Let’s start with the bad news: The North Korean problem has no simple or quick solution. The North’s weapons-grade plutonium and nuclear devices have already been manufactured, and are now safely hidden in underground facilities.
China, and to a lesser degree Russia, remains unwilling to support a truly rigorous (read: efficient) sanctions regime. More narrow financial sanctions that target the money used to reward regime insiders with perks, like bottles of Hennessy cognac and Mercedes cars, won’t have much impact. Most of the North Korean elite believe that regime stability is a basic condition for their survival. No doubt, they would be willing to put up with locally produced liquor and used Toyotas if the alternative was being strung from the lampposts.
More international aid would be most welcome in Pyongyang, no doubt — but not enough for the regime to give up its nuclear program. Once the money was spent (and it would be spent quickly), a nonnuclear North Korea would be just another impoverished country, competing for attention with places such as Sudan and Zimbabwe. A US security guarantee — another carrot held out by some in Washington — wouldn’t be any more enticing. North Koreans don’t believe in the value of foreigners’ promises, especially when such promises are made in democratic systems where leaders and policies change every few years.
There is thus a great and growing temptation to say that North Korea is better off forgotten and ignored. This reasoning is attractive, and utterly unrealistic. North Korea has not the slightest desire to be left alone. Whilst being “benignly” neglected, North Korean leaders would work hard to improve their nuclear and missile arsenal. They would then try to sell their technologies abroad, both as a way to be troublesome and to earn extra cash.
All of North Korea’s most destructive policies — the nuclear and missile programs, the unwillingness to reform, the determined efforts to maintain a police state, the penchant for fomenting regional tensions — are designed to keep the regime afloat. The only way to alter North Korea’s behavior is to change the nature of the regime. The question is how.
What brought about the end of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? Certainly the desire for national independence among ethnic minorities, as well as a longing for democracy among better-educated sections of the population, played a significant role.
On balance, though, the fate of communist regimes was sealed by their economic inefficiency, not their political repressiveness. In order to become a political factor, this economic inefficiency first had to be recognized by the majority of the population. Had the Soviet leadership been willing and able to maintain a North Korean level of isolation and repressiveness, the Soviet Union might still be in existence today.
For a long time, Soviet agitprop tried to cushion the impact of news about Western prosperity by insisting that only the cruelty of historic fate, and not the ingrained problems of the communist system, prevented the Soviet people from enjoying the same consumer delights as Americans. Russians couldn’t compare themselves with the lucky inhabitants of North America, who had never suffered a foreign invasion and were free to exploit the entire world for their selfish purposes.
North Korean propagandists face a bigger challenge. They have to explain the stunning prosperity of South Korea — a country populated by members of the same ethnic group, who share the same language and culture as the destitute inhabitants of the North. The more that knowledge about the fabulous success of South Korea spreads among ordinary North Koreans, the less tenable the status quo will become.
Three channels can be exploited to provide the North Korean populace with unauthorized information about the outside world. First, academic, cultural and other interpersonal exchanges, endorsed by North Korean authorities, will open the gates to potentially dangerous knowledge. Conservatives in Washington, Seoul and elsewhere may question the value of these exchanges, and no doubt the top functionaries in Pyongyang and their spoiled children will be the first to take advantage of overseas study trips or international student exchanges. Yet these are exactly the type of people who matter most. Changes to the North Korean system are most likely to be initiated by well-informed and disillusioned members of the elite.
History shows the power of even controlled and limited exchanges. In 1958, an academic exchange agreement was signed between the US and the USSR. In the US, diehard conservatives insisted that the program would merely provide the Soviets with another opportunity to send spies into America. Indeed, the first group of four exchange students included a rising KGB operative, as well as a former soldier who later joined the Communist Party central bureaucracy. Within a decade, he had become the first deputy head of the propaganda department — in essence, a second-in-command among Soviet professional ideologues.
The KGB operative’s name was Oleg Kalugin, and he turned out to be the first Soviet spy to criticize the KGB’s role as a party watchdog. He initiated a campaign aimed at its transformation into a regular intelligence and counterintelligence service. His fellow student, Alexander Yakovlev, became Mikhail Gorbachev’s right-hand man. Yakovlev made a remarkable contribution to the collapse of the communist regime in Moscow (some people even insist that Yakovlev, rather than Gorbachev, was the real architect of perestroika). Both Kalugin and Yakovlev said it was their experience in the US that changed the way they saw the world.
Apart from academic exchanges, it is becoming possible to deliver unauthorized knowledge directly to North Koreans. DVD players are common now in the North, and even computers are not unheard of anymore. Tunable radios, while still technically illegal, have been smuggled into the country in growing quantities. The information blockade can now be penetrated, and the North Korean public seems to be more receptive to critical messages.
They should be exposed to the modern world, with all its complexity and uncertainty.
Andrei Lankov is the author of “The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia.” From Bloomberg View.