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However, none of these mechanisms is likely to work in the peculiar case of North Korea. Despite the significant relaxation of the past two decades, North Korea is not liberal enough for its people to have any influence in matters of governance. North Koreans do not vote (well, they do vote with a predictable 100-percent approval rate for a single government-appointed candidate). They are terrified and isolated, they do not have the rudimentary self-organization necessary for creating a resistance movement, and they are still to a large extent unaware of any alternative to their mode of life. A popular revolt, Tunisia-style, might be possible in the long run, but is unlikely to happen any time soon.

At times it has been suggested that the sanctions (especially financial sanctions) will deprive the regime of the funds that are used to reward the top brass with small perks, like bottles of Hennessy cognac and Mercedes cars. It is assumed that as a result of such deprivation the North Korean generals and dignitaries will become restive and exercise some pressure on the government, demanding the surrender of nukes and/or reforms. This is an unrealistic expectation as well. The entire upper crust of the North Korean elite is likely to share the belief that regime stability is a basic condition for their survival. So we might presume that they would be willing to put up with locally produced liquors and used Toyotas if the alternative is a regime disintegration that will (or so they believe) send them to clean the floors of their prison cells, if not straight to the lampposts.

In other words, in the highly unlikely case that China sincerely cooperated with a sanctions regime (the only way such sanctions would really have any teeth), the sanctions would merely help to starve to death another few hundred thousand North Korean commoners without producing any of the desired political effects. The Pyongyang elite would see the death of a few hundred thousand as a regrettable but necessary price to pay for the survival of their regime.

Thus, as we have made clear, the hard-line policy is not going to have much impact on North Korea. Alas, the same is applicable to its major alternative, the policy of engagement. The Washington soft-liners usually cite three major incentives that can be put on the table as a reward for denuclearization: aid; security guarantees; and normalization of relations with the United States. To borrow the expression of Wade Huntley, an influential soft-liner, US administrations should just “sit down and talk” in order to resolve the nuclear issue.
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The root of the current problems, the soft-liners insist, is America’s unwillingness to be flexible and generous enough and its adherence to an approach that is too militant and/or excessively idealistic. This approach is what Wade Huntley describes as “emancipatory militant idealism”—the belief that the United States might and must use force for achieving the benevolent goals of emancipating suppressed peoples worldwide.
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The aid would be most welcome in Pyongyang, no doubt. However, even a large lump-sum payment is not necessarily a long-term solution. Once the money is spent (and it will be spent quite quickly), a nonnuclear Pyongyang regime will have great difficulties in obtaining additional aid. Without nukes, North Korea would be just another impoverished country that must compete for donor attention with such places as Sudan or Zimbabwe. Even though some aid would probably come its way, it would be on a smaller scale than is currently being received. It also would be
strictly conditional and its distribution carefully monitored. However, in order to survive, the Kim family regime needs to be able to distribute its foreign aid according to its own priorities, without excessive interference from the donors. The North Korean leaders need money, but only the kind of money they can control. They prefer payments and giveaways to investment, since the latter implies a great deal of interaction between foreign investors and North Koreans. As well, it cannot be directly channeled to the programs the regime considers necessary for its own survival. It is the existence of the nuclear program that allows Pyongyang politicians to determine the conditions on which aid should be delivered and distributed.

The promises of the US security guarantee—even if such promises are to be believed—are also not sufficiently attractive to change Pyongyang’s behavior. Few people would doubt that North Korean leaders are sincerely afraid of a large-scale US-led invasion, and this fear is justified, as the fate of Iraq, a fellow member of the “axis of evil,” has demonstrated. However, there are at least two reasons why such security guarantees might be irrelevant.

First, North Koreans deeply distrust Americans (and, more broadly speaking, all foreigners), and they do not believe in the value of foreigners’ promises, especially when such promises are made in democratic systems where leaders and policies are bound to change every few years and where the moralistic outbursts of public opinion might outweigh all earlier agreements.

Second, North Korean leaders know that in the final analysis, their major security threat is internal, not external. They are afraid of a US-led invasion, Iraq-style, but they are even more afraid of a domestic coup or revolution. Needless to say, neither the United States nor any other outside player can provide them with a guarantee against such an outcome—indeed, as events in Libya demonstrated, they are likely to actively encourage such an outcome. One cannot imagine a US president who promises to send the US Marines to suppress a pro-democracy rebellion in Pyongyang (but one can easily imagine a president who dispatches marines—or, more likely, jets—to save the rebels from slaughter by the Kim loyalists). At the same time, their nuclear status at least increases Pyongyang leaders’ ability to fend off
unwanted intervention in the event of a domestic crisis as well as their ability to extract foreign aid under their conditions (and control over aid distribution might help to prevent a domestic crisis).

If anything, the recent events in Libya confirmed these assumptions. On March 22, 2011, the KCNA—a North Korean official news agency—quoted a spokesman for the DPRK Foreign Ministry as saying:

The present Libyan crisis teaches the international community a serious lesson. It was fully exposed before the world that “Libya’s nuclear dismantlement” much touted by the US in the past turned out to be a mode of aggression whereby the latter coaxed the former with such sweet words as “guarantee of security” and “improvement of relations” to disarm itself and then swallowed it up by force. It proved once again the truth of history that peace can be preserved only when one builds up one’s own strength as long as high-handed and arbitrary practices go on in the world.

For a change, the present author believes that this particular KCNA statement makes perfect sense.

Indeed, in 2003 Colonel Gaddafidid exactly what the North Korean rulers had stubbornly refused to consider—surrender his country’s nuclear materials in exchange for better relations with the United States and other Western nations. As we have seen, the compromise did not work. When his own people decided to get rid of him, the rebels found willing military support from the West and the eccentric dictator had nothing to deter the mighty West from intervening in the domestic politics of his country. The North Korean leadership must have thought that had Gaddafi not been persuaded to surrender his nuclear program in 2003, the West would never have seriously considered intervening in Libya.

The North Korean regime is thus not going to respond to either pressure or rewards, and this is increasingly obvious to the interested parties. There is therefore a great—and growing—temptation to say that North Korea is better to be forgotten and safely left alone. This is the essence of the “strategic patience” strategy, which has quietly become the mainstream
thinking of the US foreign policy establishment after 2009. In essence it says that the United States is willing to talk to North Korea, and maybe even “reward” it with some monetary and political concessions, as long as North Korea does what the United States wants it to do—that is, starts dismantling its nuclear program. If it doesn’t do so, the United States should, as strategic patience promoters insist, ignore North Korea’s antics, since North Korea isn’t going to be all that harmful anyway. A somewhat similar attitude seems to be dominant among the South Korean Right. These people believe that aid and political concessions make sense only if North Korean leaders agree to policies that are seen as “rational” by Seoul.

This reasoning might be attractive, but it seems to be unrealistic. North Korea has not the slightest desire to be left alone. Indeed, they cannot afford to be left alone. In order to compensate for the innate inefficiency of their economy, they need outside help, delivered on their specific conditions. So far, the best way to squeeze this aid has been to appear dangerous, unpredictable, and irrational. Therefore, they will continue to appear thus, attempting to cause more trouble for those countries and international forces from whom they hope to squeeze some resources. The alternative is not really attractive—either to survive on meager and perhaps diminishing returns of their nonfunctioning economy or to become excessively dependent on just one sponsor (China).

The supporters of strategic patience (aka, benign neglect) should understand that whilst being benignly neglected, North Korean leaders will work hard to improve their nuclear and missile arsenal, at the same time trying to proliferate (both as a way to pressurize by being troublesome and as a way to earn extra cash). South Koreans are in an even less enviable situation, as we have argued above, since the refusal to deal with the North Korean regime means that South Korea will face an almost endless chain of provocations. This is bad news for Seoul, since an outbreak of inter-Korean tensions is much more costly for the South than for the North.

Like it or not, the strategic patience of both Washington and Seoul is limited. Sooner or later, they are likely to give in and rejoin the game that is initiated and stage-managed by Pyongyang. The price of not doing so is too costly. It therefore makes sense to be prepared to rejoin the game on
the conditions that are—in the long run, at least—more favorable for Seoul, Washington, and, in the final count, the majority of the North Korean population. The North Korean problem has no quick fixes, but this does not mean that it has no solution whatsoever.

When we discuss the North Korean problem, it is important to keep in mind that it has three different, if interconnected, dimensions.

For the United States, the major problem is North Korea’s willingness to develop and maintain (perhaps, even proliferate) nuclear weapons and other WMD, as well as Pyongyang’s inclination to engage in seemingly reckless provocative behavior.

For South Korea, the major issue is North Korea’s refusal to initiate any kind of reforms that would bring about economic growth and a political transformation, thus creating better conditions for a manageable unification. The ceaseless brinkmanship of Pyongyang also constitutes a serious problem for Seoul (actually, a significantly greater problem than for the United States, which is lucky to be located thousands of miles away).

There is also another, often unmentioned, dimension of the problem: that of average North Koreans. For them, the continuing existence of the system in its present ossified form means that they are doomed to live lives that are both materially and spiritually impoverished (and full of fear, too). Unable to enjoy the fruits of economic growth that the luckier people in all neighboring countries have experienced, their lives are, essentially, struggles for physical survival. They are deprived of even the theoretical opportunity to become acquainted with more refined forms of culture. Last but not least, they always remember that harsh punishment waits for everybody who deviates from the state’s rigidly prescribed forms of behavior. On balance, this waste of human lives and energy might be the greatest consequence of the Kim family’s dictatorial rule.

As we have seen above, all of Pyongyang’s policies—the nuclear and WMD programs, the unwillingness to reform, the determined efforts to
maintain a police state, the penchant for creating regional tensions—are closely connected to the nature of the North Korean regime. Without these strategies, the regime and the ruling elite will be in serious trouble and so they persist with these policies, no matter what the cost to their own population, to outsiders, and even to the long-term future of their country. The only way to alter North Korea’s behavior is to change the nature of North Korea’s regime. But how?

To answer this question, it makes sense to have a closer look at the not-so-distant history. What brought about the end of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? In the end, it was the ingrained inefficiency of the centrally planned economy, its inability to provide the population with the level of consumption that prevails in the developed West. This is not to deny that the desire for national independence among the ethnic minorities as well as a longing for democracy and political freedoms among the better educated sections of the population also played a significant role in the demise of Communism. However, on balance, the fate of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was sealed by their economic inefficiency, not their political repressiveness. The author himself was witness to this transformation and hence can assure readers that the decisive impact on the Soviet imagination in the final decades of Communism was produced by the sight of shelves at an American supermarket rather than by the sight of vote counting at an American polling station.

Paradoxically, the less dramatic transformation of China was also a result of similar changes: by the 1970s, the Beijing leaders were aware that China, in spite of the mad experiments of Chairman Mao, was increasingly lagging behind its neighbors, and that its state-planned economy failed to deliver. They concluded that reform was necessary.