that a central number might a million. That’s out of a population of twenty, twenty-two million; five percent. It’s on the scale of Mao’s famine uh, in China in the Sixties.

Ben Wattenberg: It’d be like fifteen million Americans starving to death.

Nick Eberstadt: And we don’t have very much information about the current situation because the North Korean government runs a very secretive statistical blackout, enforces that as part of its national security policy. Even though foreign governments and organizations have been sending hundreds of millions of dollars to North Korea to help relieve the famine, North Korea hasn’t reciprocated with information about the dimensions of the problem. But back in Nineteen Ninety-eight, the World Food Program, in conjunction with UNICEF and the European Union, did a nutritional study. Their numbers indicated that seven-year-old boys in North Korea are eight inches shorter and twenty pounds lighter than seven-year-old boys in South Korea. And there aren’t many inches or pounds on seven year old boys anywhere in the world.

Ben Wattenberg: Yeah. It’s really a unique sort of social situation where you have people from the same ethnic stocks speaking the same language but yet with two entirely different social situations. The Communist North has done terribly and is collapsing and all that sort of stuff and South Korea was one of the four great Asian tigers and it’s going gangbusters. I mean you have in North Korea this educational system which is basically pre-modern, and just being totally indoctrinated. Do they believe this stuff? What happens when we talk to refugees are coming out - some - a thin trickle through China, I guess. When we do those interviews, do they have any sense of the modern world?

Victor Cha: Well I think many of the people that we do get to talk to who come to China, do have some sense of what’s going on in the outside world. And in many ways it’s a self-selection process. Those are the people that had the courage to try to vote with their feet and exit the country and therefore they’re the ones, for whatever reason, that have some sense of the outside world. And arguably, if those people feel that way, a broader population than had just a hint of what was going on outside would be doing exactly the same thing as these brave people who try to get into China do.

Nick Eberstadt: But even the brave people seem to still believe in a lot of the myths of the regime, that Kim Jong-Il is a great leader, that he should be the leader of the country. And these are the people who, as Victor said, risked their lives to get out.

Ben Wattenberg: What is the book on that? I mean you read sort of two things; one is that he’s completely nuts and the other is that he’s this great polymath, who’s a musician. How does that...?

Victor Cha: Well I think that sort of public perception of Kim Jong-il, the current leader of North Korea has gone through phases. I think initially when his father was running the country and Kim Jong-Il, the son, was not in the spotlight, there were a lot of things that were said about him that had to do with questions of whether he was rational, about his temper, about his different pursuits that had absolutely nothing to do with the welfare of the country. And then I think we went through this phase in which there was direct interaction between Kim Jong-Il and the high people within the U.S. government where there was a new view that this person was rational, that he was understandable and that he was someone that could be worked with. I think that the fact of the matter is, for people who look at this all the time....

Ben Wattenberg And that he had a western sensibility about him.

Victor Cha: Right, that he had a western - that he had an e-mail address and all this. But I think what’s very clear, as you look over time, is that I would not say that this person is irrational; I think he’s very rational, but I also think he’s very ruthless. And what we’ve seen in the various crises that the North Koreans have created is that they have a very rational way of trying to create a crisis and try to negotiate down from that crisis to get the things that they want. That’s actually a very rational bargaining strategy for a country that doesn’t have anything.

Ben Wattenberg: You buy that?

Nick Eberstadt: Generally, yes. I’d add over the last year this unusual quantity, Kim Jong-Il, seems to be making more mistakes than he made in the past. In the year 2002, he tried a couple of innovations in international policy and I think all of them backfired. He tried what some people call ’an economic reform,’ it’s even been called ’reform’ in his own press, although before that was counter-revolutionary to use that word. Big failure, a big backfire. He tried so-called ’confession diplomacy’ in a summit meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi saying, 'We’re so sorry that we actually did kidnap some of your citizens.' North Korean side seems to have thought this was going to be the necessary admission for an eventual normalization and payoff from Japan. Completely backfired. And when Assistant Secretary Kelly visited Pyongyang in October 2002 with evidence of a secret nuclear program, instead of handling it the way Dad would have and say, 'Oh this must be a mistake. Your intelligence information must be wrong. We’ve got to talk more. We’ve got to get more money from you.' Instead he was very defiant, said, 'Yes, we’ve got this. We’ve got even more powerful things and our agreements with you are dead.' That has been, I think, another big mistake the leadership has made. So we’re seeing not only someone who likes to play high stakes diplomacy, but someone who’s making decisions that are backfiring. It’s not a good combination.

Ben Wattenberg: What is the relationship between South Korea and North Korea? I have just been doing some reading up on it, as I gather, the South Koreans don’t want to take in any North Korean refugees either. I mean they get into China, China can’t send them to South Korea, which would be sort of the logical place, they send them back to North Korea.

Victor Cha: What the South Koreans are afraid of is the whole notion of everything coming apart, basically, the economic cost, social cost, and then cause the whole thing to come apart. The economic growth that they’ve had over the years. There certainly are costs that come with unification, but if you accept that unification is inevitable, you can’t just look at these things as costs that should be deferred forever and ever. I mean there are things that you should invest in now in order for this unification process.....

Ben Wattenberg: But I mean, you know, you look ahead, there is a certain logic to saying there’s a North Korea and a South Korea; one’s very poor, one’s doing very, very well. They should unify, they speak the same language, the languages haven’t really diverged or anything. And that would make, you know, would make everyone live happily ever after. On the other hand, you can also draw a scenario and say, okay there will be two Koreas or there will be two countries; one will be called North Korea, one will be called South Korea.

Nick Eberstadt: Both of the Korean states argue there is only one legitimate Korean state on this peninsula. We’ve got a game of musical chairs and just one chair. And.....

Ben Wattenberg: It’s a China-Taiwan kind of thing, only one China and one Korea.

Nick Eberstadt: And even more intense because they have a land border and lots and lots of weapons pointed at each. And as Victor was saying, in South Korea there’s great apprehension about what it would mean financially for absorbing the North if they should have that opportunity someday. But.the other side of that is if the North is not absorbed and it keeps on its present trajectory, it’s going to be a nuclear state with ballistic missiles. So there are other costs to not unifying. And the South Korean Constitution stipulates that anybody who raises their hand in the Korean Peninsula anywhere and says, 'I’m South Korean,' gets to go to the South. So this refugee problem along the Chinese border actually should be addressed by South Korean constitutional democracy. In theory, anybody among those refugees who said, 'I’m South Korean, take me back to my homeland,' should get a free pass over there. But South Korea’s government has been very frightened by the economic implications of that.

Victor Cha: The cases that for some reason get publicity usually through the aid of NGO groups that are helping are cases that eventually do end up going to a third country and these people eventually do get to come back to South Korea. But that’s a minority compared to the majority of people that are really trying to do this without the aid of NGO’s; they’re just getting rounded up by the Chinese....

Ben Wattenberg: NGO’s - non-governmental organizations.

Victor Cha: Non-governmental organizations. These poor people are just getting rounded up and sent back to North Korea to suffer a fate that, you know, we can’t even imagine.

Ben Wattenberg: Meanwhile you have this situation where the United States has troops in South Korea stationed in the northern part, up near the demilitarized zone and has kept the South Koreans from being attacked for almost fifty years, I guess, or forty-five years. And now we hear that there is a wave of anti-Americanism and here is South Korea being threatened and instead of them, everybody being angry with North Korea, suddenly we read the South Koreans are angry with the United States. What did we do?

Victor Cha: What you hear is that you have a younger generation of South Koreans that basically blame the United States for the worsening relationship between the North Koreans and the South Koreans and between the North Koreans and the United States. If they point to one thing, they point to President Bush’s Axis of Evil speech as basically undercutting the South Korean government’s Sunshine Policy. That’s what you often hear. The fact of the matter is, as most of us know..

Ben Wattenberg: And what is the Sunshine Policy?

Victor Cha: Sunshine Policy is a policy of unconditional engagement that the Kim Dae Jung administration, when they took office in Nineteen Ninety-eight..

Ben Wattenberg: This is the South Korean government? Right.

Victor Cha: Yes. Have put forth until the very last days of the administration in South Korea, in the last couple of weeks that are left before the inauguration. But essentially, many of these younger people have the mistaken impression that it’s largely the United States that’s to blame for the worsening relations with North Korea and with North Korea’s recent agitation. As we all know, the thing that sparked a lot of this, in particular the revelations about a second secret nuclear weapons program through Uranium enrichment, most of these, or a lot of these activities started well before the Bush Administration came into office, before the Axis of Evil speech. And the North Koreans have clearly shown in these actions that when engagement was taking place between the North and the South, they were clearly doing other things contrary to this policy of engagement.

Ben Wattenberg: What’s the demographic relationship between the two? South Korea’s about twice as large?

Nick Eberstadt: About twice as large. Maybe a little bit more than twice as large

Ben Wattenberg: Forty million people?

Nick Eberstadt: Yeah, about forty, forty-five, forty-six million versus twenty some. Twice as many.

Ben Wattenberg: If unified, you’d have a major seventy million people.

Nick Eberstadt: Yes, that’s the figure that leaders in both North and South Korea always use when they talk about the Korean people. They say, ’the seventy million Koreans.’

Ben Wattenberg: Which is almost as large as Germany. I mean it’s a big country over there. Yeah.

Nick Eberstadt: One thing which also, I think has been a problem inadvertently through the Sunshine Policy that Victor mentioned, is a kind of a political consequence that wasn’t thought through. President Kim Dae Jung, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his Sunshine Policy, has argued that that policy has succeeded. Of course, politicians don’t like to say their policies have failed. What succeeding means, the way he has framed it, is that North Korea, he would argue, has become less of a threat, less of a menace, less of a possible cause of war on the Peninsula than before he began his policies. And that naturally leads South Korean citizens to wonder, if North Korea is not a threat on our Peninsula, exactly what are these American troops doing here? That’s something which the U.S. and the South Korean side really haven’t gotten together to work out. They haven’t explained what the logic of their relationship should be if there’s a Sunshine Policy or why American troops should be in South Korea in a kind of a post-North Korean threat environment.
.

Ben Wattenberg: Okay, so here’s North Korea, this somewhat bizarre state and they have some nuclear weapons and are threatening to build more fairly rapidly. What’s the threat?

Victor Cha: The threat that they’ve always posed to South Korea has always been the conventional threat. I mean, and that’s been the artillery tubes, thousands of artillery tubes that they have on the DMZ, the Demilitarized Zone, separating the two countries, and the one point one million man army. So that has always.....

Ben Wattenberg: And the capital of South Korea, Seoul, is only about thirty-five miles away from the DMZ.

Victor Cha: Yes, it’s very close to the DMZ. The warning time for a North Korean artillery shell in Seoul is less than a minute; fifty-six seconds. So that’s how close it is. So the question, you know, becomes why then why the nuclear activity? And I think one of the big concerns from a U.S. perspective is that the threat posed by a nuclear North Korea is not that they would necessarily use these things, although that’s always a possibility, but that they would sell them. And we’ve already seen that they’re quite enthusiastic about selling their ballistic missiles and ballistic missile technology. So that’s a very....

Ben Wattenberg: To the Libya, Syria, Iran...
.

Victor Cha: Pakistan.

Ben Wattenberg: Pakistan.

Victor Cha: Yes. And the other thing I think to remember is that a North Korea that has an operational ballistic missile capability with warheads that might be nuclear, chemical or biological, even if they don’t use these weapons, they have coercive capabilities in the region. A country that wields those sorts of weapons and does not seem to play by the international rules as other countries do, wields a sort of political leverage in the region that I think is not in the interests of the United States.

Ben Wattenberg: Yeah, you know, it seems to me that people are arguing that one of the arguments against the potential Iraq engagement is ’well, North Korea already has nuclear weapons and they’re more dangerous and we ought to deal with that first.’ But it seems to me exactly the opposite. I mean the proof of - or one of the proofs - of why we ought to be engaged, and probably violently, in Iraq is if you don’t do that you end up with a situation that you have in North Korea which is a rogue state with nuclear weapons who you can’t negotiate with .because they have a nuclear weapon and they’ll say, you know, sure bring one of your carriers by, America, then we’ll take care of it.

Nick Eberstadt: It’s very hard for us to imagine that the North Korean government could be serious about making nuclear threats because it seems preposterous to us from our post-enlightenment, post-modern end-of-history world view, but North Korean leadership lives in a very different universe. One thing North Korean leadership has said forever since the beginning is they intend to unify the country as an independent socialist state, that would name under them, under the Kim family. And one thing that American policymakers have been very concerned about, not just in the Bush Administration but in the Clinton Administration, be what nuclear North Korea would mean for deterrence in the Korean Peninsula. A nuclear North Korea during a crisis might make the United States hesitate about acting in South Korea. If the United States guarantee to South Korea is worthless, that is tantamount to saying there is no alliance there. And of course, the North Korean government wants there to be no alliance there so nuclear weapons are yet another part of the path towards severing the South Korean-U.S. military alliance.

Victor Cha: And there are ripple effects that come from a nuclear North Korea. I mean, again, the notion of a nuclear North Korea in which the U.S. commitment appears to be questioned by countries like South Korea will then have a ripple effect on Japan. I mean, Japan sees a nuclear North Korea with ballistic missiles, the only ones of which are capable now are ones that are targeted on Japan. Japan, I think would have a very vigorous national debate about whether they should move simply from defense, whether that’s missile defense, to some form of deterrence, which would mean ballistic missile capabilities and probably nuclear capabilities. If Japan is now a nuclear power in the region, that’s gonna have ripple effects on China, given the sign of Japanese rivalries....

Ben Wattenberg: And the whole rest of Asia, right?

Victor Cha: And the whole rest of Asia.

Ben Wattenberg Whereas Japan is not a very popular place.

Victor Cha: Right, absolutely.

Ben Wattenberg: What would happen if Japan, United States, Russia, South Korea and China sat down in a room, along with any other players who might be interested, but those are the key players - and said, 'look, we gotta take this guy out.' This is not just some sort of ...it’s not even like communism where it’s a great structural force where if you, you know, if you shot Khrushchev or whoever it was, that would be the end of it. It’s like Saddam, it’s a one-man deal. If you took out Kim Jong Il, you would quite plausibly begin to move towards sanity and normality. I mean suppose, or suppose heaven forfend, the UN Security Council said, 'We’re gonna do it,' you know, 'disarm, get rid of that stuff or else we’ll pay the consequences, if there are consequences.' I mean, is that plausible?

Nick Eberstadt: It’s hard to imagine all of the concerns the actors in the region acquiescing in a military operation against Kim Jong-Il right now. Do you...?

Victor Cha: I would agree, yeah.

Nick Eberstadt: But things would have to get a whole lot worse than they are now, not that they’re so great right now, before one would get the acquiescence of the South Korean government and China and Russia and Japan in some sort of military pressure campaign on North Korea, wouldn’t you think?

Victor Cha: I think it would be very difficult at this point.

Ben Wattenberg: I mean, it seems to me, you know, and we’re with how prescient I am, I mean you look ahead for the next few decades, these are the kinds of crises that we’re going to be facing, it’s not communism anymore, it’s not the Nazis anymore, it’s not just that the al Qaeda and the terror thing, it’s these small actors with dangerous toys. And we’re going to have to either figure out some way of doing something about it or else plan on being always on the brink. And it’s not a pleasant prospect.

Nick Eberstand: There’s no evidence that I can see that Kim Jong-Il and his crew can be trained to be model citizens or even tolerable actors in the international stage. The question then, however if you see things my way, is how do you get a better class of government in North Korea. And the North Korean leadership has thought about that, too, that’s why they have bunkered themselves in this sort of a nuclear manner. They want to make it very unpleasant for people outside to entertain these sorts of questions.

Ben Wattenberg: Okay, on that note. Thank you very much Nick Eberstadt, Victor Cha. And thank you. Please remember to contact us via e-mail. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

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Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

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