Averting the Unthinkable
Mini Teaser: Regime change is the only realistic policy.
The imminent prospect of North Korea becoming a nuclear power is the most severe threat to the security of the United States and the rest of the Western world today. The anxiety that this prospect brings with it is compounded by the fact that there are no realistic prospects of solution to this threat being offered.
Under pressure from allied and domestic opinion, the Bush Administration has reluctantly entered into multilateral negotiations with Pyongyang. While there may be very good political and military reasons for negotiating with such an intractable enemy at this moment, there is little prospect for these negotiations succeeding. The reason is simple: any agreement to ensure North Korean nuclear disarmament entails intrusive international inspections, and Pyongyang will never allow such inspections--regardless of past or future treaty obligations. If the United States is serious about preventing North Korea from becoming a nuclear power, it must face the necessity of regime change in Pyongyang.
Regime change does not necessarily entail the overthrow of communist party rule in North Korea. What it does entail is the replacement of the current totalitarian dictatorship led by Kim Jong-il. For both strategic and moral reasons, a democratic North Korea is in America's best interest. But an authoritarian dictatorship on the Chinese model, committed to economic and social reforms, would be an acceptable second choice. While some Western analysts recognize the necessity of a structural transformation of North Korea's economy, they do not comprehend that this entails a regime change, imagining instead that the necessary reform process could be transacted by the present leadership.
Regime change in North Korea will not occur voluntarily. Coercion--preferably the unarmed sort and with at least the participation of China--will be necessary. But America should prepare itself to go to war, with allies if possible, alone if necessary. Yet few of those negotiating with Pyongyang--least of all our South Korean allies, who adhere to a demonstrably bankrupt policy of appeasement laced with bribery--and not even reasonable Americans offering advice from outside, are yet willing to face this awful reality.
The Nature of the Threat
The current regime in North Korea is an Orwellian nightmare--the concept of totalitarian dictatorship in its purest form. All power is in the hands of a pseudo-charismatic dictator, synthetically creating the image of mass devotion to his personal genius but in fact ruling by fear through a pervasive apparatus of secret police surveillance and bureaucratic party-state control over every aspect of daily life--including, most importantly, the supply of food and shelter. Its moral inspiration is the Soviet tyranny of Joseph Stalin, whose Red Army installed this regime in 1945. The North Korean regime is responsible for the death of millions of its own subjects--through mass executions, a gulag system equal to, if not more villainous than, the Soviet one, and central planning policies that have led to mass starvation and gruesome poverty for those who survive. The great historical achievement of Korean communism is to have caused a famine that has killed off a greater percentage of the population than has occurred anywhere else in the world (Pol Pot's Cambodia possibly excepted).
The structure of power in Pyongyang has remained unchanged since its inception--surviving, indeed, being enhanced by a dynastic transfer of power in 1994 from the father and "Great Leader" Kim Il-sung to his only begotten son and the "Dear Leader", Kim Jong-il. While the threat to the world emanates from North Korea's international behavior, not its domestic structure, the internal nature of the regime is of great relevance to understanding the dangers inherent in that behavior.
Over the course of its existence this regime has violated every norm of civilized international behavior. It has not only harbored international terrorists (the Japanese Red Army) who had hijacked aircraft and massacred civilians at airports, the regime has itself engaged in terrorism, shooting down a South Korean airliner in 1988 (killing all 115 on board) and assassinating members of the South Korean cabinet who were on a state visit to Burma. Over many years, it has kidnapped civilians from South Korea--to satisfy Kim Jong-il's personal need for a technically sophisticated film industry--and from Japan--in order to train North Korean spies in Japanese language and culture. It engages in the illicit trade of both weapons (including selling ballistic missiles to Libya, Iran and Syria) and narcotics (such as heroin, which it transports to criminals in Western countries). Most ominously, as we all know, it has secretly developed nuclear weapons, breaking a number of signed agreements.
In 1994, the United States discovered that North Korea was building a plutonium enrichment facility at Yongbyon. The Clinton Administration, which had considered bombing the facility, then decided to take what appeared to be a less politically costly course: negotiations. The "Agreed Framework", signed in Geneva on October 21, 1994, required North Korea to cease and dismantle its nuclear programs in return for the United States providing fuel and a light-water reactor that would generate electric power but not provide fuel for nuclear weapons.
Their signature turned out to be worthless. In the summer of 2002, the United States discovered evidence that North Korea was cheating the world: Pyongyang was secretly building a uranium enrichment plant that could produce nuclear weapons. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly brought this charge in October 2002, and, to everyone's surprise, the North Koreans admitted their deception. Then, on December 22--two days after a narrow majority of South Koreans elected as president the soft-line candidate Roh Moo-hyun, who had promised not to use sanctions or pressure against the North to change its nuclear policies--the North Koreans announced that they were removing United Nations monitoring equipment from the sealed plutonium nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. The next month, North Korea announced it was withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
If the North's facilities are not shut down and the spent fuel rods are not shipped out of the country, North Korea will be able to produce several nuclear weapons within months--if it has not already done so.
Many analysts assume that this series of moves is part of a game of extortion, whereby Pyongyang gets promises of Western economic assistance to prop up its shattered economy in return for agreeing not to proceed with nuclear weapons development. But if this is a shakedown, it is not indefinitely reusable; hence it will be unable to solve Pyongyang's long-term economic problem. This is not to say that extortion is not part of Pyongyang's calculus, but rather that the North is seeking the bomb for other reasons. Indeed, weapons sales have been a major source of hard currency for the bankrupt regime. More ominously, nuclear weapons capability serves Pyongyang's basic strategic objectives, which are incompatible with those of Washington and its allies.
Who does North Korea threaten most by its acquisition of nuclear weapons? The first and most obvious target is South Korea. Nuclear weapons would give the North's massive but technically inferior conventional forces a new strategic advantage vis-Ã -vis the South: Pyongyang's acquisition of nuclear weapons is probably not aimed primarily at changing the force balance between North and South Korea directly. Rather, the acquisition of nuclear weapons is a geostrategic decision meant to deter the United States and the region's other powers from intervening on the side of the South in any future conflict.
North Korean missile development has now reached the point where it has the capability to hit all major Japanese cities. Before too long it will also be able to strike America's western coast. Absent nuclear warheads, such a capability is militarily insignificant. With nuclear warheads, such missiles would be a lethal first strike force and, as such, could be considered by the North as a deterrent to hold tens of millions of Japanese civilians, the Japanese economy and millions of Americans hostage during a North Korean assault against the South.
This is not to suggest that Pyongyang, upon acquiring nuclear weapons, plans to invade the South shortly thereafter. The North is well aware that the United States has plans to retaliate massively in a manner that will topple the regime should it invade the South. More likely, Pyongyang wants this deterrent as a shield behind which it will be able to conduct its "rogue nation" activities--such as missile, chemical weapons and narcotics sales abroad--with impunity. Furthermore, it will have the deterrent available for some future occasion when the United States is tied down, say, halfway across the globe and hence unable to bring to bear its full military capacity in defense of South Korea.
But the most chilling threat posed by a North Korea gone nuclear is its ability to provide nuclear weapons material to terrorists, in particular Al-Qaeda. There is no reason to believe that Pyongyang would have a moral qualm about doing this. Moreover, North Korea has a track record of being one of the world's great proliferators of weapons technology.
It is also known from documents acquired in Afghanistan that Al-Qaeda wants to acquire a nuclear capability. So a weapons transfer from Pyongyang to Al-Qaeda is not a nightmare scenario from a science fiction novel but a real possibility. The notion that any transfer of nuclear weapons-grade material to Al-Qaeda would be detected easily by the outside world is false. Weapons-grade nuclear bomb material is tiny in size. It could be transported out of North Korea in at least two ways: first, by land through the porous border with China; or second, by mini-submarine (the North has several) to a small boat that could then transport it by ship to Pakistan or some other poorly-governed nation, where a friendly, well-paid, Al-Qaeda-sympathizing scientist could transform the material into one or more bombs. Those bombs could then be placed in separate containers and shipped to, say, New York, Boston, Montréal, San Francisco, London, Marseilles, Tokyo and Sydney, and detonated. A successful nuclear attack on America and its allies would not only kill hundreds of thousands of people instantly, it would poison tens of millions more with radiation and render major Western shipping centers uninhabitable for years, devastating the economies of the West. This would be Al-Qaeda's ultimate doomsday scenario.
As of now, no reliable inspection method exists for detecting the presence of a nuclear weapon in the millions of shipping containers that enter American or other Western nations' ports each week, nor the means of tracing the genesis of such after it has exploded. The perpetrators of an Al-Qaeda nuclear attack are unlikely to be traced, and, in any case, the fingerprints of Pyongyang would not be directly evident. It is a low-risk policy for Pyongyang. Its main advantage would not consist of the funds provided by Al-Qaeda, but the probable disorientation and weakening of the United States, Pyongyang's main enemy.
The Fundamental Problem
The nature of the regime provides an impenetrable barrier for any policy of verification of agreements. Nuclear disarmament is extremely unlikely without regime change.
The most important starting point for any understanding is recognition that this is a totalitarian tyranny. Like Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao Zedong's China, Enver Hoxha's Albania, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, this type of regime is the most extreme in terms of the regime's suspicion of its citizens, not to mention foreigners, and the pervasiveness of state controls of the economy and society. It is also a highly personalized regime, led by a deeply paranoid dictator.
We have learned, or should have learned from the behavior of the other examples of this, that the system of total control is a matter of regime choice, not necessity. The regime will not be subject to economic incentives to change the total political, economic and social system. This type of system exists to satisfy the ideological and psychopathological needs of the dictator, as Robert C. Tucker noted in his book The Soviet Political Mind. That is why he does not care about its economic inefficiency, nor about the massive cost of the system in terms of losses of millions of human lives. That is why the regime cannot be bribed into reform.
The systems of tyrannical totalitarian control in the ussr, China and Albania ended only with the death of the dictator, and in Cambodia with the regime's overthrow by foreign invasion. Not that they became democratic as a result, but at least the range of human freedom was less circumscribed. So long as Stalin, Mao, Hoxha and Pol Pot held power, their regimes could not retreat to the authoritarian-communist systems that now operate in China and Vietnam. The authoritarian reform alternative has been available for Kim Il-sung and his heir Kim Jong-il to see for two decades. Since the advent of pacifist governments in South Korea--first under Kim Dae-jung in 1998 and under Roh Moo-hyun since 2003--South Koreans have been advocating such a development. Yet, the North Korean leader has shown no genuine interest in emulating it.
A radical totalitarian tyranny is incompatible with a system of intrusive weapons inspections. Such inspections challenge the existence of such a system. Weapons inspectors, whatever their nationality, are assumed to be foreign spies. Compounded with this is the fact that the paranoid, fear-driven nature of such a system impedes the dictator from having a proper understanding of his political and military situation and his realistic options. This point has been made by others with regard to the Iraqi system of political decision-making.
Saddam's regime is but the latest example of the irrational decision-making of this particular sort of tyrant. Recall the example of Stalin's decision in 1937, at a time when he feared a dire military threat from Germany, to purge the Soviet officer corps of its most talented generals in the paranoid belief that they constituted a threat to his regime. This only weakened the Soviet Union's ability to resist its predatorial enemy, and thus encouraged an eventual Nazi invasion. On the basis of delusions, Stalin had weakened his regime in a bid to strengthen it.
Recall Mao Zedong's decision in 1963 to confront both the Soviet Union and the United States at the same time and then to launch the Cultural Revolution in 1966, which undermined the position of his armed forces, among other things. Like Stalin, Mao overestimated his regime's own strength for years and underestimated the resolve of his enemies. This almost led, in 1969, to a Soviet strike against China's nuclear weapons installations. Finally, recall Pol Pot's decision to attack Vietnamese villages in 1977 and his continuing provocations and refusal to negotiate with his immensely more powerful neighbor after his army's defeat in 1978, believing that his tiny army could win on the basis of its ideological purity. This fantastic behavior led the Vietnamese to invade and overthrow his regime.
The point is that totalitarian tyranny is not merely irrational but has tendencies toward self-destruction--a result only narrowly avoided in the Soviet and Chinese cases, but not in the Cambodian case. And these comparisons have a deeper resonance when one realizes that the current North Korean regime is not merely similar in its political structure and mentality to the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Phnom Penh under Pol Pot and Pyongyang under Kim the elder maintained a close political, diplomatic and advisory relationship. Indeed, while Pol Pot was in power, North Korea actually inspired and advised the regime. In fact, in 1979, after Vietnam invaded, the North Korean advisers had to flee Cambodia to Thailand to avoid capture.
It is fatuous to believe that Kim Jong-il is a misunderstood closet cosmopolitan, who is just waiting for the right foreign gesture to make him more reasonable in his domestic and foreign policies. Unfortunately, such thinking is widespread in the broad political culture and in the corridors of power of South Korea--a nation that should be America's most important ally against North Korea.
South Korea's Attitude Problem
One problem inhibiting American foreign policy, and in fact encouraging North Korean nuclear adventurism, is the attitude of South Korea. Over the past decade, South Korea's political culture has gradually adopted a left-wing, pacifist and appeasement-oriented attitude toward the North and an increasingly virulent hostility toward the United States.
A study by the Pew Center for the People and the Press in May 2003 found that 50 percent had an unfavorable view of the United States and 43 percent had a favorable view. In June 2002, 53 percent had been favorable and, in 2000, 58 percent had been favorable. A poll conducted by the Korean Gallup organization in late-2002 found that 53 percent of South Koreans disliked the United States and only 37 percent liked it. In the same poll in 1994, 64 percent liked the United States and 15 percent disliked it. This change is correlated with age: in South Korea, the older one is, the more likely one is to be staunchly pro-American and anti-communist; the younger one is the more one tends to be trusting and even affectionate toward the North, while distrustful of and openly hostile to the United States. A well-to-do 29-year-old South Korean woman expressed the typical attitude of younger Koreans toward America:
If the United States left I wouldn't mind. . . . If North Korea wants nuclear weapons, I think they should have them. The U.S. and so many other countries have them. There's no way North Korea will attack us with them. I don't think so. We're the same country. You don't bomb and kill your family. We share the same blood.
The current South Korean government of Roh Moo-hyun, like the Kim Dae-jung government that preceded it, reflects the views of the younger generation. The political consequences of this normative shift have been devastating for American policy and heartening for the North. No longer are political defectors from the North widely publicized in the South, and refugees are not as welcome as they once were.
Attempts by private citizens to make the North more open to information from the outside world are not tolerated by the Seoul government on the grounds that this will upset the authorities in Pyongyang and make the process of peaceful unification more difficult. For example, in August 2003, a group of South Koreans led by the German human rights campaigner Norbert Vollertsen attempted to send transistor radios into North Korea on specially designed cargo balloons. The purpose was to break Pyongyang's monopoly on news and information to which its subjects were exposed (all radios in North Korea can only pick up the government station) by making available radios that could pick up Korean-language government and private stations in China, Russia and South Korea. South Korean police intervened and stopped the action before it could begin, in the process subduing the middle-aged Vollertsen so roughly that he had to be hospitalized.
Another striking example was provided a few days later. During the Universiade international sports games in the South Korean city of Daegu, where North Korean teams participated, a small group of protesters carrying banners insulting Kim Jong-il were attacked by three North Korean "journalists" in attendance. Many of the protesters needed medical treatment as a result of the beating. But Seoul's response did not include the arrest of the thugs or the lodging of a formal protest to Pyongyang. Rather, Seoul apologized to the North, labeling the protesters "provocateurs."
How has this political cultural shift happened? It would be easy to blame the policies of the Bush Administration, in the manner of many on the American and European Left. It would also be wrong. The Pew Center study showed that, of those South Koreans who had an unfavorable view of the United States, when given a choice between blaming the Bush Administration or America generally, or both, 72 percent felt that the United States generally was the problem, and only 20 percent blamed the Bush Administration in particular for their attitudes. (These figures contrast starkly with anti-American sentiment in Europe. There, of that part of the population holding an unfavorable view of the United States, 74 percent in France, 74 percent in Germany, 67 percent in Italy and 50 percent in Spain believe that the Bush Administration is the problem, while only a small minority blamed America generally.)
Given that these attitudes are generationally different, the explanation of anti-American political attitudes in South Korea is rooted in generational issues. Older South Koreans recall directly the Korean War and the atrocities of the North. They were the ones most affected by the separation of families that took place as a result of the communist regime. The older generation still sees the United States as a factor of salvation and looks to the totalitarian North with dread, noting America's role as protector during the South's rise from poverty to wealth.
On the other hand, the younger generation, born into relative prosperity, recalls most vividly the struggle against the dictatorships of the South from the 1960s on. For them, the Kwangju massacre of students by the military government in 1980 is the focal point of collective memory. They recall that Pyongyang supported the students, while Washington supported the military dictatorship. They became even more susceptible to Marxist interpretations of Korean history. By the late-1980s, those students had become the South's university professors and high school teachers, in an Asian version of what the German intellectual agitator Herbert Marcuse called the "Long March through the institutions." The myth that America was responsible for the division of the nation, and that it caused the outbreak of the Korean War, permeates the younger generation's thinking, with the writings of University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings serving as their basic texts. The recent discrediting of his theses by revelations from Soviet archives has made no impact upon these deeply held prejudices.
One political result was to encourage Kim Dae-jung's "sunshine policy": an attempt, through what Western policymakers like to refer to as "constructive engagement", to transform North Korea peacefully into a more open society, one that would trade and allow cultural interaction with the South. The ultimate hope is to eventually discover a basis for peaceful reunification of the divided Korean peninsula. Even if the policy had been partially successful in facilitating more economic and cultural openness in North Korea, there was still the unanswered question of how a people divided by two completely antithetical political systems would ever be able to unite. Only two 20th-century examples provide models. The reunification of North and South Vietnam came about as a result of military conquest and the overthrow of a non-communist government by a communist one, backed to some extent by both China and the Soviet Union. The reunification of Germany came about only as a result of the peaceful collapse of the communist system, when the Soviet-trained and protected German communist elites lost the support of their "elder brother" and, lacking the ruthlessness of tyrants, lost confidence in their own ability to rule. Proponents of the "sunshine policy" do not propose that either of these examples provide a model for Korea. How then will reunification happen?
Apart from its conceptual muddle, the "sunshine policy" was from the beginning a dismal failure in practice. To ensure a summit meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas, Southern officials and businessmen secretly paid Pyongyang hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes. The North has established a capitalist zone in the far north of the country, adjacent to China, where such economic activity can be isolated from the rest of the country. And the cultural opening--a promise of travel between the two zones that would enable divided families to spend some time together--was a farce that has only occurred once, and then only of a scanty 200 elderly people out of a pool of millions of eligible divided family members. The current North Korean leadership retains control of most economic life and has displayed no substantial interest in transforming the North into a politically authoritarian market economy and society like that of China.
Even if the December 2002 election results in South Korea had brought to power a hard-liner, thus keeping Seoul and Washington closer together on the Pyongyang question, the fact remains that, since September 11, South Korea and the United States face different threats from the advent of North Korean nuclear power. Washington is at the top of Al-Qaeda's hit list; Seoul is not. As such, American and South Korean security priorities have begun to diverge fundamentally.
The Specter of Regime Change
How can regime change in North Korea realistically occur? Two scenarios present themselves. The least bloody option calls for Beijing to make use of its near-total control over so much of North Korea's energy and food supply by essentially supporting one faction against another and foment a coup d'état in Pyongyang, the result of which would be to put Pyongyang on a firm road to a China-style reform-oriented communist regime. Why would Beijing want to do this? Some suggest that Beijing fears the regional proliferation that would result from Pyongyang's arrival to the nuclear club. Japan and South Korea would be bad enough, but Taiwan would be unacceptable. Additionally, Beijing might decide that the danger of ethnic Muslim separatists in western China acquiring a nuclear device from the North, via Al-Qaeda, might be sufficient to warrant a pre-emptive action against the North.
More significantly, it appears that the most compelling reason for China to act against the North is the reasonable fear that, if Beijing does not act against Pyongyang, Washington might. For, if the United States were to overthrow the regime in North Korea, it would likely expect a non-communist regime to emerge in the aftermath and would accelerate steps leading toward the unification of the two Koreas under a pro-American, democratic capitalist regime. Having such a regime on its border would adversely affect China's strategic environment, so China's motivation to act to change the regime in Pyongyang would be greatly affected by its perception that decisive American military action would result absent Chinese intervention.
Here is where the Iraq situation has complicated things greatly. On the one hand, before the Iraq War, Beijing was detached from the burgeoning crisis on the Korean peninsula. American officials complained about this fact often. Yet after the Iraq War, Beijing suddenly became open to Washington's suggestions that it should participate in and even host negotiations. No doubt the display of American resolve and military skill in the Middle East has convinced China to become involved in trying to solve the Korean crisis peacefully. On the other hand, the tying down of American troops in Iraq, in an unexpectedly complicated and probably drawn out counterinsurgency, and the stretching of American military deployments worldwide, means that American military options on the Korean peninsula are extremely limited.
The United States certainly has more than enough air power in the region. But it is doubtful that, at this moment, America has the ground forces required to conduct the kind of military operation that would enable it to overthrow the regime in the North by force. And this leaves aside the moral concerns that may constrain an American president from taking such a drastic step. At present, the only likely scenario of forcible regime change involves the direct involvement of the South Korean military. Given the political climate in South Korea, this will not happen unless the North directly attacks the South. Yet this essay has argued that the likelihood of an imminent North Korean assault on the South is slim. Or is it?
The United States has suggested on occasion that, if Pyongyang does not accede to a disarmament plan, it will propose the institution of sanctions and an economic blockade against North Korea. Sanctions, if enforced by the currently negotiating nations, especially China and Russia, may well cause the collapse of the regime. Pyongyang has publicly responded that it would regard such a policy as a declaration of war. Moreover, it promises under such an eventuality to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire." That would be a direct assault on South Korea and certainly trigger an armed response from the South. With South Korean forces involved alongside the 37,000 U.S. forces already in country, plus those in Okinawa, and the full power of the United States Air Force in the region, Washington could bring enough military force to bear to topple the regime. It would not be a pleasant solution to the problem. But it would be decisive. And it may be the only solution, no matter how horrible the costs might be.
We must be brutally honest about the consequences of "kicking the can down the road", as the Clinton Administration did in 1994 and some in the Bush Administration may be prepared to do today. No one looks forward to war with North Korea. But other prospectively greater evils are at issue here: Al-Qaeda nuclear detonations in New York and other American or Western ports would be intolerable. They would be apocalyptic. They could result in the immediate loss of as many lives, perhaps more, as any war on the Korean peninsula. They would leave an environmental catastrophe in their wake that would turn affected major urban centers into wastelands for decades to come. They would stain the world with their ugliness in an unprecedented way and, in so doing, could spell the end of Western economies and societies as we know them.
Can we allow that to happen?
Essay Types: Essay