When it comes to nuclear-armed North Korea, the question is not if the reclusive Stalinist state will come to an end, but how soon and how violently. The lives of millions of Americans and East Asians depend upon the answer, which will come from an obese dictator who has yet to turn 30.
Ever since the guns of the Korean War stopped sounding along the 38th parallel in 1953, Americans and South Koreans alike have feared that the North’s formidable military machine might once again go into action. Since then, the North has revved this well-founded anxiety to a fever pitch at an almost predictable pace, by provoking incessant crises with violent violations of the armistice.[1] When I was born back in 1968, the seizure of the U.S.S. Pueblo by the North Koreans was the latest threat to the false peace and when I last wrote on this topic back in 1995, the latest incident was the killing of three North Korean spies who had infiltrated the North. Some of the worst incidents came in 2010, when the North sank the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan, killing 46 sailors, then killed two South Korean soldiers and two civilians in a sudden bombardment of the Yeonpyeong Island. The alarm bells have been ringing non-stop for almost 60 years along the heavily fortified demilitarized zone that separates the two sides, yet it still remains to be seen if those bells with someday sound the death knell of a wider war that could claim hundreds of thousands of lives. The DMZ may still be a no-man’s land, but appearances can be deceiving, for the Korean Peninsula is actually in a state of flux, thanks to various long-term trends in power politics, which will eventually end in the barbed wire coming down and the trenches being filled in. The question is how many graves, if any, will also have to be dug.
One of the most important trends is the changing military balance, which is slowly tilting against the North in conventional terms despite its recent advances in weapons of mass destruction. Pyongyang’s armed forces are still formidable enough to initiate a bloody Second Korean War, at least on paper. To support its 1.1 million man army, Pyongyang has more than 20,000 artillery pieces (about twice that of South Korea, or even China) and about 3,500 tanks, compared to 2,561 for the South.[2] Restricted training time for the pilots of its 1,700 aging aircraft means that the Korean People’s Army Air Force must adopt a defensive posture against the overwhelming technological and numerical superiority of South Korea and the U.S., but the nation’s 11,000 air defense guns make that defensive posture a credible deterrence. To put that number in perspective, the military inventories of China, Japan, South Korea and Russia combined barely top this total.[3] Given enough time, the North could not prevent the U.S. from shipping more aircraft to the front, given the weakness of its navy. The North has just 50,000 naval personnel with three frigates and 70 submarines, which are incapable of operating far from shore, thereby ruling out a coordinated naval defense of the nation's east and west coasts.[4] South Korea, at the tip of the peninsula, does not have that natural geographic limitation, especially when complemented by the globe-spanning, blue water navy fielded by the U.S.
The New Balance of Power on the Korean Peninsula
The conventional balance of power has actually changed so much that an increasing number of specialists argue that the South could halt an invasion before it reached the capital of Seoul, just 35 miles from the DMZ. This is a drastic change from 1950, when the South was utterly dependent on the U.S. and its allies for military assistance.[5] As a result, the U.S. has drawn down its forces to a mere 18,000 troops, which are meant to act as a “tripwire” that will trigger a massive American counter-invasion. Just as the Japanese realized that they could not win a protracted war with America and thus decided on a single knock-out blow at Pearl Harbor, so too would North Korea’s fortunes depend on instantaneous success on the part of its invasion force before American reinforcements could arrive. The key to Pyongyang’s war hopes lies in intense shelling of the South Korean positions on the DMZ and nearby Seoul. In contrast to Japan, however, North Korea has a pre-existing stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of unknown size and potency that it would be sorely tempted to use once the shortcomings of its conventional forces became apparent. At present, the greatest threat of mass casualties come from its chemical and biological agents, such as nerve gas and anthrax, which can be launched by shells; the longer the North survives, however, the greater its nuclear weapons capacity will grow. Atomic bomb tests in 2006 and 2009 demonstrated that Pyongyang had the capability to make crude weapons, but delivering them is another story. Hence the need for missile tests like the one it has scheduled for April, in which it will launch a satellite as a cover for developing intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) technology that could deliver its warheads as far as Alaska. If unabated, that trend might give the North the ability to target the whole West Coast of America with a more reliable, if small, stockpile of nuclear weapons a generation from now. The longer it survives, the greater the regime’s technological capacity for mass destruction will grow, as it paradoxically loses parity in conventional weapons with the South. In the long term this increases the likelihood of a desperate, sudden attack with overwhelming conventional and unconventional weapons, for the same reasons that imperial Japan decided on a sudden strike at Pearl Harbor.
This dilemma stems in part from the North’s own economic strategy, which exhibits not only the worst elements of Stalinism, but an obsession with weapons production that is actually self-defeating. As historian Paul Kennedy demonstrated in his classic book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, many leading nations in the last half-millennium have lost their great power status by diverting too many resources from civilian economic production to military uses, which paradoxically saps the ability of the civilian sector to support the military sector in the long run.[6] This “imperial overstretch” was one of the key reasons for the decline of the British Empire, for example; Kennedy even predicted in advance that overspending on the military would undermine the power of both the Soviet Union and the U.S. in the long term. The same process may be occurring in North Korea, which has oriented its entire economy to military production. The inefficiencies of Communism are glaring in the North Korean system because it is still wedded to the version of it practiced by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, whose love of gigantic but bloated industrial plants influenced his allies, including Kim Il-Sung, the first dictator of the North. This same system was responsible for much of the environmental damage that still plagues the former Soviet bloc; in order to speed up production, the Stalinists cut corners with environmental safety and use of natural resources to the point that they did long-term damage to economic growth. North Korea today exhibits the same sort of economic retardation from environmental damage, such as reckless deforestation[7] – which may have been a hidden contributor to the devastating floods of the 1990s that reduced the regime to dependence on foreign food aid. By siphoning off its remaining resources to the military to an extent exceeded by few other Communist regimes, as well as sticking stubbornly to the most antiquated economic doctrines of Stalinism, North Korea has doomed itself to a lingering economic decay, one that is even undermining its ability to keep up with the South in terms of conventional weaponry. This is why it can no longer afford to give its pilots adequate training time (which is as important as numbers and types of aircraft, as the Arab-Israeli wars demonstrated) or to buy, let alone produce, combat aircraft capable of competing with the latest South Korean or American weaponry. The civilian economy is of course a shambles, as is best illustrated by pictures of the night sky over the dark nation. As of 2011, North Korea’s 24.5 million people had an estimated per capita income of just $1,800, compared to $31,700 for the 48.6 million living in the South.[8] It can be said for certain that anyone in America has industrial products made in South Korea somewhere in their homes, but none imported from the North. In the long run, a nation simply can’t maintain such a formidable array of weaponry without paying for them somehow, either through domestic production or importing them from abroad. North Korea is by no means a paper tiger, but it will become one if all of those tanks and air defense guns begin to rust into obsolescence, much like the Stalinist philosophy that spawned them.
The Last Temptation of Communism: How a Generation Gap Brought Down the Berlin Wall
The Soviet bloc could have gone on rusting indefinitely, comfortably replaying the same Cold War crises and rhetoric until Kingdom Come. What prevented that flaccid fate was a subtle change in philosophy, which North Korea can also choose to adopt at any given time. Yet one of the primary obstacles to social change of any kind, whether for good or evil, is the threat of external competition or aggression, which tends to instill a conservative attitude in human beings. By conservative I don’t mean anything resembling the ideology of Young Republicans, but in the strictest sense of being resistant to change; during wars, capitalists cling to capitalism, Marxists to Marxism, slavers to slavery and so on. This is precisely why the right wing Republican approach to foreign policy actually backfired and prolonged the Cold War, by confirming the Soviet bloc’s fears of capitalist encirclement and thereby keeping hardliners in power. The same approach ironically helps maintain the Castros in power in Cuba, where Communism, for all of its faults, is at least tempered with some degree of humanity. Because it was unworkable, the brand of Communism imposed upon Russia and Eastern Europe could only be sustained by the threat of national emergencies, whether real (such as Hitler’s invasion of the U.S.S.R.) or imagined. That spirit of national emergency could not be sustained forever though, which is why Communism mellowed in the Soviet bloc after détente began; for all of their faults, Brezhnev was not Stalin, nor was Khrushchev as much of a monster as Lenin. As the Cold War dragged on, the brinkmanship and rhetoric got stale, once the possibility of actual fighting between the superpowers died down; it is good to keep in mind that the Red Army was dismantled without a shot being fired, but the death toll might have reached into the hundreds of millions if the bluster of radicals like Barry Goldwater and his ilk carried the day. North Korea is animated more by militarism than Marxism and therefore it will be less likely for our rivalry to end in such an unusual “soft landing,” but the possibility still exists. Once the leadership of North Korea stops perceiving the U.S. and its allies as such a threat, then it will be more difficult for them to justify the crisis atmosphere they have kept their nation in for more than six decades, either to themselves or to their population.
It is also wise to keep in mind that the liberalization of politics and economics in the Soviet bloc was started from the top down, by reformers like Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, not from the ground up. Even in the case of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who was killed in a brief civil war, the demonstrators who started the revolution had to be aided by dissident elements in the military; none of the regimes that fell during the collapse of Communism at the end of the last century fell because of a popular insurgency and those that were toppled by popular demonstrations, as in Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia, benefitted from the acquiescence of the governing regimes. North Korea has an even more centralized polity than either the Soviet Union or Romania, so real change will probably have to be effected there from the center.
In contrast, one of the brightest changes on the peninsula since the armistice was the conversion of South Korea from an iron-fisted dictatorship to a democracy in 1987, following massive nationwide protests over the torture of a dissident student. Few commentators realize that before the Korean War broke out, Kim Il-Sung actually had real credibility as a national hero for leading brave resistance to the Japanese occupation of Korea prior to World War II; like Mao Tse-tung, he developed his bloodthirsty madness after attaining power. Until then, he was no worse than Syngman Rhee, the corrupt and equally repressive dictator installed in the South by the U.S. shortly after World War II. [9] It is generally accepted that either Stalin prodded Pyongyang to invade the South to test American resolve, or that Kim Il-Sung initiated it on his own to force the hand of the Soviets, but there is also some persuasive evidence that Rhee manipulated the complex events leading up to the Korean War in order to force the Americans to support him.[10] All three dictators were of the ilk that would do such things and there is no reason why all three hypotheses can’t be equally true, because they’re not mutually exclusive. Now that South Korea has an authentic democracy with elected leaders responsible to the common people, the contrast between the two Koreas is starker than ever, for there is little reason to think that the South would deliberately provoke a war that might destroy its own citizens. Kim Il-Sung and Syngman Rhee had no such compunctions. Nor can the North realistically paint itself as the heroic savior of the Korean people, or as offering any sort of untried, untested ideology, or as being no worse in the human rights department than the South. Those things were debatable more than 60 years ago, but they’re not now.
The collapse of Communism in the last century was beneficial in the sense that it brought political freedom to the people of the Soviet bloc, but it also brought poverty; the brand of economic freedom the NATO allies preached to them was actually the kind of freedom that a fox demands when you close the chicken coop, or a cat seeks when the top of your fish tank is closed. Capitalists both foreign and domestic simply looted the former Soviet bloc, stealing entire industries overnight and taking away the economic security of the common people, with instantaneous, disastrous results, which many of these countries have never recovered from. Most leading indicators of public health in Russia, such as life expectancy and infant mortality, plummeted with the sudden transition to a capitalist kleptocracy. In the case of North Korea, however, this kind of looting is unlikely to happen because there’s nothing left to loot; the country is already dependent on the rest of the world for food aid, because its economic system is so inefficient, even compared to other Communist countries. The Communist Party there has tempered Marxism with its own dash of juche, or philosophy of self-reliance, which is not necessarily a bad thing in the right proportions; history has shown that nations that are excessively integrated into the international marketplace lose both their political and economic independence and become painfully vulnerable to simple changes in market conditions. A case in point is the Asian currency crisis of 1997, in which the nations of the region suffered in direct proportion to how little they regulated capitalism. Handing over one’s sovereignty to outside investors and trading partners who can place an embargo on you for political reasons are not necessarily wise policies, but juche is the opposite extreme of complete destruction of foreign trade. One of the reasons that the West, including America, have lost their industrial bases and are sinking into debt is that they are quite mad on the idol of “free trade,” but North Korea illustrates the opposite principle. China and South Korea matter much more to the power equation six decades later precisely because they have not fallen into the traps at either extreme, and have gained economic power as a result.
It actually might be in our interest to stimulate as much trade as possible with the North Koreans (military and dual use technologies excluded, of course) for two simple reasons, both of which tend to undermine Communism, first by defusing the tension it feeds upon, secondly by the sheer force of temptation. What is generally not understood about the Fall of Communism is the role played by our commercial culture, which seeped into the Soviet bloc through a hundred porous holes in the Iron Curtain; John Foster Dulles didn’t succeed in knocking down the Berlin Wall, but MTV helped pull it down. By the 1970s, Western visitors to Moscow were confronted with an unusual type of crime: muggings by Russian citizens who only wanted their blue jeans, for the prestige they brought. This is not necessarily a healthy development, for the same spiritual force that prompted inner city kids to begin shooting each other for pairs of sneakers also tempted the Soviet bloc, little by little, to give in to the consumerist philosophy of the West. Because Communism is an unnatural system, it takes an act of the will to maintain it, in the same sense that Christianity, being otherworldly, requires a concentration of purpose and focus of the will. Capitalism differs from both in that it is simply the inhuman philosophy that everyone practices when they surrender their economic ethics and begin doing whatever makes them the most money, in order to gain the greatest prestige. Many of the most violent, despicable butchers who menaced mankind in the past, such as the Mongol hordes, the conquering caliphs of early Islam and Red China, were all bought off by the lure of wealth, which led some of them to become soft and their empires to become brittle. Instead of the god of battles, they switched idols to the love of money, a false deity that America and the West have honed to a greater degree than any civilization before them. We know that some monks and nuns we now call saints also fretted most about the lure the riches of the world presented to them, while some of those we calls monsters rather than saints, such as Cardinal Richelieu, succumbed to that lure. Capitalism is unique in that it presents a temptation to both the godly and ungodly alike; it is a sin that even sinners must guard against.
As I discuss in greater detail in A Dream of Distributism, when capitalism fails, it often survives by simply collapsing into greater capitalism, by finding new classes of victims to exploit; it goes from dog eat dog to dog eat anyone, so to speak, by discarding even more economic ethics. For example, because the capitalists of the West long ago jettisoned Catholic economic commandments against speculation, usury, market cornering, charging unjust prices and paying unjust wages, they suffer from periodic financial panics, which began immediately after the Reformation for a reason. Whenever those occur, the ruling classes usually use it as an excuse to substitute all sorts of false “reforms”, such as lowering tax rates for the super-rich (thereby raising them for others), or eliminating governmental regulations like price controls that protect the poor (as usually the International Monetary Fund typically demands when they lend money to small Third World countries), or simply begin colonizing poor nations in order to sell them goods at preferential prices and raping their natural resources in return. In this sense, a shift to capitalism is not necessarily a good thing; as I discuss more deeply elsewhere, the only economically sane, moral and equal system is distributism, which is also diametrically opposed to Communism. As I dealt with in Contempt for Content: Fresh Evidence of a Stale Culture, Western capitalism is long been characterized by a particularly decadent Culture of Consumption, which has decayed in recent decades into a Culture of Contempt that no nation would be wise to adopt. There is dual trap here, first in the promise of national prosperity to leaders and second to rulers and ruled alike to sell their principles, whether good or evil, for personal gain. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was because their people were converted to an ideology of commercialism, which they were first exposed to through Western communications media of all kinds. Then the leaders were tempted to believe in our propaganda about capitalist productivity, without counting all of the countless cheats that are used to produce that illusion, from the exploitation of slaves and immigrants in the 19th Century, to the pillage of the Third World, and now expanded to the worldwide exploitation of the unborn through abortion and contraception. Once capitalism suffers another catastrophic collapse, we will probably next jettison our ethics against murder and suicide of the elderly and disabled through euthanasia. Now Russia and the Soviet bloc has the dubious freedom to swear like sailors to the accompaniment of their favorite rap artists, and all they had to do to share in our false prosperity was to throw away their ethics along with their empire. If North Korea succumbs to the temptation of glitz and glamour that our commercial culture tantalizes the world with, then East Asia will certainly be a safer and more prosperous place, but it will not be without its costs; it will have to sell out its principles, even if those principles have been twisted by evil. To accomplish this sale, it will take the same stealth as a carnival huckster or stock broker, who never appear threatening to those they fleece; Pyongyang won’t take the bait unless it feels perfectly safe, so they must be lured in. The more economic aid we provide them and the more communication we have with their citizens through any sort of media, the higher the likelihood that they will become addicted to them enough to change their ideals. Although juche obviously does not bring prosperity and in the long run undermines North Korea’s military strength, in the short term it is necessary if Pyongyang wants to maintain the freedom of action necessary to prosecute a war for survival at any given moment. It is a means of maintaining a garrison state in the short term, a way of propping up the reigning ideology of militarism, not a practical variation of Communism. As soon as some of the leadership begins to realize that its future military prowess depends on a greater degree of integration into the international marketplace, they can form a coalition with those who would like to buy Western goods that bring fleeting pleasure or status, like Abercrombie T-shirts or I-pads. An increasing proportion of our modern culture is unhealthy and is paid for through unnatural means, such as limiting family sizes, but some of it is good. It might not be a bad idea for the U.S. government to simply buy up all of the discarded Frank Sinatra, Beatles, disco and glam rock albums and cassettes languishing in library sales and basement across the nation, then ship them to North Korea as a free gift. When playwright William Congreve wrote three centuries ago that, “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,” he did not foresee that it would become so universally available and so charming as to lull the Russian bear to sleep. Perhaps the same spell can be cast on North Korea.
Communism was also a generational phenomenon, in large part because the first generations of its supporters were crusaders who were hell bent on correcting real evils, even if they often resorted to far worse evils, like the Khmer Rouge. The generation of reformers who succumbed to the philosophy of Lenin and Trotsky saw men being exploited in capitalist sweatshops; Karl Marx witnessed one of his own children die because he lacked money for medication. Once the people who saw those evils died, they were replaced with people who had to carry on their legacy without actually witnessing them first hand. A Russian citizen coming of age under Brezhnev could only imagine the oppression of the tsars, but could witness the tyranny of the Soviet state on a daily basis. By the mid-1980s, when Brezhnev and his fellow geriatric leaders began to die off, the leadership tried to reshuffle high-ranking positions among the remaining octogenarians until no one was left and they were forced, by default, to turn to Mikhail Gorbachev, a younger man with different reforms in mind. The same story essentially repeated itself in other Communist countries, even in those where Communism had no homegrown constituency and had to be imposed by force from the outside. In the Soviet Union, the process took almost 74 years, from 1917 to 1991. Communism wasn’t fully established in North Korea until after 1945, so if it follows the same time table, we’ve still got another 17 years before it collapses of its own accord. Furthermore, Communism was a very different thing from one place and time to another, even within the same countries. Marx intended a different system than Lenin put into practice, which was in turn somewhat different in reign of each head of state, from Stalin to Khrushchev to Brezhnev to Gorbachev. The libertines who helped make the Russian Revolution certainly would not have felt at home in the stuffy, repressed, conservative regime of Brezhnev. Even compared to itself, North Korea was a different thing in 1960 than in 1945, largely because of the belligerence of Kim Il-Sung. It is a vastly different thing than the mild Marxism practiced by the Sandinistas, or of Fidel Castro, or of the opposite extreme of genocidal violence perpetrated by the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas in Peru or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Several salient characteristics distinguish North Korea from its fellow Communist regimes, including its militarism and juche philosophy. The latter flows in part from the special historical circumstances, which until the 19th Century remained deliberately isolated from the rest of the world for inscrutable reasons possibly rooted in East Asian culture. Korea was nicknamed the Hermitic Kingdom, but Japan was likewise a closed society until the U.S. Navy did some gunboat diplomacy under Commodore Matthew Perry, prompting the Emperor to open the country after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. China too had been an insular empire from the time when Admiral Cheng Ho’s formidable fleet was dismantled in the early 1400s, to the early 1800s, when the British Navy sailed up their rivers with impunity in the Opium Wars. Some of North Korea’s odd behavior can be explained by the fact that it is just the last bastion of this old tendency towards insularity. And now, with the change in leadership to Kim Il-Sung’s son Kim Jong Il in 1994 and now to his grandson Kim Jong Un in 1994, it has also reverted to the old tradition of a monarchy, which is probably as far from the teachings of Marx, Lenin or Stalin as you can get.
The Velvet Revolution vs. Tiananmen Square: A Tale of Two Civilizations
A third generation of Communists is now in power in North Korea, begging the question of whether or not there is a new opportunity for lasting peace on the peninsula, or an increased chance of war. Because the country is a monarchy in all but name only, we are now forced to read the political tea leaves the same way our ancestors had to in medieval times, through the difficult task of trying to read the mind of one man. We can add up all of the trends buffeting North Korea and determine that they will influence him somehow, just as we can take an inventory of his personality traits and state that he may decide by certain reference points, but in the end it comes down to free will. This can make monarchs particularly unpredictable, for the free will of millions of men and their representatives tends to be more predictable by virtue of cancelling out all but the lowest common denominator. Being a man, Kim Jong Un has that same spark of divinity we all have to resist the world, rather than being shaped by it like a beach is by a wave, or even in the manner than an animal reacts through instinct. One can look at his girth and say that perhaps it is a sign of gluttony and inner weakness, but then again, the wisest Catholic apologist of the last century was generally recognized to be G.K. Chesterton, a morbidly corpulent cigar-smoking British journalist. The inner circle of the Communist Party and the military, however, might not be so generous and could see his youth and weight as signs of vulnerability. There are rumors swirling about that he attended college in Switzerland and is a fan of Michael Jordan, which might mean that he might be willing to open North Korea to international trade, for some Swiss Miss instant cocoa and autographed sneakers. Perhaps when he was abroad, he learned about the self-defeating sequence of events that imperial Japan’s paranoia brought upon itself, leading to an ever-expanding war with the rest of East Asia, then to Pearl Harbor and certain defeat. If so, perhaps he can recognize the self-defeating course North Korea is already on and can avert a disastrous Second Korean War by becoming their Mikhail Gorbachev or Vaclav Havel. We can say for certain that he didn’t witness first-hand the events that prompted his grandfather to join the Communists, so perhaps he will ride the wave of generational change that knocked down the Berlin Wall, rather than being drowned by it. Or perhaps he may misplay his own games of brinksmanship out of inexperience and leave a horrible legacy, a peninsula burned to a cinder. We can say for certain, however, that his approach, or that of his successors within the Communist Party or the military, shall be tempered by the will of a different dictator belonging to the inner circle of a different Politburo.
How this scenario plays out will depend in large part on the will of Xi Jinping, who is expected to succeed Hu Jintao as the president of China this fall. His ascension marks yet another yet another sea change underneath the surface of the giant of Asia since the Communist Party took power there in 1949. His father, Xi Zhongxun, fought bravely in the 1930s and 1940s alongside Mao Tse-tung against Chiang Kai-Shek’s brutal dictatorship and Japanese invaders, before Mao took power and began to outdo Chiang in brutality. He and other Long March veterans helped engineer some effective economic reforms in the early ‘60s and were repaid with imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao’s Red Guards terrorized China.[11] Deng Xiaoping initiated the reversal of many of Mao’s most radical economic policies after he took power in 1979, ushering in an entirely different brand of Chinese Communism that is now actually its exact opposite, dog-eat-dog capitalism. The political repression of the old Communist system remains, but China’s economic policies are now as right-wing and exploitative as anything practiced in the capitalist world. There is always some gap between rhetoric and reality with all human beings, especially hypocritical politicians, but this reality gap has perhaps never been wider in all of human history than in modern China, where the ruling regime practices fascism, while simultaneously lauding and teaching the contrary philosophies of Marx, Lenin and Mao. Like the leadership of North Korea, however, the Chinese Communists of old cared less about the crude version of social justice Marx’s philosophy offered and far more about the perception that it would help them build the power of their nations. Now that international political and economic conditions are suitable to building China’s national power through a mercantilist policy of foreign trade, its leaders have had no qualms about practicing the exact opposite of what they preach. Communism hasn’t survived in China; it has already fallen, although the ruling class of fascists retains the name. The rise of Xi Zhongxun’s son to power is only the latest sign of this total reversal.
The primary motive force in China’s political culture is a desire to prevent a repeat of the 100 Years of Humiliation, in which the European powers of the 19th and early 20th Century gained such political and economic influence that they became capable of carving up the country into colonies, which would have happened if the U.S. not engineered the Open Door policy in 1900 for its own interests. We can count on Xi Jinping to take any action necessary to achieve that goal, including cutting North Korea loose if it becomes a liability. The Stalinist regime is actually an embarrassing reminder of Mao’s failed economic and political policies, including the imprisonment of men like Xi Zhongxun. Today, Beijing is the only nation on the planet with any real influence over North Korea, but that is solely due to the fact that the two armies once fought together more than half a century ago. During various crises in the mid-1990s, many of those Chinese veterans clamored for military intervention against the U.S. in the event of a Second Korean War, but that appeal is likely to fade as that generation dies off. It is likewise not in its interest to have an unpredictable neighbor with every incentive to use weapons of mass destruction, or to see violence of any kind erupt on the Peninsula. Any second war there would likely be bloody, but result in reunification on terms favorable to its rival, the U.S. Despite the North’s rusting conventional capabilities and improvements in the South’s defenses, victory might require the deployment of up to half a million U.S. troops. If they were to cross the 38th Parallel to counter-attack Pyongyang, the Chinese would be right back where they were in 1950: having to decide whether or not to allow the armed forces of its main superpower rival to advance right up to their northeastern border.
During the last Korean War, China’s fledgling military was capable of driving the Americans back across the 38th Parallel and maintaining a stalemate thereafter. Thanks to China’s phenomenal economic growth since Deng, Beijing can now afford the second-best armed forces on the planet, which would also have the enormous benefit of fighting near their home territory. In a full-scale land battle near Chinese territory, where it can project the full force of its power, there is no question that China would embarrass us, no matter how many millions of men we sent to the front. Of course, it’s not in China’s interest to engage in a fight that might ignite World War III, given that the world is already China’s oyster; if it just bides its time until imperial overstretch forces the U.S. to withdraw from East Asia, as the British did a century before them under budget constraints, then it can gain mastery of the region without firing a shot. Western power in East Asia is already receding, in part because East Asia itself has beaten us in the battle for global economic power; that is why China and South Korea count so much in the power equation now, while I’ve had scant reason to mention Russia at all. The U.S. would rather see Korea reunified without violence because of staggering economic and humanitarian costs of a Second Korean War, while China’s long term interests likewise lay in a peaceful transition. South Korea would also like to avoid bloodshed for obvious reasons, since it is mainly their blood that will flow; the leadership in Pyongyang has no such scruples, yet knows that it cannot hope to win a military confrontation. Everyone has a vested interest in maintaining the appearance of a static deadlock, but beneath the surface numerous political and economic forces are upsetting the power equation, whether we like it or not. Chief among thing these are the generational changes in the Communist Parties of the North and of China, the economic decline of the North, the U.S. and Russia and concomitant rise of China and South Korea, and the declining conventional and rising unconventional military capabilities of the North. Once the logjam on the Korean Peninsula is finally broken, we can say one for thing for certain: when the dust settles, American power will be further diminished. We can’t win a fair fight against the Chinese, nor can we afford to stay in Korea much longer, since we are slowly losing our share of global economic power to China and the rest of East Asia. Barring revolutionary change and revival within the U.S., that trend will continue, in which case the best we can hope for in Korea is a graceful, peaceful exit. The best China can hope for is to remake the North into a smaller version of itself, beginning with economic reforms that will open it to foreign trade and aid but simultaneously reduce its political independence; in this case it could be rapidly transformed from a dangerous neighbor into a relatively more prosperous, stable client state, just as Burma and other parts of the region are slowly becoming. Perhaps the only way that North Korea can revive its power while maintaining the Stalinist system is to make itself an ally of convenience to China in its rivalry with the U.S. For example, if Taiwan were to declare independence, there is a very real risk of a Chinese-American war that could upset the whole global order and perhaps lead to a nuclear exchange – in which case Beijing might welcome an invasion of South Korea to tie down more American troops. North Korea has every incentive to provoke such a deadly confrontation, or to drag China into a Second Korean War through other means, just as it does to use weapons of mass destruction. Whether or not that occurs depends in large part on the free will of Kim Jong-Un, who can save his nation from inevitable defeat solely by taking the risk of instituting real political and economic reforms. If he refuses to act, the North will simply continue to rust until it caves in; if he does, he takes the risk of being overthrown, or of rejecting juche to such a degree that Pyongyang becomes a mere puppet of China. He has so little room for maneuver that North Korea is unlikely to survive long enough for his own son to succeed him.
Several factors militate against a peaceful resolution, such as the unusual militarism and hermitic cultural roots that characterize North Korean Communism. Another factor that is generally overlooked, perhaps deliberately, is the lack of a Christian culture to fall back on, which played a hidden role in tempering the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Because they grew up in nations that were once infused with Catholic virtues, even the villains there had to admit some semblance of human rights, which is an idea of exclusively Christian origin; in fact, Marxism itself is merely a distortion of the Christian ideals of social justice and economic equality. That is why men like Gorbachev did not call out the armed forces to crush the rebellions against Communist rule from 1989 to 1991; even the worst of them had too much attachment to Christian ideals, though they never realized or admitted the origin of their best values. Communism simply evaporated overnight in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other Eastern Europeans countries overnight with few shots being fired, but changed into an even more monstrous form in China under Deng, especially after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. One of the greatest changes on the Peninsula since the Korean War has been the conversion of much of South Korea to Christianity, which had a direct effect on their political culture in the pivotal year of 1987, when the Catholic Priests Association for Justice played a key role in bringing down the brutal capitalist dictatorship. North Korea is a throwback to a time in East Asian history when Christianity was regarded as a foreign cult to be relegated to the fringes of society through repression and as a result, it has no Christian ideals to appeal to. The main hope for lasting peace on the Peninsula rests in the heart and soul of one man, and the degree to which he accepted whatever Christian ideals were still floating around Switzerland when he was a student there. It also lies in the hearts of the highest ranking Communist Party officials and generals in the North, who could overthrow Kim Jong-Un, either to frustrate his reforms or to inaugurate their own. What little evidence we have suggests that they have no clue as to the state of their own country; for example, when a high ranking North Korean official took a recent helicopter trip to the South, he expressed genuine surprise at how many electric lights were on at night.[12] This is contrast the rest of the world can see merely by Googling images of the night sky. If the night sky begins to light up in the North, it will be because Christian ideals somehow seeped into the minds and hearts of the ruling class. If they do not, then one day Pyongyang’s armed forces may put out the lights in the South. Just as Christian ideals brought about the bloodless Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the lack of them led to the bloody Tiananmen Square Massacre in China, so too will religion and culture act as the hidden determinant of North Korea’s end. Either we will have Christianity to thank for a peaceful reunification, or the lack of it will lead Pyongyang to “go postal” and take out hundreds of thousands of lives on its way out. Whether the hard way or the easy way, we will learn new appreciation for religion of love.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to psychology to economics since age 9.
[2] P. 12, Cordesman, Anthony H. and Hammond, Robert, 2011, The Military Balance in Asia: 1990-2011, A Quantitative Analysis. Center for Strategic and International Sutides (CSIS) Burke Chair in Strategy: Washington, D.C. The report is available at this website. Cordesman and Hammond in turn cite International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2011, The Military Balance 2011. Routledge: London. The report is available at the IISS website.
[4] See the Wikipedia entry on the Korean People’s Navy and Investigation Result on the Sinking of ROKS "Cheonan" by the The Joint Civilian-Military Investigation Group, published May 20, 2010, which is available at this webpage.
[5] See The Conventional Balance on the North Korean Peninsula, published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
[6] Kennedy, Paul, 1987, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. Vintage Books: New York.
[7] Hyeong-nam , Bhang, 2011, “Severe deforestation in N. Korea” in The Dong A-Ilbo, Nov. 26, 2011. The report is available at this webpage.
[8] These figures are cited at the CIA World Factbook, which has a webpage on the North here and on the South here.
[9] The definitive work on the subject is Cumings, Bruce, 1981, The Origins of the Korean War, Volume One. Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey.
[10] For the most popular viewpoint, see Simmons, 1975, Robert S., The Strained Alliance: Peking, Pyongyang, Moscow and the Politics of the Korean Civil War. The Free Press: New York; Rees, David, 1964, Korea: The Limited War St. Martin's Press: New York; and Middleton, Harry J., 1965, The Compact History of the Korean War Hawthorn Books, Inc.: New York. For the North Korean-centric hypothesis, see Alexander, Bevin, 1986, Korea: The First War We Lost. Hippocrene Books: New York. For the Rhee hypothesis, see Stone, I.F., 1952, The Hidden History of the Korean War. Monthly Review Press: New York.
[11] Higgins, Andrew, 2012, "Xi Jinping, Set to Become China's Next Leader, Father's Past is Sensitive," published Feb. 13, 2012 in The Washington Post online edition.
[12] Hyeong-nam , Bhang, 2011, “Severe deforestation in N. Korea” in The Dong A-Ilbo, Nov. 26, 2011. The report is available at this webpage.
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