From Posturing to Credibility

North Korea’s leader is challenging the United States. Is he crazy? No, the nation is simply following its own logic. Kim Jong Un is gaining the respect of the North Korean people as well as North Korea’s upper echelons. All he lacks is an end to international tensions, a peace treaty with the United States and a little patience.

For weeks, North Korea’s leaders have been threatening to go to war with its obviously far superior military adversary, the United States of America. The world immediately branded such talk as irrational, but is that really the case? That’s not a rhetorical question; in the end, a solution to the problem and the prevention of a war both depend on people understanding what motivates both sides. To put it plainly, there is absolutely no reason to conclude that Kim Jong Un and his government are insane or uninformed. The way they’re going about achieving their goals may be unconventional — to put it politely — but that in itself is not in any way a sign of stupidity.

Like every ruler, Kim Jong Un wants to stay in power. To do so, he needs support from those under him. That can be accomplished by force, and North Korea’s system does this with no regard for human rights. Still, it would be wrong to assume that North Koreans wait hopefully for liberation by Western powers. They want improvement in their daily lives, peace, security, upward mobility opportunities, respect, and a future for themselves and their children. But they don’t necessarily want it all brought to them from the outside. They want to accomplish it themselves, in their own way and at their own pace.

Kim Jong Un has promised them all that and did so immediately after he assumed power at the end of December 2011, in addition to symbolic gestures such as publicly rebuking slacking officials, distributing foodstuffs and opening one recreational park after another — the proverbial bread and circuses — all of which he also had promised. During my two previous visits in 2012, I was able to see personally that more and more Koreans believe in their new leader, an unknown quantity up to that point.

Why Is North Korea Prohibited from Doing as Everyone Else Does?

But promises also have the disadvantage of having to be kept unless one wants to risk all future credibility. That’s where a dramatic national security crisis comes in handy. No patriotic North Korean would want to have doubts about the national leader in such a situation. The byword, then, is “solidarity.” The new ruler gains national stature that he can later put to good use. The international condemnation of North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests is seen as a two-faced insult. Why is North Korea prohibited from doing something everyone else is permitted to do?

U.S. Reaction to North Korea — Tit for Tat

In order to stay in power, Kim also needs to rein in those outsiders who could wrest power from him. The support of the outside world would be a welcome bonus to him, but he’s content for now just to be left alone. He knows that to be considered harmless is dangerous. He has known that since the developments in Libya at the latest.

Kim Jong Un wants to secure permanent independence for his nation: independence from the United States, from China, from South Korea. All of them are, in one way or another, a threat to him. In many respects, they are also superior to North Korea. Nuclear weapons are a terrible but highly effective deterrent, so North Korea isn’t likely to give them up, at least not in the short term. On the contrary, its military will continue developing and refining them until there’s no longer any doubt that North Korea not only possesses them but that they are also effective.

A Misunderstanding Could Ignite a War that Nobody Wants

What’s in store in the future? The only real wild card in this game is the unforeseen event that triggers a war no one wants. Apart from that, North Korea provided its solution to the problem a week ago on Sunday when it announced that they would not use nuclear weapons except in the event it is itself attacked by a nuclear power. That, and his stated support for nuclear nonproliferation. That’s the whole deal and the West needs to come to terms with that.

As soon as Kim Jong Un feels secure from outside or domestic attack, economic reform will follow. Otherwise, he will find it impossible to make the chronically inefficient socialist economic system productive enough to produce the growth necessary for improvement. If he actually has lived in Europe, that should already be clear to him, just as one visit to China would also show. It wouldn’t even have to be to Shanghai; one visit to the border city of Dandong just across the Yalu River would be convincing enough.

Kim Jong Un doesn’t want to be a Korean Gorbachev or, God forbid, Ceausescu. His preference would be a Korean Deng Xiaoping with perhaps a bit of Park Chung Hee, the South Korean military dictator who took his country from the poorhouse to a booming economy in 20 years, thrown into the mixture as well. South Korea’s current president is Park’s daughter, so who can tell?

The Kaesong Gamble

Special economic zones have played an important role in China. Could they serve as a model for North Korea? Perhaps. But the Kaesong industrial zone is currently proving to be a double edged sword. During my three visits to the zone, I could scarcely believe North Korea’s leadership would dare undertake such a gamble. Fifty thousand young North Korean women in daily contact with South Korean managers in a hyper-modern, pristine, brightly lit workspace with which the usual drab industrial environment couldn’t hope to compete. An ideological nightmare, last but not least because it’s here that those nasty capitalists make their profits.

How does one explain something like that? Despite the schooling and constant monitoring, what do these girls tell their parents, families and friends? And that for the slightly less than $100 million the zone brings in annually? That’s a lot of money, but it isn’t the world. North Korean foreign trade with China amounts to $6 billion annually. The blockade of Kaesong, therefore, is probably more injurious to the South Korean companies that had to close down their operations due to high labor costs and move North.

The real embryonic harbingers of change are primarily the numerous joint ventures with China. They’re probably getting a hard lesson in capitalism from the ruthless Chinese, but they are at least not waiting for possible national reunification to learn them. South Korea will soon have to give up the notion of possessing a superior knowledge of the game rules by some specific date in the future as the West allowed in Germany’s case.

In countless training sessions, the North Koreans have learned market economy theory from Europeans like me. The on-the-job training in China is in full swing. North Korea’s new premier, Pak Pong Ju, is a reformer. Kim Jong Un is young and ambitious and obviously not afraid to take risks. He’s gaining the respect of his people and the country’s elites right now. The only thing he needs now is an end to the tensions, a peace treaty with the United States and some patience. The rest will happen automatically.