Archive for August, 2006
Posted by joshua on August 31, 2006 at 10:37 am · Filed under Geopolitics, An Alliance?, Korean Politics, Six-Party Talks, Kim Jong Il, WMD, Japan & Korea, China & Korea, NK Military, Washington Views, Kremlinology, U.S. & Korea
[Update 2: Thanks to the reader who pointed out that I had accidentally disabled the comments! That’s fixed now; please submit any questions or comments you have.]
[Update: This post will “stick” at the top of the page for a couple of days; scroll down for new entries.]
Chuck Downs is an author, independent consultant, and former Pentagon official who frequently appears on television news programs to discuss North Korea policy. He has held a number of important positions in government during his career, including Deputy Director for Regional Affairs and Congressional Relations in the Pentagon’s East Asia office and Assistant Director of the Office of Foreign Military Rights Affairs, where he was deeply involved in the planning and negotiation of key overseas basing agreements with foreign governments. He later served as Senior Defense and Foreign Policy Advisor to the House Policy Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. He retired from government service in 2000.
Since his retirement, Mr. Downs has served as a Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Public Policy, where he chaired the North Korea Working Group, as a fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies, and the former Associate Director of the Asian Studies Program at the American Enterprise Institute. He currently serves on the board of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the North Korean Freedom Coalition. He co-wrote Crisis in the Taiwan Strait with Former U.S. Ambassador to Korea and China, James Lilley. He is best known as the author of Over the Line: North Korea’s Negotiating Strategy, which has also been published in Korean and Japanese. This quotation should give you a general idea of how Mr. Downs views his subject:
“North Korea does not enter into negotiations because it seeks agreements. Its objective is to gain concessions and benefits merely as a result of consenting to talk.” He believes not only that the deliberate policies of the Pyongyang government have claimed more than 500,000 lives each year since 1995 [the article was published in 2000], but that in many ways the regime is better off today than it has been at almost any time in the past. “It has obtained political recognition, security assurances and significant economic assistance -even from its former enemies. Through its negotiating strategy, the North Korean leadership has avoided political and economic collapse time and again during the past five decades.” [….] “Contrary to the hopes of the administration, North Korea has used these years to develop a more threatening military posture, not less.”
Our thanks to Mr. Downs for agreeing to this interview. He has also agreed to answer readers’ questions in the comments below. As always, I reserve the right to moderate comments.
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Q: There have been some rumors among Korea bloggers that in October, after the next talks on the future of the alliance, that an accelerated downsizing or even a full U.S. withdrawal from Korea could be announced. Have you heard those rumors? Do you think there’s anything to them?
A: I wouldn’t call them rumors. For a long time, there have been discussions between both countries on troop deployments. South Korea has resisted a fast timetable of reductions, but Secretary Rumsfeld wants these things to happen on a faster timetable. That’s what he has always said. I think Rumsfeld and his people still want to proceed on that accelerated path. So this is not a new push by Rumsfeld. Perhaps the reductions have recently become even more desirable from the point of view of the Pentagon.
It’s clear that the SK government wants to give lip service to the alliance, but its point of view is at odds with the basic rationale for the alliance. You can’t have an alliance when one side tries to portray the other as an oppressive presence. When this develops, as it did in the Philippines, there is no alternative but to accelerate the reduction in the American presence. The government in South Korea is now limiting us in ways that reduce our capabilities and change our obligations in a legal sense. In such situations, the U.S. tends to respond extremely quickly. When the host government isn’t stridently calling for us to stay and address a common threat, it’s hard for us to justify continuing the troop presence. No one ever thought we’d leave the Philippines, either, but our presence is always based on how the host country views our forces. If the host country starts doing things like changing the basic command structure, it’s a fundamental shift in the way the alliance works. You will hear the U.S. side say that it will move quickly to do what the host government wants. You can’t do something good for the host government that the host doesn’t recognize as a good thing. We are not the Soviets and this isn’t the Warsaw Pact. We are not a colonial power. If the host country doesn’t want us there, we won’t stay.
Now, I don’t think this means a pull-out from Korea completely, but if we hear the South Korean government say that we are there to work for our own interests, but not theirs, then we can be out in a number of months.
When you are in a foreign country, that country is in charge. We never stay in a foreign country against that country’s will — ever. The Korean pro-U.S. right thinks we should be pushing against the Roh government, for arrangements that favor the U.S. That’s all fine, but it doesn’t work that way. We do what the government in place wants done. It’s the task of the Pro-Americans in South Korea to get their government to promote a strong alliance and arrangements that favor one. We won’t do something against their government’s objectives.
Q: How do you think the North Korean missile tests affected the Administration’s view of the North Korean regime?
A: I think they made the administration realize that – some of this was surprising – how far South Korea’s view had diverged from our view of how to deal with the North Korean threat.
The other thing that happened was it proved how cooperative the Chinese can be in undertaking stringent measures against North Korea when they’re persuaded that it’s in their interests to do so. In spite of some troubling rhetoric from China, they voted for a strong condemnation of North Korea’s program in the the U.N. resolution, and they took strong action to limit North Korean access to the Bank of China. The South Korean view was that pressure and the resolution were not helpful.
The third interesting development from the missile tests was the strong expression of anti-Japanese sentiment by the South Korean government. The U.S. government worked out a clever way to encourage Japan to carry the diplomatic burden at the UN. Although North Korea threatens South Korea more directly, Japan voiced the strongest protest against North Korea. This protected South Korea from having to lead the charge against North Korea. Japan was willing to do that in the interest of protecting itself. Normally, in the past, South Korea would have been in the position of leading the charge. At the time, we welcomed having Japan take the leading role, because we knew that South Korea wanted, on some level, to have relatively cordial relations with North Korea. We tend to assume that in reality, South Korea recognizes the threat from North Korea, and wanted Japan to play a leading role in formulating a strong international response. But the Roh Moo Hyun government turned on Japan, instead of criticizing North Korea. That was a completely unfortunate turn of events.
Q: Do you think the Sunshine Policy is dead?
A: Roh Moo Hyun and his followers are going to continue trying to carry out the Sunshine Policy every chance they have. But I think the South Korean public is beginning to be very tired of funding a country that still wants to annihilate or absorb South Korea. Its followers are still in power and still running the executive branch in South Korea, so the Sunshine Policy is not dead
yet. But it has less popular support, and eventually, I think it will die because of a lack of popular support.
Q: We’ve heard various reports that China has cut off fuel to the North, or reduced aid or trade. How much do you believe those reports?
A: I don’t have any independent way of confirming that. Sometimes, people talk about things that happened ages ago as if they were happening today. In March of 2003, we know that China shut off North Korea’s supply of fuel, supposedly for technical reasons. I don’t know if that has happened again. But a very effective measure taken by China was to deny North Korea access to the Bank of China.
Q: Do you think China’s view of the North Korean regime has changed since the missile tests?
A: The missile tests per se didn’t change their views, but they strengthened the arguments of people who take a more pragmatist view. Various Chinese officials have already staked out their positions on North Korea. You have an older group, sentimentalists, who tend to see “fraternal” North Korea from the perspective of the Korean War and China’s support for North Korea then. Then you have younger technocrats, pragmatists, who realize that what North Korea is doing is dangerous to China’s own interests.
The missile tests strengthened people on the pragmatist side. Chinese attempts to moderate North Korea’s positions, which failed miserably, hardened Chinese Chinese views about North Korea’s actions.
Q: We’ve discussed all of these effects from the missile tests in July. So what would motivate Kim Jong Il to do something that’s damaged his interests so much?
A: He probably thinks it has not damaged his interests. Part of the answer may involve domestic North Korean matters we don’t know anything about. It may have been necessary for Kim Jong Il to provide his military with a type of exercise — something to challenge their loyalty, to keep them busy. He knows that his military cultivates contacts with Chinese military officers. Kim Jong Il was asking his military to do something in open defiance of Chinese interests. They failed on the Taepodong test, and that was an embarrassment. The SCUD and No-Dong launches, on the other hand, were a demonstration of how effectively those missile forces work. They were an impressive show of handling of mid-range missiles from mobile launchers in different parts of country. The entire emphasis was on loyalty of the military to Kim Jong Il. I suspect that this may be followed by executions of some whose loyalty was in doubt. It may also be followed by more tests.
Q: We’re all speculating about whether Kim Jong Il will test a nuclear weapon. Would you care to venture your own guess?
A: It seems as though a nuclear test would be the capstone of a strategy of ratcheting up pressure against the United States. The setback was that the Taepodong was a major failure. Kim Jong Il might hold off to prove that he has good long-range Taepodong capabilities first. Another thing you have to consider, in the context of that embarrassing failure, is what would it be like to suffer the embarrassment of a bad nuclear test? Kim Jong-il has to be considerably concerned about the failure that may result from his bravado.
In terms of traditional strategy, I expect North Korea to go through what appear to be preparations for a nuclear test. I’d expect them to go through the motions of preparing to conduct a nuclear test without actually doing it, perhaps for as long as two years. If he goes through with it within the next few weeks, that might be an indicator that he has something worse in mind down the road. The traditional way for North Korea to serve its interests is to threaten to test without actually testing, so it creates an atmosphere of concern and fear and leverage about the potential test. There can be a lot of back-and-forth discussion about whether they have a right to conduct a test, how they want to join the nuclear powers like India and Pakistan, and about their need for deterrent forces. We’ll also hear their rationalization that this is justified by a fairly small U.S. and ROK military exercise called Ulchi Focus Lens [see Richardson’s link here — Joshua]. They can get lots of play out of the threat of a nuclear test. They can make this go on for many months, maybe a year.
Q: Recently, the South Korean Foreign Minister met with his Chinese counterpart, and the two jointly called on North Korea not to test a nuclear weapon. Would you agree that the South Korean and Chinese positions on North Korea are considerably closer than those of South Korea and the United States?
A: It’s possible, and the South Koreans may see it that way, but I’m not sure the Chinese see it that way. It’s easy to call on North Korea not to test a nuclear weapon. I wouldn’t apply a great deal of significance to that, certainly not as much as South Korean officials do.
Q: To what extent is it really accurate to call South Korea an ally today?
A: Although the current trend seems to be moving very quickly toward a diminishment of the alliance, it has been such a strong alliance over the years that there’s still a significant amount left to it, even despite the approach Roh Moo-Hyun has taken. Roh is certainly aware of other benefits of the alliance, other than deterrence of North Korea, such as regional and global security, and South Korean participation in the Middle East, which is very important. Aspects of that could continue even without the threat from North Korea, even if one party in the alliance thought there was no North Korean threat. Something will be left of this alliance even if the North Korean factor is taken out of the equation.
Q: How much chance do you think there is of us agreeing to CVID with North Korea before this Administration ends?
A: Very close to zero.
Q: Does the Bush Administration, through diplomacy or otherwise, still have time to accomplish anything?
A: Something is accomplished by merely trying to pursue an objective in this kind of international policy. I’m not sure that I’d consider an agreement with North Korea a good accomplishment. A better accomplishment would be cutting all of North Korea’s means of support from outside governments and its banking operations. There is a lot that can be accomplished, even though I think an agreement with North Korea is unlikely.
Q: Do you think there are elements in the Administration so desperate for a deal that they would take one that fails to attain our objectives?
A: Whatever those elements may be, they’re not in the White House. I don’t think this White House would conclude a bad deal with North Korea.
Q: From where I sit, Kim Jong Il is just continuing to build bombs and refuse to negotiate in good faith. One possible explanation for this is that we lack the power to deter him: South Korea won’t go along with us, our Army is fighting two ground wars, and China – at least as I see it – won’t cut off his supplies. Realistically, what military options at our disposal can deter Kim Jong Il from dragging things out forever?
A: I think we are deterring him now from many things. He’d be in Seoul now, with a government much more like his, if we were not already deterring him. We are already succeeding at deterrence. It’s worth remembering that. I wouldn’t give up on the possibility that we will continue to deter with much of the same force we’ve been using for last 60 years. The Bush Administration has constrained his options more on illicit activities and banking—that’s an achievement.
It’s true that we’re deterred from taking certain military actions, but I’m not sure we’d want to take the kind of military action we’ve been kept from taking. After all, we didn’t attack North Korea when South Korean governments wanted a more hostile policy toward North Korea. It’s true that South Korea now tends to stay our hand, but I’m not sure we’d want to pursue hostile action anyway. Iraq also restrains our options, but from doing something we’d prefer not to do anyway.
Q: What, then, should we be doing to influence events in North Korea? I speak here not just of the regime itself and its decisions.
A: We should be trying to influence the regime and its decisions, trying to embarrass the regime with the truth every time we get a change. We should be trying to learn as much as we can about connections between the North Korean military and the Chinese military. We should encourage China to build contacts on a personal or local level to try to influence better behavior by the government in Pyongyang. Success lies in influencing China through the U.S.-China relationship, toward loosening its bonds with the North Korean regime.
Q: To what extend should we be trying to reach out to the North Korean people?
A: I think they listen to our radio broadcasts. Through word of mouth, they probably know more than we suspect. We forget that, throughout history, huge mass movements have happened in countries without loudspeakers or telephones. It’s possible to have mass movements form based on what people hear from their neighbors. We could see a situation develop in North Korea where the people begin to move toward the border, and begin to challenge the military. At that point, the military would have to decide whether it wanted to maintain its loyalty to the people of North Korea, or to Kim Jong Il. This is the scenario that Kim Jong Il finds the most frightening.
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A few notes on how this interview was conducted. I interviewed Mr. Downs telephonically, typed notes of the conversation, and later reworked those notes into grammatical sentences that were as faithful as possible to Mr. Downs’s own words. I then forwarded that text to Mr. Downs for his approval and adoption, at which time he had the opportunity to edit his responses for accuracy. Newspapers don’t ordinarily do this, but having had the experience of being misquoted by newspapers, and given the reluctance of most people to allow themselves to be recorded, this is the format both the interviewees and I tend to prefer. In this case, Mr. Downs’s edits did not significantly change the meanings of his responses and were primarily edits for clarity and flow.
Posted by joshua on August 29, 2006 at 8:23 pm · Filed under Technology, North Korea, Famine & Food Aid, Korean Society, NK Military
Update: Scroll down and tell me I didn’t find what I think I found.
Yes, I had spent many hours “flying” over North Korea with Google Earth, but it took this article to tip me off to an entire online community of amateur photo intel analysts. The L.A. Times reports:
An intrepid German poster named “wonders” has flagged more than 332 sites of interest. Most are military — the vast air defenses ringing Pyongyang, the artillery along the demilitarized zone, the Yongbyon nuclear facilities, tunnels, caves and weird earthworks. He’s labeled a gigantic buried half-cylinder as “Underground parking garage — not!” and an ominous-looking lump as a “Not too friendly looking thing.”
[….]
Of course we know the ugly facts about North Korea — in the abstract: That it’s one of the poorest, most highly militarized nations in the world, with a malnourished population and a thirst for nukes. That it sends children of the disloyal to be worked to death in camps. That visible earthworks are most likely telltale signs of vast underground cities it has dug to hide its military facilities from Western spy satellites.
But we haven’t been able to see it for ourselves. Now Korean War veterans in Peoria or cyber geeks in Hong Kong can peer down upon the repressive state from their living rooms, for kicks.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by joshua on August 29, 2006 at 10:49 am · Filed under Technology
The largest unmanned aircraft to rely solely on hydrogen fuel has flown successfully during tests. The plane, with a 22-foot-wingspan, is powered by a fuel-cell system that generates 500-watts—equal to five bright light bulbs. [link]
Posted by joshua on August 29, 2006 at 8:07 am · Filed under Human Rights, Refugees, Activism
From the Korea Herald:
About 30 North Korean defectors are seeking asylum in the United States, Radio Free Asia quoted a mission leader working with refugees as saying yesterday.
In an interview with the Wasington-based news channel, Rev. Cheon Ki-won of Durihana Mission said, “A second group of North Korean defectors will soon be entering the United States following the first six in May.”
Cheon did not specify the identities of the defectors or their current whereabouts.
“The number of (N.K. defectors) will be around 25 to 30,” Cheon said. He said he was not sure whether they would be arriving in the United States together or separately.
Posted by joshua on August 29, 2006 at 7:57 am · Filed under NK Economics, Counterfeiting, Drugs & N Korea, Money Laundering
From the AP:
The financial noose is tightening around North Korea as international banks sever ties with the nation - a move championed by the United States, a top Treasury Department official says.
[….]
“There is sort of a voluntary coalition of financial institutions saying that they don’t want to handle this business anymore and that is causing financial isolation for the government of North Korea,” Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in an interview Monday with The Associated Press.
“They don’t want to be the banker for someone who’s engaged in crime, as the North Korean government is,” he said.
Banks in Singapore, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong and Mongolia are opting not to do business with North Korea, Levey said.
“Is there a complete cutoff, so that they can’t get banking anywhere? No, that’s not the case, but they’re having a very difficult time finding banking services,” he said. “You’re seeing a near complete isolation.”
Remember — the feds brought Al Capone down with a tax evasion charge.
Posted by joshua on August 28, 2006 at 8:25 pm · Filed under China, Human Rights, China & Korea, Refugees, Activism
A missionary who was imprisoned for 15 months after trying to aid North Korean refugees in China has returned home to a greeting of balloons and flowers from delighted relatives and friends.
Wearing a baseball hat and dark sunglasses Monday night on his arrival at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the Rev. Phillip Jun Buck, 68, said returning home was like being in a “dream state.”
A son, Jamin Yoon, 35, holding flowers as his father was swarmed by reporters, said his father’s attire was chosen to shield his appearance in case the longtime evangelist decided to try to go back to China for more missionary work.
I had heard that he would be freed, decided not to write anything until I heard something more definite. Grant Montgomery has the story.
Update: Pastor Buck describes his captivity:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by joshua on August 28, 2006 at 8:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized, WTF?
Trey Parker and Matt Stone claim that Marines forced Saddam Hussein to watch the “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.”
How I have longed for this. Please, God, let it be true.
I hope readers will join me in officially writing off anyone in the Human Rights Industry who shows outrage over this, but had no comments or questions about this, this, or this.
Posted by joshua on August 28, 2006 at 4:14 pm · Filed under Counterfeiting, Money Laundering
If you don’t know the background, start here. One of the Chinese gangsters is apparently cooperating, and went to court yesterday:
A Californian man indicted on charges of smuggling counterfeit dollars into the U.S. testified at his trial that the high-quality counterfeit US$100 bills or “supernotes” were manufactured in North Korea, the National Intelligence Service said Monday. The NIS reported to the National Assembly’s Intelligence Committee that the man admitted conspiracy to smuggle the supernotes and admitted where the phony bills were made.
eh … eh … eh … RICO! Excuse me.
Posted by joshua on August 28, 2006 at 4:03 pm · Filed under Korean Politics, Human Rights
Well, well, look who the new “centrist” candidate, Goh Kun, invited to his big political coming-out day:
The group’s inaugural meeting was held at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry building yesterday. A list of 106 promoters of the group included mostly scholars and prominent figures, including former Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun, who is now a professor at Ewha Womans University, and theater actress Park Jung-ja. Mr. Goh said the group did not include active politicians.
Yes, that Jeong Se-hyun. Goh Kun earned a reputation for being a relative adult after Roh Moo-Hyun was briefly impeached. Of course, it’s pretty easy to look like an adult standing next to Roh, but hard to look like one when you’ve invited Mister Pearls-for-a-Pig himself to your smoke-filled room. This means that we could look forward to five more years of South Korea extending a “rot in hell” policy to the North Korean people if Goh wins in 2007. Et tu, Goh.
Posted by joshua on August 28, 2006 at 12:00 am · Filed under An Alliance?, Washington Views, U.S. Military, U.S. & Korea, ROK Military
A big welcome to the new readers from Gateway Pundit, and as always, many thanks to Jim for his link and his support.
Update: Yonhap reports that “60 former defense ministers, chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Army, Air Force and Navy chiefs” will step forward to oppose the command transfer. They want a word with Roh before he visits the White House next month. The Washington Post picks up the story, and gets it about right:
Roh’s populist rhetoric aside, what has really scared the gaggle of retired generals are indications that the Pentagon may be just as eager to see the switch.
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Next Thursday, we’ll find out whether the new anti-ballistic interceptors will ever be able to shoot down a Taepodong, should the need or excuse arise. Yesterday, Donald Rumsfeld stopped by the system’s nerve center at Ft. Greely, Alaska, I suppose to offer gentle, comforting words, hand out cocoa with marshmallows, and help everyone to relax and think about fluffy bunnies:
[O]n Thursday an interceptor based at a second launch site, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., is scheduled to be tested against a target missile launched into the Pacific from Alaska’s Kodiak Island. That will be the first full-up test of the latest version of the interceptor and its “kill vehicle,” a device attached to the nose of the interceptor. Once it separates from the interceptor’s three-stage booster, the “kill vehicle” is designed to use its own propulsion system and optical sensors to lock onto its target and, by ramming into it at high speed, obliterate the warhead and any payload it might carry.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by joshua on August 26, 2006 at 11:03 pm · Filed under Kim Jong Il, WMD, Kremlinology
A big welcome to the new readers from Gateway Pundit, and as always, many thanks to Jim for his link and his support.
All of us who wonder why Kim Jong Il has does some of the bone-headed things he’s done lately have shared a few common assumptions about him as we engaged in this speculative parlor game of ours:
* He is sane, rational, calculating, and reasonably well informed about his foes’ thought processes (some, however, would also argue that Kim is temperamental and impulsive, and therefore prone to emotional, irrational actions).
* He seeks to isolate his people. He knows that he could not withstand comparison to other systems of government, must prevent such comparisons at all costs, and is therefore unwilling to open his economy to the outside world (some believe that trade and aid can coax North Korea out of its isolation, although that view is largely discredited by recent events).
* Somewhat paradoxically, he needs controlled commerce with, and aid from, other countries to provide his regime with income to feed soldiers, pay perks, and keep the machinery of repression running (there is, of course, much disagreement about just how much trade Kim Jong Il will tolerate, and what effect it will have on North Korea’s political system).
* He created this crisis to achieve political or diplomatic advantages (some — and count me in here — think he means to do this by acquiring nukes; others think he just wants the better deal that we’ve stubbornly refused to give him).
* Finally, we’re all assuming that he’s the one calling the shots, and no evidence of which I’m aware seriously suggests otherwise.
But with Kim Jong Il openly threatening to test a nuclear weapon, you have to question how he can rationally expect to do anything but make his own predicament much worse. That’s causing me to reevaluate my assumptions. None of the conventional theories, all of which impute rational and calculating motives and plans to him, makes much more sense than the Chewbacca Defense. Either our assumptions are wrong, or we’re all analyzing this too rationally.
Extortion
This is the conventional wisdom. Most observers think Kim Jong Il’s motive is extortion; some are willing to pay, while others aren’t. The Chosun Ilbo echoes the conventional wisdom, that this is simple extortion:
If the North goes through with the test, the objective must be to goad the U.S. into coming to bilateral negotiations. Since its declaration in February last year that it is a nuclear power and its missile tests last month proved fruitless, the North is now monkeying around with a more powerful card.
I don’t agree with that, because it should be obvious enough that nuclear extortion won’t accomplish North Korea’s imputed aid-seeking goals. The United States, Japan, and China would only punish North Korea for it, and South Korea would give the North anything it wants just for the asking anyway. This isn’t lost on the Chosun Ilbo, either. The reaction to the missile launches, after all, was the death of the Sunshine policy, a sharp downturn in diplomatic (and possibly economic) relations with China, and a sharply harder line by Japan, which is cooperating with the United States to impose some supposedly dreadful economic sanctions.
What’s more, if Kim Jong Il just wants a better deal, why did he turn down the deal of a lifetime? It’s hard to see how a rational North Korean government could reject a deal so good that one influential Republican staffer in Congress declared it dead on arrival. If Kim Jong Il is rational and aware of his foes’ thought processes, he can’t expect that a nuke test (or threats of a nuke test) will get him aid, benefits, trade, or recognition.
“Barrel of a Gun”
I proposed my own “Barrel of a Gun” theory, but its predictive power is inconclusive at best. That theory is named after North Korea’s most popular political novel, generously provided to me by Oranckay when we met last April in Seoul. The idea is that the missile tests were the equivalent of a ransom note to prove to the North Korean people that Kim Jong Il is strong when in fact he was about to ask for more aid.
Kim has in fact indicated his willingness to accept South Korean aid, but the unexpected severity of the floods just weeks after the missile launch make it more difficult to associate that request with a pre-existing strategy (although the North was already headed for severe food shortages). The launches had the effect of forcing even South Korea to promise to reduce aid (for what that’s worth, which isn’t much). In the end, my theory suffers from the same problem as all the rest of them — it’s already having too many of the wrong effects for any rational actor to continue pursuing it.
Strategic Disengagement
Richardson’s theory of “strategic disengagement,” that the North Koreans are doing this to withdraw from the world and keep their people isolated, makes sense on several levels. In fact, the North Koreans do desperately need to preserve a psychological state of war with the outside world to justify the isolation of the population. Were the people to find out how the other half lives, well, take Andrei Lankov’s word for that. It looks like Richardson’s side of the debate has picked up a new (ex-North Korean?) adherent at the Daily NK:
The Kim Jong Il regime, which already lost its ability to self-reliance, is in a dilemma as to whether it keeps the three survival conditions or weakens the conditions through transaction with the outside community. To Kim Jong Il, relationship from outside is a double-edged sword. In order to breakthrough the deadlock, Kim developed a ‘cooling strategy.’ He cools down the external relationship, periodically, by launching missiles and developing nuclear weapons.
Expected effect of ‘cooling strategy’ includes;
1. The regime is able to gain more stable and safe benefit from cooling strategy than from normal relationship with the outside. Normal economic transaction with the international community would threaten the regime’s tight control over its people and weaken the isolationism.
2. The cooling strategy increases the level of tension and fear among the North Korean public. And therefore popular control becomes more effective. Kim Jong Il learned this from decades of his experience.
3. Kim Jong Il’s hawkish stance against the international community through ‘cooling strategy’ creates a defiant image of him, so firm control over North Korean military can be maintained.
I have some problems with this theory, too, however. First, it assumes that the North Koreans are intentionally cracking a walnut with a sledge hammer. Kim Jong Il is already in complete control of business and other exchanges with this country now. Witness the “Iron Ajumma” episode with Hyundai Asan if you doubt his ability to reduce his economic ties with the outside world without paying a diplomatic price. To control its interaction with the outside world, he need only announce that he is renegotiating the contracts on its own terms.
What of Kim’s profitable “legitimate” trade, such as the Kaesong Industrial Park, or Kumgang Mountain? Why would Kim jeopardize that? After the July missile tests, U.N. Resolution 1695 demanded that all states be “vigilant” about funds they send to the North, and how they’re spent. The benefits of these ventures may not be what we thought them to be, however. Our Treasury Department now says that cigarette counterfeiting is now North Korea’s largest source of forex. Nor are those ventures free of political cost, as I noted here:
In the end, however, the cultural isolation of Kaesong’s hand-picked workers will fail. The workers will eventually take note of the health and prosperity of their southern counterparts, and they will talk about it. And when the regime’s security forces find out, they will do what they did after learning that some members of the nation’s cheerleading squad talked about what they saw in Busan. Kaesong itself will not be immune to that reaction. That means that predictions of explosive growth at Kaesong will prove premature, and that Kaesong will be fortunate to remain what it is now: a small, carefully sealed cash cow for Kim Jong Il’s regime.
Kim could conclude that Kaseong creates more domestic political trouble than it’s worth to him financially. If its main purpose was really sudpolitik, the Uri Party’s abyssimal polling and its beating in recent elections could have convinced a rational actor that the political game was pretty much up, at least as it concerned electoral politics. That would suggest that Kim will shift toward subversion through radical labor and student groups.
The biggest problem I have with the theory is that Kim’s means of isolating himself are also causing the United States to get serious about cutting off Kim Jong Il’s foreign bank accounts, from which his largest sources of external funds come. It’s also reducing the incentive for nations hosting those accounts to resist the U.S. efforts to isolate him. The loss of those accounts threatens the funding that sustains the regime, and which comes from enterprises (lawful and otherwise) in which he has invested much time and money. Why jeopardize them, since they’re (1) profitable, (2) probably essential, and (3) no threat to the regime’s self-imposed isolation? The effect of losing those sources of income would be to increase North Korea’s dependence on China, which has never seemed more displeased with North Korea, to the point of reportedly reducing North Korea’s fuel supply. Doesn’t North Korea depend on Chinese fuel? Maybe not, if you put any credence on this report, or this one. Still, I doubt that Iran, Venezuela, and other arms clients would support Kim Jong Il if he lost both his Chinese patronage and his access to the global banking system.
The Scott Evil Theory
If rational explanations fail, we should look for irrational ones. Last month, James posted a piece called “Power Maddens, Absolute Power Maddens Absolutely?,” linking to a piece by Jay Homnick in The American Spectator. The executive summary is that perhaps we have overestimated Kim Jong Il’s propensity to act rationally. After all, we are talking about a man who Jasper Becker claims shot his barber over a bad haircut (a haircut that bad must be quite a sight). Jerrold Post, who profiled terrorists, dictators, and various narcissistic megalomaniacs, still finds Kim Jong Il to be an exceptional case:
“One of the most interesting questions about Kim Jong Il is: What does it mean to be the son of God?” says Jerrold Post, a George Washington University psychiatrist and a former psychological profiler for the CIA. “It’s hard enough to succeed a successful father, but it’s quite another thing if the father is elevated to a godlike stature.”
A gratuitous anecdote that I couldn’t resist adding:
In interviews, they were surprisingly kind to the Dear Leader. Sure, he drank too much, cheated on his wife and humiliated his underlings, they told reporters, but he was also smart, funny and hard-working — a man who would make a great Hollywood producer.
Choi told a story that made the Dear Leader seem almost charming: One day, he came for a visit and asked, “What do you think of my physique?”
She hesitated, pondering how to answer such a question when it comes from a short, dumpy dictator known to execute his enemies.
“Small as a midget’s turd, aren’t I?” he said, smiling.
One theme that emerges is a great desire for constant attention and adulation. One wonders how Kim Jong Il reacts to being despised, or ignored. It that woman had spoken the truth, there isn’t much question of how it would have ended for her. We speak here of a man who is capable glib charm, but lacks ordinary psychological restraint. It’s also very likely that Kim Jong Il has a ferocious temper, and that that temper is actually setting North Korea’s security policy. Dr. Post, who is after all a medical professional, has a diferent diagnosis. It follows a long discussion of Kim’s upbringing, one that redefines the word “dysfunctional:”
All this family drama and trauma could drive a man crazy. And Jerrold Post, the GWU professor and former CIA psychiatrist, believes that the Dear Leader has a serious mental illness.
“He has the core characteristics of the most dangerous personality disorder, malignant narcissism,” Post theorized in a recent psychological profile.
The disorder is characterized by self-absorption, an inability to empathize, a lack of conscience, paranoia and “unconstrained aggression.”
The Dear Leader, Post concluded, “will use whatever aggression is necessary, without qualm of conscience, be it to eliminate an individual or to strike out at a particular group.”
The Wikipedia entry on malignant narcissism suggests that we can expect more dangerously impulsive, irrational behavior:
Otto Kernberg described malignant narcissism as a syndrome characterized by a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial features, paranoid traits, and ego-syntonic aggression. Some also may find an[] abscence of conscience, a psychological need for power, and a sense of importance (grandiosity). Pollock wrote: “The malignant narcissist is presented as pathologically grandiose, lacking in conscience and behavioral regulation with characteristic demonstrations of joyful cruelty and sadism.”[1] Malignant narcissism is considered part of the spectrum of pathological narcissism, which ranges from the Cleckley’s antisocial character (the today’s psychopath) at the high end of severity, to malignant narcissism, to NPD at the low end.
Kernberg wrote that malignant narcissism can be differentiated from psychopathy because of the malignant narcissists’ capacity to internalize “both aggressive and idealized superego precursors, leading to the idealization of the aggressive, sadistic features of the pathological grandiose self of these patients.”[2] According to Kernberg, the psychopaths’ paranoid stance against external influences makes them unwilling to internalize even the values of the “aggressor”, while malignant narcissists “have the capacity to admire powerful people, and can depend on sadistic and powerful but reli[a]ble parental images.” Malignant narcissists, in contrast to psychopaths, are also said of being capable to develop “some identification with other powerful idealized figures as part of a cohesive “gang” … which permits at least some loyalty and good object relations to be internalized.”
Malignant narcissism is highlighted as a key area when it comes to the study of mass, sexual and serial murder.
Some, but not all, of the characteristics associated with the related diagnosis of “psychopathy” also seem consistent with what we know of Kim Jong Il, or are worth contrasting to the imperfect information we have. Here’s the actual test used by psychologists today, known as the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Values in brackets are mine.
This is a clinical rating scale with 20 items. Each of the items in the PCL-R is scored on a three-point (0, 1, 2) scale according to specific criteria through file information and a semi-structured interview. A value of 0 is assigned if the item does not apply, 1 if it applies somewhat, and 2 if it fully applies. The items are as follows:
Glibness/superficial charm [2]
Grandiose sense of self-worth [2]
Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom [?]
Pathological lying [1]
Cunning/manipulative [1]
Lack of remorse or guilt [2]
Shallow affect [?]
Callous/lack of empathy [2]
Parasitic lifestyle [2]
Poor behavioral controls [1, although it will be a “2″ if he tests a nuke.]
Promiscuous sexual behavior [2]
Early behavioral problems [?]
Lack of realistic, long-term goals [an excellent question]
Impulsivity [2]
Irresponsibility [1]
Failure to accept responsibility for own actions [1]
Many short-term marital relationships [2]
Juvenile delinquency [?]
Revocation of conditional release [n/a]
Criminal versatility [2]
The items are then summed in order to obtain a total score. The cutoff for psychopathy is 30 points or greater (25 in some studies).
I put him at 23, just below the cutoff, but (1) I’m operating with incomplete information, and more importantly, (2) I’m a lawyer, not a psychologist. Although this is definitely not a delusional, wacky sort of madness, it’s scary stuff indeed for those who had believed Kim Jong Il incapable of any number of destructive acts that would also mean the end of his regime, and his life. Madness is a matter of degree, of course, but irrational men are not as easily deterred.
Posted by joshua on August 26, 2006 at 7:48 pm · Filed under NK Economics, WMD, China & Korea
[Update: This new report says that the growth rate of Chinese-N. Korean trade fell last quarter, but there are varying explanations. During the first months of this year, however, South Korea’s trade with the North also showed a modest rise, but a decrease in South Korean products (including aid) going North.]
As Richardson noted earlier, there has been much recent speculation about the state of Chinese-North Korean relations, particularly since China voted for weakened but potentially significant sanctions at the U.N. Now, ABC News reports that China is fiddling with the valve that controls North Korea’s oil supply.
China has reduced shipments of crude oil to North Korea, apparently in response to Pyongyang’s missile tests, a news report said Saturday.
China, the communist North’s closest ally and key provider of oil, also has agreed with South Korea to cooperate to prevent a possible North Korean nuclear test.
South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper said China has reduced “a significant amount” of its oil supplies to Pyongyang since the July 5 missile launches.
More here. Kyodo News adds more fuel to this (pun not intended), with a report that Kim Jong Il had some uncomplimentary words for his would-be masters to the North.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has criticized the North’s traditionally close allies China and Russia as unreliable and said Pyongyang must surmount the current difficulties it faces concerning its nuclear development program on its own, according to diplomatic sources.
Kim’s skepticism toward China and Russia was expressed at an ambassadorial meeting in Pyongyang, which took place July 18-22 soon after the July 15 unanimous passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the North’s test-firing of missiles, the sources told Kyodo News.
But this UPI story claims that China has made a strategic decision to “stay friends” with North Korea, something that doesn’t seem compatible with cutting off its fuel.
In a recent high-level discussion, Chinese officials decided to maintain friendly ties with North Korea and its leader Kim Jong Il.
President Hu Jintao was one of those at the central meeting on foreign affairs work, along with top Chinese diplomats, Kyodo News Service reported.
China is North Korea’s closest ally but officials were angered by the recent missile test, which was done over Chinese objections. On the other hand, China fears that problems in North Korea could lead to an influx of refugees.
Meanwhile, the planet’s single most intrepid reporter (for the Daily NK, of course) stows away in a truck, sneaks into a warehouse, and brings back pictures of the apparently undiminished trade between China and North Korea.
One description of these reports that would plausibly harmonize them would be to say that China is bringing Kim Jong Il to heel. I’m still pretty skeptical of China’s intentions, and haven’t ever seriously considered the idea that our interests in North Korea have merged with China’s. China may be seeking more obedient protectorates, not just in the North, but in the South, too. What’s more, I question the sources of the reports of friction between China and North Korea, which consist of a Chinese state employee and Kim Jong Il himself. Finally, the Chinese have a motive to fabricate the appearance of pressuring the North, something that the American government would certainly expect in the runup to a nuclear test. That’s still true even if I agree that China’s interests would be harmed by a North Korean nuclear test, as they were harmed by the missile tests in July.
If there is anything to the dissolution of the Chinese-North Korean alliance, it would be a delectable photonegative of the concurrent dissolution of the U.S.-South Korean alliance. To be sure, this paints a tempting picture for Korean nationalists in the short-term. In the longer term, it threatens to leave Korea, in the same weakened, vulnerable, and isolated state in which it found itself just over a century ago. Koreans would do well to remember whose army occupied Korea before Japan moved in. The more things change ….
Posted by joshua on August 26, 2006 at 10:19 am · Filed under Human Rights, Refugees, Activism, Washington Views, U.S. & Korea, "United" Nations
Updates: This chatroom for English-speaking expats in Thailand has pictures of the refugees and pages of outraged, sympathic comments. One of them points to this BBC story. The Thai government’s reaction is to increase patrols on the Mekong to keep the refugees out.
Look at this baby’s face. Then try to comprehend what will happen to her if she is sent back to North Korea.
.
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====== (original post follows) ======
With somewhere around 175 North Korean refugees in a state of limbo in Thailand, the South Korean government is sending the right signals, yet no one is landing at Incheon Airport yet. President Roh and UniFiction Minister Lee Jong Seok must not be looking forward to more scenes like this, perhaps believing that they have some rational relationship to tensions with the North, but also because it would mean a reversal of former UniFiction Minister Chung Dong Young’s die-in-place / rot-in-hell policy. They seem to be debating whether to filter them in in small groups or load them onto one plane and be done with it.
One is entitled to suspect that they may hope for some other way out, but yesterday’s statement from Jay Lefkowitz, extending America’s welcome to Korea’s least-wanted citizens, has made that option unpalatable for Korea’s pride:
The United States will keep its door open for North Korean people wanting to flee oppression in their homeland and continue to serve as a “safe haven,” a U.S. government-funded broadcaster reported Saturday, quoting a senior U.S. diplomat in Washington.
“We are looking to help facilitate the passage of North Korean refugees into freedom. And to the extent that North Korean refugees would like to come to the United States, that is something that we want to make available,” Jay Lefkowitz, Washington’s special envoy for North Korean human rights, told Radio Free Asia (RFA).
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Posted by joshua on August 23, 2006 at 10:22 pm · Filed under NK Economics, Appeasement, Counterfeiting, Drugs & N Korea
Stuart Levey’s visit to Asia last month is paying off. Yet another nation is cutting off Kim Jong Il’s finances.
Vietnamese banks have already closed down North Korean accounts over the past few weeks, most likely forcing Pyongyang to move its money to its last remaining haven, Russia, said Peter Beck, head of the International Crisis Group’s Seoul office, on Tuesday.
Beck said Nigel Cowie, general manager of North Korea’s Daedong Credit Bank in Pyongyang, e-mailed him last week and said Vietnamese banks have shut down Daedong’s and other North Korea-held accounts.
[….]
“The only financial window they (North Koreans) have left now is Russia, I am told,” Beck said at a roundtable on North Korea hosted by the Mansfield Foundation.
Somewhere, the world’s smallest violin is playing an adagio for Nigel Cowie, although I still count Switzerland and Luxemburg as two countries that may yet harbor North Korean accounts. I also recommend Andy Jackson’s post here, which discusses North Korea’s most “legitimate” banker. Cowie and his constituency of defenders in the comments probably set a record for most uses of the word “legitimate” per column inch, which I suppose depends on how you define the term. Whether Cowie is laundering money, wittingly or otherwise, is a matter I’ll leave to the Treasury Department, since there’s really little point in speculating in a factual vacuum about an investigation I can only assume to be ongoing, based on the media reports. You may also choose to accept Cowie’s explanation of why his bank’s “legitimate” transactions are conducted with large bundles of cash.
Third, there are good reasons why much of the international trade of the DPRK for these sorts of goods is cash-based. This relates mainly to the fact that the local currency is not convertible (and indeed we do not handle local currency), so imported goods are bought and sold for hard currency. The absence of the normal system of reciprocal correspondent bank accounts that exists in other countries which enables transactions to be settled by electronic book entry; the shortage of liquidity in the local market, which means that people are reluctant to deposit money in banks because they don’t know when they’ll be able to get the money out, so they would rather carry cash - and so on. This is quite a big subject in itself, and I have done a separate paper on this issue, but the bottom line is that people do tend to transact largely in cash, which in itself is not illegal - in this market, it is in fact often the only way.
Most of this could just as well apply to the Taliban in 2000. What all those conditions have in common is that they’re self-inflicted by the North Korean regime itself, out of a combination of economic dysfunction, repressive statism, recalcitrant lawlessness, and no small measure of concealment. But let’s make Nigel Cowie the only man in North Korea entitled to a presumption of innocence and assume that his bank’s transactions are all lawful. He has chosen to set up shop among stacks of dope money, suspicious dual-use imports, and counterfeit Benjamins. Then, Cowie complains when he winds up in Treasury’s impact zone as a result. In a regime as intentionally opaque as North Korea’s, some “collateral damage” to a relative sliver (veneer? perish the very thought!) of “legitimate” activities is inevitable. Things seems particularly murky in the wake of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1695, which demands that North Korea’s financiers exercise “vigilance” in assuring that their funds don’t go to the missile fund.
What we do know about Mr. Cowie’s business is that he aspires to profit by financing this regime, and that he knows damned well how Kim Jong Il will spend those finances. And won’t. If this is legitimate, then the world owes Walther Funk a historical absolution. Or, as Stuart Levey puts it:
“You don’t want to be the one ten years from now who’s got (Korean leader) Kim Jong Il’s money,” Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey said in an interview with Reuters.
“(It’s) just like we saw during the (former U.S. President Bill) Clinton administration when they exposed the Nazi banks,” Levey said. Swiss banks were embarrassed in 1997 by revelations that the German government had passed funds through the Swiss National Bank and other Swiss banks during World War II to finance the Nazi war effort.
“You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that. I think banks understand that. I just don’t know whether they are taking all the steps that they can and we would encourage them to do it,” he said.
There’s no laundering the culpability that goes with enabling some things.
Posted by joshua on August 23, 2006 at 1:48 pm · Filed under Famine & Food Aid, Human Rights, Refugees, Activism, "United" Nations
[Update: Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon is promising to take “appropriate measures,” which is encouraging in a vague sort of way. Foreign diplomats also sound optimistic. I infer that this was an underground railroad operation, and get the distinct idea that it was betrayed from within, as I also suspect in the case of a previous operation in Laos. Note also that various reports count as many as 179 refugees, most of them women and kids.
Separately, Yonhap reports a big spike in defections from the North this year. With the food situation worsening, expect that to continue.]
By separate mail, I invited Ambassador Lee to respond, promising to print his complete response, unedited. Keep watching for updates.
Your Excellency,
According to a new report, 169 North Koreans — who are citizens of your country under Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic of Korea Constitution — are under arrest in Thailand. Unless your country accepts them, they may be sent back to North Korea. If they are sent back, they will be sent to concentration camps or shot.
I ask because in the past, your government has expressed a policy of not accepting large numbers of North Korean refugees. I specifically refer you to an interview by ex-Unification Minister Chung Dong Young in OhMyNews, which I link with comment here. I quote:
[T]he government clearly opposes organized defections. For the people in the North to live their lives in the North with their families is necessary both for individuals and for co-existence and co-prosperity. The policies of reconciliation and cooperation call for humanitarian aid to the North along with strengthening of economic cooperation, and continuous pursuit of North Korea’s participation in the international community. . . . With this in mind, it is not desirable for anyone to organize defections, intentionally bringing people out of North Korea. In particular, this runs counter to the government’s policy of co-existence and co-prosperity. . . . [Incidents like last summer’s mass airlift of defectors] have been unfortunate from the point of the total interests of the Korean people.
Is your government aware of this situation? Will it allow these Korean citizens, including dozens of women and children, to be sent back to their deaths in North Korea? Do you believe that you could defend this under your country’s Constitution, or under the U.N. Convention on Refugees?
The Korean Embassy’s Web form, which didn’t work for me, is here. The Thai Embassy is here. You may want to remind them that the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in North Korea is one of their country’s most distinguished legal scholars, Vitit Muntarbhorn. Dr. Muntarbhorn calls North Koreans hiding in third countries “refugees sur place,” meaning that the 1951 Convention forbids sending them back to North Korea.
It will be interesting to see how much attention the lives of 169 innocent people fleeing persecution get from the Human Rights Industry.
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