The Infidel point out some of the wishful thinking in Michael O’Hanlon’s last op-ed piece in the WaPo. Basically, Mr. O’Hanlon is rehashing the same shit that he and partner in crime Mike Mochizuki have been pushing for quite some time - I direct you to this August 6 piece in the NYT, which I reprint below together with my explanation why “thinking bigger” about North Korea is a waste of time.
Taken from The Marmot’s Hole, August 7:
Once again, the Marmot takes issue with the NYT, and once again, it’s Michael O’Hanlon and Mike Mochizuki who must be taken to task. Look, I respect O’Hanlon and Mochizuki’s scholarship, but I seriously question whether they know what North Korea is really about. Take a look at the plan they’re pushing:
Now that the United States and North Korea have finally agreed to talk, the issue is what to talk about. A priority of the Bush administration, as well as its predecessors, has long been the dismantling of the North’s nuclear-weapons program. This goal is realistic, but only if the United States is prepared to engage North Korea on a wide range of issues - especially its failed economy.
A “wider range of issues?” We can’t even hold the North Koreans to deals of a narrow scope, and you want to give them more opportunities to bend us over? Completely unrealistic, if not outright insane. And as far as the DPRK’s failed economy is concerned, there is nothing the United States can, let alone should, do to help the North overcome that problem.
The structure of the talks - scheduled for next month, they will include China, Russia, South Korea and Japan - ensures that the major regional players will be able to emphasize to Pyongyang that its nuclear weapons program must first be frozen and then dismantled entirely. Unfortunately, North Korea probably won’t listen to a proposal that requires it to make all the initial concessions. It already had something close to the deal Mr. Bush is now proposing under President Bill Clinton - but then Pyongyang willfully ignored it and began a secret nuclear program in the late 1990’s.
If anything, North Korea now thinks it needs nuclear weapons even more than before to ensure its own security, given President Bush’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein, his doctrine of military pre-emption and his statement that North Korea is part of an “axis of evil.” And Washington’s vague promises to eventually discuss better diplomatic and economic ties are unlikely to sway North Korean leaders.
I’ve already made it known what I think of North Korea’s “security concerns.” Look, if the Norks were simply afraid of an American invasion, a nonaggression pact would be a viable option. But Pyongyang is looking for much more that just security guarantees - what it truly wants, in fact, is aid. A lot of aid. And that says a great deal about North Korean intentions.
Mr. Bush is right that appeasement doesn’t pay, and that the United States should not bribe North Korea to return to a nuclear deal they already violated. Unfortunately, that probably leaves the situation at a standoff, since North Korea won’t accept the administration’s terms.
What to do under these circumstances? As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, if you have an unsolvable problem, enlarge it. The United States should demand much more of North Korea - and offer more as well.
The key is to recognize that a core cause of the crisis is the North’s economy, which has shrunk by half in the past 15 years. Only a plan that begins to repair that economy can resolve this nuclear crisis and prevent future ones.
This approach would not mean giving in to blackmail. The United States, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia would force North Korea to reshape its economy and modify its oppressive form of governance as a condition for assistance. It would amount to regime change - but regime change without war.
Turn on your George Clinton, folks, because it’s from here that O’Hanlon and Mochizuki start to get trippy. Reform in North Korea? Reshape its economy and modify its oppressive form of governance? Well, party on, dudes…
The cornerstone of this plan would be deep cuts in North Korean conventional military forces together with major economic reforms. Conventional forces don’t get the headlines, but they gobble up most of North Korea’s military budget and perhaps 20 percent of its total gross domestic product. A treaty mandating 50 percent cuts in heavy weaponry for both Koreas would be relatively straightforward to negotiate and verify. It would also be perfectly consistent with American and South Korean security interests.
Did O’Hanlon and Mochizuki just use the words “straightforward,” “negotiate,” and “Korea” in the same sentence? Korean Studies Guidelines, Article 1 - WITH KOREANS, NEGOTIATIONS ARE NEVER STRAIGHTFORWARD. O’Hanlon and Mochizuki are pretty good scholars, but you’d think that after years of watching North Korea’s antics, the two would have weened themselves off this fantasy that North Korea will one day show itself to be a negotiating partner worth negotiating with. And a 50% cut in heavy weaponry for BOTH Koreas? Even assuming Kim Jong-il was willing to pay the political price associated with screwing his very base of support (which he’s not, BTW), who’s to say the South Koreans would go along with such a deal EVEN IF they trusted the North Koreans enough to do it (which they don’t, BTW)? After all, Seoul is looking at more than just North Korea; it’s got Japan, China, and Russia to be concerned with, and any kind of conventional demilitarization of the Korean Peninsula would have to be linked to a general arms control agreement involving ALL the powers of the region. I can guarantee you that getting such a regional accord would be neither straightforward nor easy to verify. In fact, given the levels of mistrust between Beijing and Tokyo AND their respective regional ambitions, defense budgets are only going to go up, up and up. So good luck convincing the Koreans to slash their conventional arsenals by 50%.
Just as in Vietnam and China, the economic reforms would begin in certain special economic zones. In these areas, entrepreneurial activity would be encouraged, foreign investment facilitated, infrastructure improved and most existing Communist laws lifted. North Korea has tried to establish such zones, but the tensions on the peninsula have discouraged any serious outside investment.
Entrepreneurial activity would be encouraged, foreign investment facilitated, infrastructure improved, most existing Communist laws lifted… and the pigs which have yet to be eaten will be taught to grow wings and fly. O’Hanlon and Mochizuki start off by making a common, but extremely inappropriate comparison between North Korea on the one hand and China and Vietnam on the other. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Instititute discusses at length why the analogy does not apply (read the whole thing, however):
What does the historical experience of severe food shortages under communist regimes suggest about the current North Korean situation?
- All previous severe food shortages took place in countries that were overwhelmingly rural and agrarian (Cambodia, China, Mongolia, North Vietnam, and Ukraine were all at least 80 percent rural at the time). North Korea, by contrast, had become a predominantly nonagricultural and urbanized economy by the late 1980s. This means that household-level food self-sufficiency is simply not an option for most North Koreans.
- Virtually all previous food crises occurred within a decade of the establishment of the communist regime. Those crises may be seen as part of the process of system consolidation. But in North Korea the current food crisis has emerged in a fully mature Marxist-Leninist polity, in which a vanguard party has held power for nearly half a century.
- In the earlier food crises the policy interventions at fault were both newly introduced and self-evident, thus lending themselves to relief through policy reversal. There is little information about North Korea’s contemporary agrarian policies and their implementation. North Korean media extolled the virtues of a “transition to all-people’s ownership in agriculture” in 1994 and early 1995. Later in 1995, however, the media fell silent, after the official appeal for international food aid and the official announcement of massive damage from flooding.
To sum up, the economic pressures and problems confronting North Korea’s socialist system today appear to have no precise analogy in recent historical experience. Although the country enforces an exceptional degree of social control over its people, and reinforces this control by a to-date singularly successful policy of obstructing communication and contact with the outside world, it is well to remember that economies under severe stress can in fact collapse. One incontestable indicator of a potential collapse is a hunger crisis precipitated by a breakdown of the national food system.
To put it briefly, as a urban, industrialized society, North Korea’s closest historical precedent for reform is not China or Vietnam, but the Soviet Union. The North Koreans are well aware of this, and have made it quite clear to anyone who will listen that “reform” will go only as far as is considered safe for the regime, and that’s not very far. The reason Pyongyang is so insistent on getting aid - even going to the extent of nuclear extortion to get it - is because the regime views aid as the only way that it can survive without making the kind of socioeconomic changes it (rightly) associates with regime change.
Oh, and good luck with those special economic zones. The ones that North Korea has already attempted - for example, in Shinuiju and Najin-Sanbong - have been colossal failures, but NOT because tensions have discouraged outside investment. North Korea is, simply put, a terrible place to invest. Those companies that have been foolish enough to do business with the Norks have paid a horrible price; Hyundai’s losses in North Korea have become the stuff of legends. Why sink money into a place where worker productivity is nil, infrastructure nonexistent, and the government could nationalize your investments tomorrow depending on what kind of mood the Dear Leader’s in. Oh, and you have to bribe your way in for the privilege.
Each country involved in the talks would play an important role. China would provide advice on how to promote entrepreneurial activity within a command economy. The United States would relax trade sanctions, promising to lift them formally if North Korea kept to its commitments over several years. Japan, South Korea, China, America and any other interested parties would help to build the needed infrastructure; aid totaling about $2 billion a year could be needed, above and beyond assistance provided in the form of food and energy. To avoid misuse, most of the aid would not be in the form of cash, and it would be provided year by year only to the extent that North Korea verifiably upheld its end of the bargain.
The plan would then expand geographically and broaden its scope to include agricultural, public health and education programs. A decade or more could be needed to make this work. But if pursued seriously, it could reap major rewards - possibly doubling G.D.P., according to the Institute for International Economics.
North Korea has been in a state of economic collapse for over a decade now, and it has yet to make any meaningful reforms. It’s not like that don’t know what they have to do, so what makes O’Hanlon and Mochizuki think that North Korea will gladly reform once it receives the “Mother of All Bailouts?” The North Korean leadership stood by and watched two million of its own people starve without lifting as much as a finger; once the “need” for change is lifted (courtesy the American, Japanese, and South Korean taxpayer), the North Koreans will be even less enthusiastic about reform, seeing how their 50+ years of economic mismanagement can be taken care of via “tribute” for abroad. And the North Koreans would sooner welcome an American invasion that it would interference with their “agricultural, public health and education programs,” or accept a deal that would even roughly conform with the commonly understood definition of the English word “verifiable.”
Other demands would be placed on North Korea as well. It would have to eliminate chemical and biological weapons, stop producing and selling missiles, let all Japanese kidnapping victims and their families leave North Korea for good, stop counterfeiting and drug-running, and begin a human rights dialogue with the outside world akin to what China has accepted in recent years. The United States would also promise not to attack North Korea and to establish diplomatic ties.
All these elements would not need to be in an initial agreement with North Korea. But they should all be on the table immediately. By offering the North’s leaders a vision for an alternative future, the United States and its allies may be able to dissuade them from their self-destructive path. And a broader agenda for diplomacy has the best chance of getting North Korea to consider what it has so far refused to do: giving up its nuclear weapons capacity.
North Korea may very well say no to this kind of proposal. But in that event, having given diplomacy a serious try, the United States will be in a better position to argue to South Korea, Japan, China and Russia that much sterner measures are needed - including economic sanctions and perhaps even military force. And if North Korea confronts a unified coalition making firm demands while also offering concrete inducements to reform, it will probably recognize it has no real choice but to say yes.
I understand O’Hanlon and Mochizuki’s arguments, but they are expecting way to much from North Korea. What the two scholars have offered North Korea is not an “alternative future” - it’s an alternative suicide that the reclusive Stalinist state has already rejected. For Pyongyang, reform = death. What O’Hanlon and Mochizuk fail to realize that the North Koreans’ “self-destructive path” is anything but self-destructive - in fact, the North Korean leadership views crisis as the very spring of life, and the nation’s unreformable socioeconomic almost guarantees that its leadership will continue in their outlook for as long as the regime exists. Dreams of encouraging reform are just that - dreams, and dangerous ones at that. If paying blackmail is what you want to do, that at least do it with eyes open, and realize that what you are doing is not helping bring about change, but giving one of the world’s most odious regimes a continued lease on life.
