How Do You Solve a Problem Like Korea? Pyongyang shrugs off sticks and turns up its nose at carrots. Biden has few options. By Walter Russell Mead
The Journal reports that Kim Jong Un’s authorized biography is out and a Korean-language edition has been uploaded to the web. The authors are, unsurprisingly, bullish on Mr. Kim. The closing section (“Spinning the World Under the Axis of Sovereignty and Justice”) hails Mr. Kim’s summits with leaders including Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in. Summing it up, the authors gush that “there has never been a time when all the world has been this focused on our people’s greatness and dignity in our 5,000-year history.”
They are not wrong. North Korea, with a gross domestic product estimated at less than $26 billion and a population of 26 million, punches well above its weight. Kim Jong Un doesn’t see himself as the crackpot leader of a failed state. He sees himself as a winner, the uncontested leader of a tiny state that by ruthless dedication has forced the greatest powers in the world to deal with it as an equal.
As another American administration struggles with the difficult and thankless task of developing a North Korea strategy, the Biden team needs to understand that even severe sanctions are unlikely to work. For years sanctions proponents have argued that if the U.S. could only get full Chinese cooperation, North Korea would have no choice but to accept some kind of denuclearization process.
This is unlikely. China, annoyed as it often is by North Korea’s unpredictable and disruptive approach to politics, would never agree to sanctions stringent enough to risk destabilizing a neighboring country. More important, the Kims are not easily swayed by economic pressure. In an effort to contain Covid, Pyongyang has voluntarily imposed an isolation on itself far more devastating than sanctions ever could be. Trade with China is down 80%. GDP is down an estimated 10%. Grain production is slated to fall one million tons below the 5.5 million tons required to feed its populace. Major factories have closed due to shortages of spare parts, and blackouts are widespread.
Despite all this, the government is signaling its determination to stand fast until the pandemic ends. Not for the first time, Pyongyang is demonstrating that it will impose massive suffering on its population to pursue its goals. Perhaps this determination would crack in the face of even direr conditions, but a mass famine did not force the regime to abandon its nuclear program in the 1990s. Sanctions alone, however severe, will not bring this country to heel.
Pyongyang doesn’t only shrug off sticks; it turns up its nose at carrots. For more than a generation, Chinese leaders have tried to persuade North Korea to embrace the economic policies that have made China the second largest economy in the world. South Korea has repeatedly offered help. While the Kims occasionally flirt with minor changes, they adamantly refuse to introduce reforms that would put North Korea on the Asian path to growth.
From the standpoint of the Kim dynasty (and that is the only perspective that matters in North Korean politics), this makes sense. A closed command economy dominated by the military establishment cements the dynasty’s absolute power. Opening the economy would inevitably dilute the dynasty’s authority by allowing foreign investors and foreign ideas to make their presence felt.
The Kims, it seems clear, do not want a flourishing civilian economy. The militarization of the economy and the permanent scarcity of resources concentrate power at the center. The nuclear-weapons program keeps the dynasty safe from foreign military pressure, and a world-class system of repression insulates the rulers from domestic discontent. The nuclear arsenal leads anxious foreigners to court the Kims, elevating the dynasty’s importance in its own eyes and those of its servants. And in efforts to limit further progress in the weapons program, foreigners offer resources that enhance the regime’s power to reward its supporters.
The human costs are appalling, but if your goals are to maintain the Kim dynasty’s total control over the country and the total independence of North Korea as a state, the model demonstrably works.
The Kim dynasty’s strategy to maintain the status quo at home is deeply destabilizing internationally. Between enhancing its nuclear arsenal, improving its missile delivery systems and experimenting with unconventional weapons ranging from cyber to bio, North Korea becomes a steadily greater concern. And as the situation in the Indo-Pacific becomes more volatile, the danger that North Korean actions could launch a wider war can only grow.
For all these reasons, the Biden administration would like to persuade or constrain North Korea to change course. But unless it can shake Kim Jong Un’s conviction that his strategy is a brilliant success, the Biden administration, like its predecessors, has no winning cards in its hand.
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