Joel S. Wit is a senior fellow at the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University and founded the website 38North. I am neither of those things, but I found his recent opinion piece in the New York Times, “How ‘Crazy’ Are the North Koreans?”, thoroughly off-putting.
“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I take my hat off to the North Koreans. They have played their cards extremely well. Despite this episodic outrage [world reaction to the North Koreans’ occasional nuclear blasts], they have managed to become a full-fledged small nuclear power with a growing and increasingly sophisticated arsenal. Moreover, even as they have moved down the nuclear path, they have maintained fairly normal political, economic and other relations with many countries from China to Ethiopia. In effect, a large number of countries have tacitly accepted North Korea as a nuclear weapons state.
“How has the North been able to do this? There are, of course, wonky answers: Unilateral and multilateral sanctions haven’t been forceful enough, negotiators haven’t been tough enough. But a big reason you will not often hear is that Americans and the international community have a comic book image of North Korea. We simply don’t take them seriously.”
I love the phrase “many countries from China to Ethiopia,” which, quite conceivably, has never appeared in print before, indicating the lengths that Dr. Wit has to go to make North Korea sound like a “normal” country. Sorry, doc, but I don’t agree at all. North Korea maintains itself as the last totalitarian communist government in the world by convincing its hapless citizens that they must live in a constant state of supreme emergency and danger, forgoing all comfort in order to defend themselves against the U.S. Any decline in this state of supreme emergency—any normalization of relations with the outside world—would mean the collapse of the North Korean state and the end of the line for Kim Jong Un’s monstrous hereditary dictatorship. Wit’s chatter about how shrewd and nonideological the North Koreans are is entirely beside the point, as is his condemnation of the U.S. for somehow failing to deal sensibly with North Korea, when Kim Jong Un would literally be committing suicide if he did so.
The real reason that North Korea gets away with this is that China wants it to. China does not want a strong, united, capitalist Korea on its doorstep (and neither does Russia). Even more to the point, neither China nor South Korea want to have to pick up the pieces when the North Korean regime does collapse, a collapse that would send millions of starving refugees running to both the north, into China, and south, into South Korea.
To get back to Dr. Wit, and to take another whack at him, I’m disappointed both by his praise of the North Korean leadership as “men of the world,” dispassionate wielders of power—“If only we were as sensible as they!”—and his utter failure to condemn what is one of the worst regimes on earth, a deeply unfortunate country where Orwell’s vision of eternal oppression and misery continues to reign. Furthermore, since China offers North Korea virtually a blank check of support—for what is the rest of the world willing to do to China that could come close to matching the disaster that China would endure if North Korea collapsed?—North Korea can continue to not play by the rules. I don’t fear North Korean aggression, nor do I think it likely that they would sell anyone an atomic bomb, but they are quite capable of selling nuclear technology and making other types of mischief around the world.
Afterwords
Reading—or rather skimming—38 North is a bizarre experience. There’s a lot of gushy gossip about the Kim family—“Keeping up with the Kim Family Runaways”, for example, and “Kim Jong Un’s Aunt Edges Further From the Spotlight”. I wonder if I’m the only one who thinks the folks at the U.S.-Korea Institute may have too much time on their hands.
