It’s interesting that when the Arab Spring broke out, plenty of foreign observers had higher expectations for Egypt than for Libya, including me. Egypt has a sophisticated, urbane class that originally led the revolution, but that class was hardly heard when the votes came in. Libya has been poor, ignorant, and isolated for years. Could its people build the kind of government we would recognize as democracy? I doubt it, but it’s reasonable to believe they can make significant improvements over their national character under Qaddafy and evolve, slowly, in that direction. Western nations that helped the Libyan rebels overthrow him have won genuine affection from its new government, and large segments of the Libyan people. That’s more than we can say about Egypt. In Libya, the relatively minimal cost of NATO intervention helped secure an influential role in shaping its new government in a favorable direction. A lot of people on the far left will be disgusted by this, but Libya’s oil also matters, because our cars — Volvos included — run on it, and because Libya’s underperforming oil fields will eventually make its government wealthy enough to spend its oil money in the same ways that Iran has, or in the ways that North Korea has spent much less. Yes, there have been some internecine blue-on-blue scraps and even one small outbreak by pro-Qaddafy forces, but overall, the situation in Libya today is as good as we were reasonably entitled to expect. The leaders of NATO and President Obama deserve credit for this. Had they not intervened, the result would have been worse than Srebrenica, but not as bad as Rwanda. I don’t doubt that in such an event, Michelle Bachmann would still have been the President’s worst critic.

If anything, the national character of Syria is even more filled with suppressed rage than it is in Egypt. After all, the Assad family’s legacy has been decades of poverty, oppression, torture, massacres, sectarian oligarchy, and the conjuring of pathological hatred for a neighbor that has repeatedly inflicted humiliating defeats on the Syrian Army. Civil war has now come to all of Syria’s largest cities except Alleppo, but including the suburbs of the capital. I don’t see how the regime can survive over the long term. The longer the term, however, the more the opposition will coalesce around those who have no compunctions about how they use deadly force, and the more it will radicalize. That is why, even if you reject all of the arguments Charles Krauthammer makes here, it is in our national interest to quickly build a strong operational relationship with receptive, friendly, and deserving elements of the Syrian opposition. If this means arming them, so be it. The Syrian people, like the Libyans and the Egyptians, will remember who their friends were in the time of their greatest need. So, one day, will the North Koreans and yes, the Chinese, too. It may not be realistic to believe that any Middle Eastern nation will become a flourishing, pro-Western democracy within the next five years, but it is realistic to believe that one can evolve, if given the space to grow. Our immediate objective should be to cultivate a good enough relationship with Syria’s future leaders and its people that, with good diplomacy, we can help protect that space.

Or we can watch Syria become what Lebanon became in the 1970’s. As murky and unpredictable as things are in Libya today, isn’t its outcome still much better than that?

In November 2009, Greek authorities seized a container from a Liberia-registered freighter as it headed toward Syria. Inside the container they found wooden boxes stuffed with several types of ampules believed to be made of glass, each containing liquid or powdered reagents, the sources said. These reagents are used to identify chemical substances that become airborne after the use of chemical weapons, the sources said. The reagents can be used in chemical weapons attacks and for defending against them, they added.

The Greek authorities also seized about 14,000 anti-chemical weapons suits from the vessel. The suits were the same type as those seized by South Korean authorities in September of the same year, which were determined to be designed for military use as they are extremely airtight, the sources said. Observers say North Korea tried to build up their foreign currency reserves through the export of reagents and protective suits. [Yomiuri Shimbun]

North Korea is a member in good standing of the United Nations, and was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss among yourselves. It may also be worth discussing this:

The diplomatic sources pointed out the possibility that the attempted export of chemical weapons reagents was conducted through China, as in past smuggling cases involving North Korea. [….] As long as Beijing does not stop neutralizing the sanctions against Pyongyang, it will be impossible to prevent arms smuggling by North Korea, the sources said,

The U.N. resolution calls for U.N. member nations to take forcible measures to inspect North Korean cargo ships if they are suspected to be in violation of the arms embargo. But it is unclear whether China inspected North Korea’s cargo shipments strictly. According to annual reports submitted by the Sanctions Committee’s expert panel to the Security Council in 2010 and 2011, China served as a transit point in at least four of the 10 arms smuggling cases involving North Korea.

Said “possibility” must have been fairly strong for “diplomatic sources” to see the need to implicate China by name, although I don’t think anonymous leaks will be much of a political disincentive for the likes of Xi Jinping.

What a shame it would be if somehow Taiwan acquired nukes small enough to be carried on a new indigenous delivery system with an uncanny resemblance to the Tomahawk. Of course, some wouldn’t see this as a shame at all, but as a far better way to prevent a war in the Taiwan Strait than putting an American aircraft carrier battle group in the middle of that. A nuclear Taiwan might even restore enough deterrence and cross-strait stability to allow us to back away from the infamous “Three Communiques,” and give Taiwan a stronger incentive to budget more for its own conventional defense, such as against a naval blockade. After all, the Chinese are smart enough to play the proxy game with little apparent restraint, and nuking up Taiwan looks increasingly attractive as a way to ensure its defense without getting us into a war with another nuclear power. It isn’t the proliferation WMD’s that I lose sleep over, it’s the proliferation of WMD’s to psychopaths, especially when our government isn’t doing anything effective to deter that.

This has been a pretty depressing election year, and it’s probably too much to expect to have a real debate about whether the people who run China really harbor enough malice against us to facilitate these things intentionally. It might do the “realists” of the world much good if they’d spend a few minutes each day reading Global Times editorials like this one instead of the echo chamber that Foreign Policy has become. You can argue that the Global Times is only one side of a spectrum of official opinion that the Chinese government tolerates, but its viewpoint certainly seems well represented by people like Shen Dingli, and speaks much more like China’s actions than the ones you’re likely to hear on CCTV’s new English-language channel.

Below the fold, I reprint a slightly edited version of something I wrote at the late New Ledger in February of 2010.

This week, the Obama Administration finally announced the contents of a long-anticipated arms sale to Taiwan, including PAC-3 Patriot missiles that can intercept ballistic missiles that China might use to terrorize, or to destroy, Taiwanese cities.

This will be another fly under the paper over U.S.-Chinese tensions that were rising even before revelations that China used Google not only to suppress thoughtcrimes within China itself, but also to spy on Americans.   China’s targets included “major financial, defense and technology companies and research institutions,” human rights advocacy groups in Washington, and “Chinese human rights advocates in the United States, Europe and China.” Not even the U.S. Congress is off limits. In June 2008, U.S. Congressman Frank Wolf, a strong human rights advocate, accused China of hacking into his office’s computers. Google is now threatening to leave China, and the State Department issued an official protest. Contrary to predictions that U.S.-China tensions would dissolve as commercial links increased, mutual economic dependence has amplified tensions as China has evolves from Communism toward a new political model based on angry, nationalist Fascism. That model seems to be working. China’s younger generation may not love the way their government treats them, but many seem to approve of its arrogance and hostility toward foreign news media, human rights organizations, and of course, America. The ugly new mood was shocking enough to cause the New Yorker to apply the single most vulgar epithet in its lexicon: “neocon.” Things aren’t about to get better now.

For your amusement, the BBC conveys what must be the single emptiest threat of the year, so far: a threat by China to withdraw its cooperation in disarming North Korea. If you wish, you may insert your own reference to O.J.’s tireless search for the real killer here.

To understand the emptiness of China’s threat and understand how we might respond to it, let’s briefly review the record of China’s compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874, passed just last June, with UNSCR 1718, which followed North Korea’s 2006 nuclear test, and with its professed desire for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula in general. China voted for both U.N. resolutions.

- Exhibit A: A recent study by the eminent economists Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard shows that China undermined UNSCR 1718 by increasing aid and trade to offset declining trade with South Korea, which eventually grew weary of feeding the North Korean nuclear beast. Language in UNSCR 1718 required those remitting funds to North Korea to “ensure” that the funds would not be used for the development of prohibited weapons.

- Exhibit B: Chinese banks have long helped North Korea launder proceeds of its illegal activity, including the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, and probably also including its international arms sales. Most infamous among these was Banco Delta Asia, but several 2005 news reports also implicated the Bank of China.

- Exhibit C: After North Korea’s May 2009 nuke test, China and Russia joined forces to weaken the initial drafts of UNSCR 1874 proposed by the United States. China managed to shield North Korea from a total ban on (mostly Chinese) weapons purchases and the authority of member states to board North Korean ships on the high seas to search for banned cargo.

- Exhibit D: Months after the passage of UNSCR 1874, Chinese trade with North Korea — chiefly with companies controlled by the North Korean military — remained almost constant with 2008 levels, decreasing slightly only because oil prices had sagged in comparison to 2008’s record prices. This business-as-usual approach almost certainly disregarded provisions of UNSCR 1874 that tightened UNSCR 1718’s financial accounting requirements.

- Exhibit E: Chinese trading companies continue helping Kim Jong Il acquire luxury items, such as Italian yachts and European luxury sedans, in violation of UNSCR 1718 and 1874.

- Exhibit F: By last October, Kim Jong Il had probably begun to feel the financial strain of international sanctions targeting its weapons exports and its links to the international financial system. China responded by offering Kim Jong Il a multi-billion dollar sanctions-busting aid package. The package may have been shelved — for the time being, at least — after the Obama Administration protested.

- Exhibit G: A shipment of North Korean weapons to Iran, intercepted in the United Arab Emirates last June, originated in the North Korean port of Nampo and was then “transferred to a Chinese ship in the port city of Dalian, in northern China.”

- Exhibit H: A shipment of North Korean weapons to Iran intercepted in Bangkok last year crossed through Chinese airspace, and the New Zealand-registered trading company that arranged the deal was registered in the name of one “Lu Zhang.”

- Exhibit I: Finally, there is China’s brutal repatriations of North Korean refugees back to the loving arms of Kim Jong Il and killing fields like Camp 12 continue undiminished and in flagrant violation of the UN Refugee Convention, which China signed. The repatriations themselves are crimes against humanity because China knows what awaits those refugees on their return. North Korean refugees claim that the hospitality of their Chinese captors includes rape, shocking them with electric cattle prods, the payment of bounties, and piercing their wrists and noses with sharp wires to string them together (they’re more cooperative that way). And for years, China hasn’t let anyone from the UNHCR anywhere near its border with North Korea to even determine the scale of the North Korean refugee problem. This sort of brutality helped Beijing to host the world’s most orderly Olympic games since at least 1936.

For China to make a credible threat to stop cooperating with UN sanctions, China would first have to start cooperating with UN sanctions.

None of this should really surprise us, of course. After all, China has long allowed North Korea to ship WMD components across its territory, may have transferred Long March missile technology to North Korea, and flashed a green light at North Korea’s first nuclear test in October 2006. Here, it’s important to remember that in China’s controlled academia, academics may have quasi-diplomatic authority, saying what the government allows them to say, but more bluntly than credentialed diplomats would. Now, here’s what prominent Chinese academic and North Korea specialist Shen Dingli wrote in the Far Eastern Economic Review the year before that test:

The development of nuclear weapons is a sovereign right to which the D.P.R.K. is entitled. Though outsiders may feel that North Korea should not go nuclear, Pyongyang is not convinced that it should voluntarily put a halt to its program. Besides, as long as the D.P.R.K. refrains from exporting its nuclear technology, it should be able to avoid a military confrontation. In order to persuade the North to dismantle its nuclear program, other countries should adopt a more realist, incremental approach.

So much for refraining from exporting nuclear technology. It’s still of no consequence to Beijing, whose support for Kim Jong Il never wavered in any meaningful way. A diplomat to his very core, Shen next implicitly compares the United States to Nazi Germany:

Of course, not everyone agrees with the assertion that North Korea is entitled to develop and acquire nuclear weapons. Yet these opponents usually reach their conclusion based purely on national or regional interests. They fail to understand that a peaceful world can only be achieved when all nations feel equally secure. The U.S. felt insecure when it learned that Nazi Germany was developing a nuclear bomb, prompting the Manhattan Project.

Shen continued to send the same signal to North Korea three days before its first confirmed nuclear test, writing here for the Nautilus Institute:

Our country has not many choices when it comes to whether or not the DPRK will conduct a nuclear test. This is because the Sino-DPRK security relationship is not a one-way street. It is impossible for China to apply excessive pressure on the DPRK. It is impossible for us to prevent the DPRK from realizing its fundamental interests while not harming our country’s fundamental interests. In the past there was such a balance of interests. It is still true today as “Taiwan independence” [forces] run rampant. Basically, our country’s work of persuasion with the DPRK in the 12 years that the DPRK developed its nuclear program had been a failure. The causes are evident.

Please do not fail to notice that Shen, not I, was the first one to link the issues of Taiwan and North Korea. Now for extra fun and 50% more veracity, reread Shen’s words, only think “Taiwan” when Shen says “North Korea,” and think “China” where Shen says “the U.S.”

For our State Department, there often seems to be no higher purposes than avoiding offense to the Chinese government, and when an apologist for and subsidiary of China Inc. like Chas Freeman can be nominated for an important national security position in the U.S. government, it’s enough to suggest a few guesses as to why. I certainly don’t see us gaining any cooperation from China by failing to impose real consequences on China for its continued support for Kim Jong Il, UN sanctions notwithstanding.

Granted, helping Taiwan to go nuclear would require some creative interpretation of the “Three Communiques,” among which was a commitment that U.S. “arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed … in qualitative or quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years.” I certainly do not propose that the United States transfer functioning nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles to Taiwan. It would suffice to quietly transfer the technology needed for Taiwan to develop its own indigenous ballistic missile capability, and to let Taiwan know that the United States would not object if Taiwan decided to close its nuclear fuel cycle. If we’re really serious about putting pressure on China, boosting Taiwan’s security, and giving Taiwan a deterrent that doesn’t depend on the U.S. Navy, then we should quietly assist Taiwan to acquire the technology to develop its own ballistic missiles, and do nothing to discourage its acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Just like China did for North Korea.

Where to begin? The unwittingly (I think) subversive decision to surround the morbidly obese kid — has he ever looked so fat? — with these lean, hungry leprechauns and their leathery, wizened officers? Posing him next to the their tiny little day-care bunks, about one-third of a Kim wide? Or standing His Porcine Majesty behind the tin plates holding meager rations that can’t possibly exceed his hourly caloric intake, set at intervals to fit wretches stunted down to the size of organ grinder monkeys? It’s things like this that convince me he’s doomed. It’s not just the manifest obscenity of his weight as ruler of a land where the lower castes and their orphans are left to starve in front of train stations. It’s the projection of inept fragility from the figurehead and the machine that made him one.

If the producer of this film really meant to glorify Jong Eun, he deserves to be sent packing to some God-forsaken ash-heap in the outer provinces. If he’s the world’s most cunningly courageous dissident, Seal Team Six should extract him and his entire family. On the Goebbels Scale of insidious propaganda genius, this makes Dukakis-in-a-tank look like Triumph of the Will. Not even Brian Myers can explain this away. Sure, I can believe that this video would be awfully persuasive to North Koreans, but to believe that it will be persuasive in the ways the regime wants it to be, you also have to believe that North Koreans are not just culturally different, but less than fully human.

My reaction on reading these excerpts? Disappointment, mostly. Few of Jong Nam’s broader conclusions about North Korea are surprising or even divergent from the consensus of outside speculators. Most are either obvious, unsupported by any credible new revelations of fact, or both. An exception is his intriguing assertion that North Korea is “extremely unstable internally,” but the grafs offer no details to support this, and Jong Nam doesn’t seem to have spent much time in the more fly-blown parts of North Korea where that instability might be (barely) visible. The personal details were interesting — he never met Kim Jong Eun, had a close emotional relationship with his father, and has a Chinese “protection” detail. Like Jong Nam himself, Jong Eun has traveled to Japan under a fake passport. Oh, and Jong Nam says never really wanted to succeed his father, before or after that whole Disney thing, which might just be true. Jong Nam gives the impression of astounding naivete given his background, in both his personal habits and in some of his political thinking.

Even chewing on these small slices, I found myself struggling to separate truth from self-serving pap (Was Jong-Nam really not involved in North Korea’s business activities in Macau, previously the center of its money laundering activities? What an interesting extradition request that would be!). My guess is that like me, you’ll fail at this task because of the short supply of known facts to compare to Jong Nam’s account. I still want to read the book. I even find myself feeling disturbingly sympathetic to someone who grew so fat on the misfortune of others. This account does conform to what I’ve heard third- and fourth-hand about Jong Nam, which is that he just never had the mean streak he needed to fit in in Pyongyang. He probably never had the gravitas to make much of a positive impact there. I’m afraid he’ll soon find himself the target of withering pressure from his homeland. I wouldn’t even rule out a brush with a stranger with a poisoned needle, although the more likely outcome for Jong Nam is that his Chinese minders will soon whisk him away from the bacchanalian fleshpot where he lives now for a more austere, less accessible part of China.

A source in North Hamgyung Province told Daily NK on January 19, “During the mourning period, one official from the provincial NSA, one from the prosecutor’s office and two from the People’s Safety Agency were murdered in Cheongjin.” The source added, “There was a note found lying next to the body of the executed NSA official which said ‘Punished in the name of the people.’”

North Korean authorities have not released the identities of the victims or any information about the case fearing public disturbances, but authorities are said to be using all resources at their disposal to find the people responsible. The Defense Security Command is helping the other three agencies with the investigation, while a report on the murders has been elevated to the Central Party in Pyongyang.

In December 2010, also in Cheongjin, the retired head of the PSA office in the Sunam district died after being attacked on the street by an unknown assailant. This however is the first time that active serving officers have been slain. The likelihood seems to be that the murders were planned by somebody with a political motive rather than a personal grudge.

The source revealed that bureaucrats in North Hamgyung Province are shocked by the incident. “On the outside they’re furious, saying they’re going to track down the person responsible and torture them, but at the same time they don’t seem to know what to do.”

“The fact that privileged officials were killed right under the government’s noses, and while there were special patrols in place for the mourning period, means that the lower down the hierarchy you look bureaucrats are more anxious,” the source said.

The reaction from citizens who are aware of the incident is mostly positive, with some saying ‘they deserved it’, although such encouragement is tempered by concerns that this case will lead to even more stringent controls on the public. There are even rumors spreading that it may have been perpetrated by members of the military, given the bold nature of the crime and the skills required to carry it out. [Daily NK]

There’s obviously no way to verify any of this, of course. According to the report and the rumors on which it’s based, the regime doesn’t know who did this, so it has sealed off the entire city to investigate (that part shouldn’t be so hard to verify). This is not the first report we’ve heard about North Koreans attacking secret police recently. Not even a made guy is protected anymore.

Not that you were wondering, but would I condone this sort of thing? Why, yes I would! Certainly there isn’t any democratic or non-violent way for North Koreans to protect themselves against this regime as they try to eke out some kind of living despite it. It’s not like Ban Ki-Moon is going to so much as say a supportive word on their behalf — if the man isn’t in Beijing’s pocket, he certainly fooled me. Whoever wrote the headline for Liz Sly’s latest report from Syria really put it best: “In Syria, world inaction fuels armed revolt.” Eventually, the same thing will happen in North Korea, right on China’s border, and China will only have itself to blame for letting the political and social pressures build to explosive levels. The odds are fair to good that China, seeking stability at all costs, will intervene and find itself in the middle of a messy insurgency that would catalyze the formation of a regional anti-Chinese military alliance and become a focal point for political dissent within China itself, but I digress. As I once read somewhere, when government becomes destructive of the lives, liberty, and happiness of the people, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. I realize that some people who inhabit this planet’s comfort zones will insist that the North Korean people, despite the lack of alternatives before them, have no right to resort to violent resistance. But those people are obviously American exceptionalists.

Hat tip to a reader.

We should perhaps remember with great concern the time when Kim Jong Il used $900 million to both permanently preserve Kim Il Sung’s body and then create Keumsusan Memorial Palace to keep it in.

It is no simple task to erect a statue of anybody, let alone someone who presumably requires a large statue such as Kim Jong Il. In the South Korean city of Gumi, a mere 5m statue of former President Park Chung Hee cost 1.2 billion South Korean Won ($1.03 million). Kim Il Sung’s statue in Pyongyang is 24m high. For a massive statue like that to be erected, the foundations also need to be consolidated, then a road must be paved to go to the area. Lighting needs to be set in place and electricity provided all year round.

Thus, at the same time as Kim Il Sung was being publicly idolized, thousands upon thousands of people in different parts of the country were collapsing in the streets of hunger.

Jimmy Carter was unavailable for comment.

I don’t think you have to agree with Soviet-style political abuses of psychiatry to believe that people with an emotionally driven affinity for evil regimes probably have a psychological disorder that’s amenable to medical diagnosis. Not that the disorder necessarily makes them unable to function in society, it just makes them look awfully silly and unworthy of publication in any serious newspaper. The more debatable question that follows is whether you still consider The New York Times to be a serious newspaper, given its willingness to publish the likes of Christine Ahn.

But then, great institutions die like our own bodies — one piece at a time. I thought the Times wrote an interesting (and favorable) review of “The Orphan Master’s Son.” Here’s another review at Bloomberg Businessweek. This is going to have to go on my very crowded reading list, along with that Kim Jong Nam book I’m eagerly anticipating.

So the number of North Koreans arriving in the South continues to rise, but are these recent arrivals in China or people who’ve been hiding in China for years, finally making a break for it? Everything I hear from the China-North Korea border these days is about crackdowns, snipers, and land mines.

I don’t fully understand why North Korea is importing more cell phones, given the mortal threat they potentially pose to its monopoly on information. The best explanation I can offer is that they’re thinking like the city governments that give free needles to junkies: they’ve concluded that people are going to get them anyway, so better to give them something they can control better. “Approved” phones can be concentrated in loyal hands, can’t call overseas, can be monitored (a few of them, anyway), and can be cut off should things get dodgy (as our British friends would say). The other reason may well be that Orascom’s financial generosity to the regime — and key regime officials — has influenced its judgment. There are some things I just can’t explain. This is one of them.

The picture turned out to have been doctored to make the water look deeper than it was, in the apparent hope of attracting more outside aid. The AP quietly killed the picture, but went right on with its public displays of affection with KCNA, the “news” agency that says that Kim Jong Eun could drive at age three, and that the heavens glowed, cranes circled, and storms stopped in their tracks when Kim Jong Il died.

You can usually spot a bad relationship long before the wedding. The aunts and the neighbors will hope that the aggrieved party will come to his or her senses before it’s too late. But in the history of human relationships, good judgment has almost never overcome emotional attachment. So just weeks after the most recent KCNA photoshop scandal, the AP is proudly showing off its wedding photo album.

Yes, they’ve held a ceremony — their word — to open their bureau in Pyongyang. How lovely.

In a ceremony that came less than a month after the death of longtime ruler Kim Jong Il and capped nearly a year of discussions, AP President and CEO Tom Curley and a delegation of top AP editors inaugurated the office, situated inside the headquarters of the state-run Korean Central News Agency in downtown Pyongyang.

The bureau expands the AP’s presence in North Korea, building on the breakthrough in 2006 when AP opened a video bureau in Pyongyang for the first time by an international news organization. Exclusive video from AP video staffers in Pyongyang was used by media outlets around the world following Kim’s death.

Now, AP writers and photojournalists will also be allowed to work in North Korea on a regular basis. [AP, of course]

… all while escorted by regime minders, kept safely away from almost anything legitimately newsworthy, while being spoon-fed the regime’s propaganda, and ever mindful of the fact that the content and tenor of their coverage is now a hostage to this regime’s approval of its continued presence. Perhaps one day the AP will get to film a coup through a hotel window. Maybe they’ll be able to show the film or tell the story weeks after the fact. Until then, I see little truth and a steady stream of lies issuing from the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau.

And who else sees a ribbon-cutting ceremony itself as ethically questionable? KCNA is North Korea’s official news agency — a propaganda arm of the most repressive regime in the world today, and probably the most repressive regime since at least the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge. Isn’t the AP’s function to fearlessly report the news, without cozying up to governments? Do you suppose the AP would have wanted to be seen in a ribbon-cutting ceremony with, say, the Voice of America?

If there is a better example of how the global news media have failed so miserably in covering the story of North Korea, I can’t think of one. The real story here is the triumph of media vanity and their lazy contentment at leaving out of mind the greater truths that the regime keeps out of their sight. It outdoes the breathy self-infatuation of Wolf Blitzer, Greta Van Susteren, and Christiane Amanpour at that fact that KCNA allowed them to be filmed in front of their propaganda statutes (though any member of the Korean Friendship Association could say the same thing). Laura Ling and Euna Lee can at least say they saw a few things that weren’t completely staged. For their trouble — which wasn’t inconsiderable — they even got a plane ride home with Bill Clinton and some book royalties.

Who supposes that the AP, now a hostage of its marriage to KCNA, will still fearlessly cover stories about snipers shooting down refugees at the border, or being sent to camps for not faking sufficient grief about the death of Kim Jong Il? Both stories have received broad international coverage recently. I found no reference to either story in the AP’s archives. Here’s a test for today, tomorrow, and next year: keep your eye on the AP’s news archive. Troll it for reporting about the most damning reports of human rights atrocities, and compare the AP’s editorial selections to those of other news agencies. I certainly don’t expect all reference to North Korea’s oppressive character to be Trotskied out of the AP’s reality, but do you really suppose that the AP’s self-censoring suppositions about North Korea’s opinions of its coverage will exert no gravitational influence over the AP’s coverage?

Neither did I.

North Korea on Wednesday signaled a willingness to freeze its uranium enrichment program in exchange for “confidence-building” incentives from the United States such as a suspension of sanctions and a resumption of food aid.

The statement, carried by North Korea’s state-run news agency and attributed to a foreign ministry spokesman, was the first sign that North Korean heir Kim Jong Eun might be open a deal discussed last year, and then put on hold following the death of leader Kim Jong Il. [WaPo]

For extra irony, North Korea is accusing us of politicizing food aid and demanding that we earn their trust. It’s the little things like this that sustain me.

So what we learn from this is that Jang Song Thaek is receptive to taking our money, which I’m sure plenty of people will want to confuse with openness to reform or actual disarmament. Really, if the Obama Administration wants to make this kind of deal, I wish it would hurry up and do it now, in time for it to be an issue in the presidential election. But for the record, I strongly doubt that we’ll see an Agreed Framework III this year, for reasons of domestic politics in the U.S. and North Korea (South Korea’s government might have an interest in looking conciliatory right now).

Up until now, Obama’s North Korea policy has been notable for its absence of awfulness, but his placement of the likes of Wendy Sherman, Sung Kim, and Glyn Davies in the State Department’s top Korea policy-making roles is profoundly disturbing and suggests a pre-positioning of people who are inclined to execute a hard turn toward appeasement once the presidential election is over. All of the “insider” accounts I’ve heard tell me that Obama came into office fully prepared to appease, even on the very heels of the collapse of Agreed Framework II. It was only Kim Jong Il’s awful behavior during the next two years that shifted him toward sanctions (however imperfectly implemented) and “strategic patience.” Assuming no colossal provocation intervenes, my guess is that the patience will run out in December of 2012.

Videos like it have produced reels of bemused speculation in America. The near-universal reaction found this in roughly equal parts disturbing and amusing. I’m certain that I have, at times, found amusement in some aspects of North Korea that were, on closer examination, much more horrid than they were funny. But if I know anything about how North Koreans really think, is that they think. If there is one thing that I believe foreigners fundamentally misunderstand about North Koreans, it is that they are unthinking automatons. I’ve lived in South Korea long enough to know that there are profound cultural differences between Americans and Koreans, but I’ve spoken with and read the accounts of too many North Koreans to believe that what we see in these videos is real grief for Kim Jong Il. There are probably some exceptions, of course, but my guess is that most of the genuine grief was that of children whose parents know how mortally dangerous it disabuse a child of the official mythology.

The regime wants us to believe the North Koreans are automatons who lack the same innate human reason, logic, and emotion as the rest of us.  More importantly, it wants North Koreans to believe this about each other, so that everyone who dissents in the privacy of his own mind feels alone, strange, and abnormal. Of course, the real emotions of these people are hidden from us, from each other, and from the state. The most common question I’ve seen asked on the internet about these scenes is whether the people are faking. Look at the faces and judge for yourself, but most of them are pretty obviously faking to me, even more obviously than the professional mourners seen on video here. These are traditional paid mourners in India. They were paid to weep hysterically for trees that were illegally logged.

There was of course widespread speculation, informed by the statements of North Korean defectors, that people were terrorized into these hysterical displays, and now we have additional reports that this is indeed the case:

Daily NK learned from a source from North Hamkyung Province on January 10th, “The authorities are handing down at least six months in a labor-training camp to anybody who didn’t participate in the organized gatherings during the mourning period, or who did participate but didn’t cry and didn’t seem genuine.”

Furthermore, the source added that people who are accused of circulating rumors criticizing the country’s 3rd generation dynastic system are also being sent to re-education camps or being banished with their families to remote rural areas.

Daily NK earlier reported news that criticism sessions were being held at all levels of industry, in enterprises and by local people’s units starting on December 29th, the last day of the mourning period. A source said at the time that the central authorities had ordered the sessions to be completed by January 8th.

The North Hamkyung source commented of the sessions that they “created a vicious atmosphere of fear, causing people to accuse ‘that young upstart’ (Kim Jong Eun) of preying on the people now that he has taken power.” [Daily NK]

The Daily NK reports have received wide circulation in the American press and blogs.

The term “reeducation camp” probably refers to the smaller camps known in Korean as kyo-hwa-so, as opposed to the larger kwan-li-so camps, which are (with a few exceptions) life imprisonment zones for political prisoners.  Prisoners in both types of camp are routinely tortured, underfed, overworked, and exposed to contagious diseases, and a six-month stint in a kyo-hwa-so is likely to be a death sentence.  In fact, the annual mortality rates in some reeducation camps, especially in camps where prisoners must work in mines, can be higher than in the big political prison camps.

All of the prisoners at Kyo-hwa-so No. 4 were men, most of them sentenced to any- where from five to twenty years. The prisoners considered their sentences a cruel hoax, as they did not expect to live long enough to serve their time. Some prisoners mined limestone in the adjacent mountain. Others crushed the rocks. Still others fired the lime in large kilns. Work started at seven in the morning and lasted until five in the evening, except in the crushing and heating units, where work often continued until ten at night. All aspects of the work were hard labor in dangerous conditions with prisoners frequently suffering chest ailments and lung diseases from limestone dust.

Once a week there was an evening criticism session in groups of up to 500 men where the prison officials would criticize the prisoner called to stand in front of the group of prisoners. There were also lectures on Kim Jong Il and his policies.

Infractions were punished with reduced rations, nominally extended sentences, and detainment in miniature punishment cells. During the eight months that Former Prisoner #19 was held at Kyo-hwa-so No. 4, there were eight public executions in the prison. He did not recall the particular offenses of these eight executed persons, though he did cite the four types of persons who would be executed at the prison camp: prisoners caught trying to escape; prisoners caught after they escaped; persons who committed crimes while on “sick leave”; and prisoners who had committed capital crimes elsewhere and were brought to Kyo-hwa-so No. 4 for execution.

Food rations consisted of a mere 50 grams (under 2 ounces) per meal of mixed corn and wheat, plus cabbage-leaf soup. Former Prisoner #19 weighed 76 kilograms (168 pounds) upon his entry into the kyo-hwa-so. After three months, his weight had plummeted to somewhere around 45 kilograms (99 pounds). He was sure that most prisoners weighed less than 50 kilograms (110 pounds).

Prisoners slept head to toe on wooden floors in groups of 50 to 100. The unsanitary living conditions — there was no bathing or changing of clothes, and Former Prisoner #19 says he was able to wash only his face two to three times a month — led to Kyo-hwa-so No. 4’s particular idiosyncrasy: the cement dust in the prisoners clothing, commingled with dirt and sweat, would cause the tattered fabric to harden, resulting in skin abrasions and infections.

The most salient prison characteristic, however, was more common: exorbitantly high death rates. In Former Prisoner #19’s eight months there, of the eighty persons in his work unit, three prisoners died in work accidents, ten died of malnutrition and disease, and twenty were sent home on “sick leave” in order to reduce the high numbers of deaths in detention. [Committee for Human Rights in North Korea]

But then, as I said before, there are always plenty of good reasons to cry real tears in North Korea. For those who can’t find one, the state will provide.

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The WSJ’s Korea Real Time blog has a very good, concise summary of the lessons learned from German reunification. Of course, the differences between the two cases are far greater than the similarities, but all of this advice makes sense to me. Example: “Don’t introduce currency union too soon, and definitely not at a 1:1 exchange rate. One Deutsche Mark was worth about four Ostmarks in 1990, but currency union set a 1:1 rate, since the alternative would have meant massive migration. Overvaluing the currency, however, meant East German industry collapsed as wages became uncompetitive, leading to massive unemployment.”  Funny, I was in Berlin when that was happening, and I still remember what a mess it was.

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Among other unaffordable grandiosities, Kim Jong Il merits repose in his father’s palatial meat locker, plus this:

The country also said it will erect a new Kim Jong Il statue and build “towers to his immortality,” while the ruling party called him “eternal leader” and gave his birthday a new title that underlines his military-first policy and links him more closely to his father, Kim Il Sung, who is still revered as the “eternal president.”

May I suggest an epitaph?  “Even in death, he still kills.”

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Brian Myers thinks that the succession of Kim Jong Eun does not presage instability in North Korea, because the people with the power and the guns are invested in his survival.  As much as I respect Myers’s understanding of North Korea’s official pathology, I don’t see how he could possibly have enough information to know this.  The premise is probably true, but it was just as true that a year ago, men who now make up the Free Syrian Army were invested in the survival of Bashar Assad.  When the people rise against a system like this (or at least somewhat like this), as history suggests they usually do eventually, it’s always in defiance of most expert predictions.  Repressive regimes are very good at concealing nascent discontent from foreign observers, and foreign observers who get access to repressive countries tend to be selected for how easily they can be fooled.

(How many times has Selig Harrison been to Pyongyang, again?  Maybe he’ll remind us.)

In the end, repressive regimes fall when three things happen.  First, there is a local uprising (that has already happened plenty of times in recent North Korean history).  Second, the uprising spreads to other areas of the country, spreading the regime’s forces so thinly that they can’t quash it everywhere at once (that can’t happen until North Koreans have the means to communicate quickly and freely across different areas of the country).  Third, enough of the security forces either side with the protesters or refuse to shoot at them that the regime can’t reestablish its control (the right propaganda could set the stage for this).  Of course, good diplomacy with China, and yes, with North Korea at the appropriate time, could truncate the civil war that Step Three usually means, by offering safe passage to exile.

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The Chosun Ilbo says that the U.S. and South Korea have a new plan to deter North Korean attacks like those of 2010, but from what I can see, the new plan looks a lot like the old plan.  Although the report tells us next to nothing about what the specific plan is, there’s enough information to suggest that it’s essentially a military response.  I’m now at the point where I’d agree that a limited and well-targeted limited military response may be less dangerous than no response at all, but I think the deterrent value would be limited at best; at worst, a limited war helps Kim Jong Eun consolidate his rule and only serves to prolong the underlying problem.  In other words, we can now safely put the “soft power” fad to rest, secure in the knowledge that Washington and Seoul have reverted back to the same old crap — dangerously underreactive diplomacy, and dangerously overreactive military options, both of which Pyongyang has learned to play to its own advantage, and neither of which consequently solves anything.

I’m most skeptical about this plan because of the risk I perceive that it will lead to involving us in another ground war, while we happen to be otherwise occupied in Afghanistan, fighting against the people who directly attacked our country (or enabled the people who did).  That’s especially true given that South Korea continues to cut its own defense budget and troop strength, without offsetting that loss of capability with better weaponry.

If Washington and Seoul really want to deter Kim Jong Eun, they ought to be threatening to do what Kim Jong Eun (and more importantly, Jang Song Thaek, and the generals) are really afraid of.  We should instead be threatening a broadcasting and arms-smuggling campaign directed at North Korea’s norther and eastern provinces, along with increased economic constriction against the regime and its (mostly Chinese) business partners.  That would not only undermine Kim Jong Eun’s political control in the provinces, it would also give China a reason to help deter the North Koreans, for once.

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This looks like an interesting read:

The protean main character is Pak Jun Do, whose father tends an orphanage in the northern port city Chongjin; Jun Do is not as expendable as the orphans themselves, but nearly so.  [….]

While at sea, Jun Do becomes an unlikely “hero of the state.” When a fellow sailor defects, everyone aboard the fishing boat fears government retribution. They devise a cover story about the defector having been eaten by sharks after American sailors boarded the boat and threw him in the water. To increase the tale’s credibility, the crew and captain decide, another layer should be added about someone jumping in to try to save the man—and suffering a shark bite in the process. The captain directs Jun Do to let his arm be bitten by a shark they have pulled aboard; he complies. The shark chomps down to the bone but doesn’t sever the arm.Now a living emblem of American rapacity, Jun Do joins a secret diplomatic mission to Texas, where North Korean ministers try to twist military compromises from a well-meaning senator in exchange for empty promises.

South Korean assistance to the North surged to raise the indicator to a high of 236.9 in 2007, a huge leap from the baseline score of 100 in 1995. The communist country`s trade volume also jumped 43.4 percent due to the expansion of trade with China. The North`s economy began to shrink from 2008, when the South halted aid. Notably, the indicator fell to as low as 86.5 in 2009 to tie the record-low set in 2000. Due to deterioration of inter-Korean relations, the volume of South Korean government assistance to the North tumbled over the period to 36.2 in 2009, down 84.7 percent from that in 2007. A decline in external trade except with China due to tougher international sanctions against Pyongyang also hastened the deterioration of the North Korean economy. Due to the participation by Singapore, one of the North`s top five trading partners, in the sanctions, the combined volume of the North`s trade fell about 10.7 percent, resulting in the indicator falling from 186.3 in 2008 to 166.3 in 2009. [Donga Ilbo]

The chief lesson I take from this is that a well-orchestrated campaign of international sanctions can still damage North Korea’s official economy enough to cause long-term decline, even despite China’s efforts to circumvent it.  Although all statistical analysis of the North Korean economy is inherently suspect, note that this study relies heavily on an analysis of government-to-government aid and official trade statistics, meaning that the majority of this impact is presumably felt by North Korea’s palace economy.  Downstream, that also affects some of North Korea’s population, but only that shrinking minority that still relies on salaries and benefits from the regime, rather than the black market.

The effect of those sanctions probably still isn’t enough to achieve one of its intended effects — to force the regime to actually dismantle its nuclear programs or allow meaningful verification — although I suspect that for a brief moment in 2006, it might have been.  That time, North Korea was saved from both extinction and negotiated disarmament by Chris Hill, Condi Rice, and George W. Bush.  This time, China has to do and pay more to offset not only the effect of sanctions, but the loss of South Korean aid and another, perhaps even more important factor — the self-inflicted wound of North Korea’s currency “reform,” a/k/a The Great Confiscation of 2009.  It would be interesting to see any decent translation of this study, but especially one that has data to measure the effects of that fiasco.

As if on cue, Marcus Noland provides additional evidence of the continuing effects of the Great Confiscation.  The Great Confiscation, of course, was intended to drive most of the commerce of ordinary North Koreans back under the regime’s economic control.  The G.C. certainly did terrible damage to the black market system temporarily, but it didn’t extinguish markets, and it has also had severe and adverse effects on the official economy, too.  The loss of confidence in, and inflation of, the North Korean currency has persisted, has recently been exacerbated by the succession of Kim Jong Eun, and has driven money out of the North Korean banking system and into people’s mattresses, or into the alternative black-market financial system.  To restore confidence in the currency, Noland suggests, Kim Jong Eun may be taking a tip from the economic policies of Ron Paul by minting gold coins (I’m glad that I haven’t lost my ability to savor ironies like this).  However, the minting of gold coins in North Korea is neither a new development nor, most likely, a hint of that North Korea is going on the gold standard.  See my comment to Noland’s post for an explanation.

North Korea on Wednesday upped its rhetoric against South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, branding him as a “pro-U.S. fascist maniac” and “chieftain of evils without an equal in the world” in view of measures his government took last month in the wake of the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

The virulent name-calling came in a report released by the secretariat of the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea and carried by the country’s official Korean Central News Agency.

The committee’s report blasted the “Lee Myung Bak group of traitors” for its “unprecedented brutal acts during the mourning over the great loss to the nation,” which it said had “rubbed salt into the wounds of the grief-stricken people” of North Korea.  [Mainichi Shimbun]

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In the rest of the world, a photo op like this would either mean that the young man is stricken with a terminal illness, or that he needs to fire his campaign manager immediately. In North Korea, it means he’s done running for office, and he’s desperate to forestall a terminal case of lead poisoning.

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After North Korea’s 2010 attacks on South Korea, observers like Brian Myers suggested that their purpose was to burnish Kim Jong Eun’s credentials as an even bigger asshole than his father (though I recall that Myers phrased it more elegantly than I have here).  Reports like this one lend credence to that theory:

[A] documentary on North Korea’s Central TV, also claimed that Mr. Kim, believed to be in his late 20s, oversaw the April 2009 test launch of the country’s long-range rocket.

“I had determined to enter a war if the enemies dared to intercept” the rocket, he was quoted as saying in the program, which showed him and his father visiting the control center during the test. [N.Y. Times, Choe Sang-Hun]

What does all of this really mean?  It means that for its own domestic reasons, North Korea won’t be ready for Agreed Framework III for at least another year, and in any case, corresponding domestic reasons mean the same thing for the United States.

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Over the weekend, while watching the GOP debates, I watched John Huntsman (if you haven’t heard of him, he’s running for Secretary of State) talking about the importance of managing our relations with China.  This caused me to ask myself to what extent Huntsman is really an authority on the topic.  What, for example, has Mr. Huntsman accomplished toward, say, finally getting UNHCR access to North Korean refugees or the places where they’re forced to hide out?  Aren’t we at least entitled to expect an effective diplomat to persuade China to violate U.N. sanctions resolutions a little less flagrantly?

An examination of U.N. and Chinese trade data reveals that exports to North Korea of products including cars, tobacco, laptops, cellphones and domestic electrical appliances all increased significantly over the last five years. Most items crossed the border from China.  The data reveal glaring loopholes in the sanctions regime, demonstrating how China has stepped in as the main supplier of goods considered luxuries in North Korea as other countries have clamped down on such exports.  [….]
[A]nalysts and diplomats believe the sanctions are ineffective, largely because the U.N. allowed member states to decide which products they consider luxury items. China agreed to comply, but permits exports of many products widely considered luxuries by the U.S., the European Union, Japan and others, which have halted or restricted exports of them. Other items reach North Korea through smuggling, especially over the Chinese border. [WSJ, Jeremy Page]

Of course, I don’t believe for a minute that Romney or any of the rest of them are likely to freeze the assets of the Chinese companies that are doing this, as much as I’d like to.  This, kids, may be the most important thing I’ve learned since I’ve come to Washington:  the educated pessimism that elections seldom result in significant changes to policies that aren’t a matter of intense public controversy.

The other educated pessimism that Washington didn’t have to teach me is about the reporter’s bonus commentary about the lighter side of North Korea starving its people to buy luxuries for its 1%.  Price waxes about how these violations could transform North Korea’s new “entrepreneurial” class, which strikes me as a conflation of real entrepreneurs (who buy their cars and iPods) with corrupt regime cronies (who get them as gifts from other regime officials).  Sure, there’s a degree of overlap.  In North Korea, people who gain their wealth primarily through trading still need political protection.  But the funding source and the method of receipt are key distinctions.  To the extent the items are smuggled in, I agree that their introduction is actually a positive development.  The state isn’t deciding who gets them, and the state isn’t buying those luxuries instead of, say, corn or infant formula.  If people who accumulate wealth solely through trading are accessing smuggled goods, it means that the underground market continues to respond to economic demand.  But those items presumably wouldn’t show up in Chinese trade statistics.  The items that do show up are paid for by money that is deducted from what the regime spends to import food for its people.  The positive impact they may have on getting new information into the hands of a few regime loyalists is more than offset by the suffering caused by that misallocation of resources.  Further, Page underestimates the degree to which these loyalists, including those exposed to “forbidden” products and ideas, will defend the regime to the end because they know how badly the end of the regime will affect them.

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Speaking of refugees, 20 of them have been arrested in Shenyang.  What will follow is the full cooperation of the ChiCom authorities in sending them across the border to a grim fate in their homeland.  In “ordinary” times, that would have meant torture, interrogation, and then a slow death in a place like Chongo-ri.  But with Kim Jong Eun’s new crackdown, it might mean an immediate trip to the firing squad.

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According to something called the Big News Network, a Japanese journalist is writing a book based on his correspondence with Kim Jong Nam:

According to The Japan Times, in an email in January after Kim Jong Il’s funeral, Kim Jong Nam voiced his opposition to the hereditary succession system that led to his younger brother, Kim Jong Un, being appointed North Korea’s new leader.

According to Gomi, Kim Jong Nam also said that the existing power group would continue to hold the reins of power and plans to use the new, young leader as a symbol of North Korea.

Kim Jong Nam also said Kim Jong Il had remarked he wouldn’t let any of his sons take power.

HT:  Theresa.

In North Korea, a new Kim may be in command but the same old human rights violations are still in play, including a renewed lethal crackdown on defectors, according to South Korean media reports.

Weeks after 20-something Kim Jong Un assumed power following his father Kim Jong Il’s sudden death by heart attack last month, border guards have begun shooting down would-be defectors who try to flee the impoverished nation, the reports said.  [….]

The JoongAng Daily said Kim Jong Un ordered “immediate executions when people are caught trying to cross the borders.” There were also reports that Kim gave the order to a special security squad of the Korean People’s Army under his direct control, authorizing them to shoot defectors on the spot.  [….]

Pyongyang has banned the use of foreign currency in markets, even the Chinese yuan, the monetary unit of North Korea’s biggest supporter, according to the Daily NK, a website monitoring the North. Pyongyang has also jammed cellphone calls across the porous China border, the website said.  [L.A. Times]

But even before Kim Jong Il died, the regime had been cracking down on cell phones.

“Those caught using Chinese handphones are being viewed as agents selling out the country’s secrets,” said a source in Hyesan, Yanggang province. “They are being sent to political prison camps and their families forcibly expelled.”

The 47-year-old man surnamed Kim, believed to be a former agent of the North’s military intelligence unit, was charged with entering South Korea in June last year on a mission of pro-North espionage, according to the prosecutors.  [….]

Questioning by prosecutors revealed that Kim had accepted the spy agency’s suggestion to defect to the South for espionage activities while he was serving a 99-month disciplinary term for drug smuggling and human trafficking, which he committed during his previous work at the agency.

But the man appears not to have gotten far before the South Koreans caught him.  South Korea has had similarly bad experience recruiting spies in military prisons.  I wonder why the North Koreans haven’t learned from that mistake.

A new, more austere U.S. defense strategy unveiled Thursday gives up on fighting major wars overseas and reduces active-duty troops from 570,000 to 470,000. The aim is to cut more than US$450 billion in defense spending over the next decade.  The new strategy would make it virtually impossible for the U.S. military to fulfill a pledge to South Korea to deploy 690,000 troops on the Korean Peninsula in an emergency.

An 80-year-old Sapporo man released by North Korea after his arrest last year said he went there with two other Japanese men to obtain counterfeit U.S. currency, according to Hokkaido police. [….]  The man was released in April but the other two–a company executive, 42, from Tokyo and a company employee, 32, from Chiba Prefecture–are still being held in the suburbs of Pyongyang.

[T]he three entered North Korea on March 14 with the help of a company employee at a fisheries company based in Rason, North Korea.  The next day, they received fake 100 dollars bills in a paper bag together with a small amount of drugs from two men introduced by the man at a Rason hotel. When the Japanese company executive was holding bills up to a light to check their quality, North Korean police stepped into the room and arrested them, according to the Hokkaido police.  [….]

The three developed the plan with An via international calls and took about 7 million yen and 50,000 dollars in cash to North Korea to finance their deal. They planned to buy fake U.S. bills and bring them back to Japan in shrimp cans, according to the police. [Yomiuri Shimbun]

Why would North Korean cops arrest supernote smugglers?  The least plausible explanation is that North Korea has developed a sudden new interest in adhering to international laws and norms.  A more plausible explanation is that these particular cops weren’t in cahoots with these particular smugglers, and saw an opportunity to shake them down, and/or disrupt the plans of a competing regime faction.  It’s also possible that like North Korea’s dope industry, a business that the state originally set up for itself is now leaking into the flourishing black market.

Recognizing that it’s still a bit early to say, all signs point to a dreary consistency, or worse, in North Korea’s policies toward Earth and its various political subdivisions.  Whoever is really in charge in Pyongyang now still wants South Korea’s money, intends to keep building nukes and missiles, and still sees no reason why South Korean money should compel them to change any of their other policies or aggressive behaviors.  A fresh report says that North Korean border guards shot and killed three more would-be refugees after the announcement of Kim Jong-Eun’s coronation.

You expect a high degree of consistency during a dynastic imperial transition of power in an absolute oligarchy, though admittedly, the post-Enlightenment world has sparse precedent for such things. Prof. Sung Yoon-Lee summarizes some of the better causes for pessimism here:

Today’s stakeholders in the Kim regime have a strong incentive to retain the same privileges tomorrow. Hence, they will likely support Kim Jong-il’s chosen one in the short run and advocate for what has worked well in the past—repression at home and extortion from abroad. This means reinforced control over the basic freedoms of the North Korean people and military provocations against South Korea and the United States in the coming year.  [Prof. Sung-Yoon Lee, National Bureau of Asian Research]

But consistency is one thing.  It’s quite another to use your first post-coronation statement of national policy to go out of your way to burn bridges:

On this occasion, we solemnly declare with confidence that foolish politicians around the world, including the puppet forces in South Korea, should not expect any changes from us,” a broadcaster on state television said on Friday.  [….]

“We will never engage with the Lee Myung-bak administration,” said the announcer.  “The sea of bloody tears from our military and people will follow the puppet regime until the end. The tears will turn into a sea of revengeful fire that burns everything.”  [Reuters]

A new leadership that was open to evolving toward a less hostile, less isolated, more productive posture would not have seen the need to say this. And given the tendency of South Koreans and Americans to pay vast sums based on the most vaporous hopes of potential reform, one wonders why North Korea doesn’t do that small service for the Selig Harrisons of the world.

In fact, the evidence we have in front of us now suggests that the only recent dramatic change in North Korea’s posture occurred in 2010, with North Korea’s direct attacks against South Korea on a scale unprecedented since 1968, if not 1953. Both were foreshadowed by North Korea’s 2009 declination of the olive branch President Obama probably intended to extend, and with its missile and nuclear tests.  One of several possibilities this suggests is that the people in charge of North Korea now may well have been in charge of North Korea by 2009, following the power vacuum created by Kim Jong Il’s stroke.  Kim Jong Il’s several visits to China and his meeting with Bill Clinton suggest that he eventually recovered to a certain degree, but the turn of North Korea’s policy in a radically aggressive direction coincides with reports that Jang Song Thaek, Kim Kyong Hui, and their dauphin Kim Jong Eun postured themselves to take over North Korea in 2009.  This suggests that Jang is at least a supporter (if not an architect) of North Korea’s more aggressive posture.  And if anyone were looking for a figurehead to symbolize the potential for reform, he could have groomed first son Kim Jong Nam, not the third son who (so the rumor has it) likes bondage porn and torturing small animals, and whose commerce with the wider world made little academic impression on him.

Of course, the left may well win South Korea’s next election, and North Korea could decide to “engage” with the new South Korean regime.  The signs suggest, however, that this engagement would be on the same extortionist terms that North Korea set in its engagement with the DJ and Roh administrations — no appreciable reform, limited and isolated investments generating cash for the regime’s own priorities, and a cessation of direct armed attacks only as long as the money continues to flow.  Significantly for the U.S., it would not mean an end to North Korea’s proliferation.  In the past, however, this primary U.S. security interest has always been subordinated to South Korean security interests.

I have advocated no dramatic policy changes toward North Korea for the present.  This is more about optics than expectations, however.  Perish the thought that some knave should argue, for purposes of the next South Korean election, that conservative policies in the U.S. and South Korea threw North Korea off a reformist track.  The premise of this theory is possible, I suppose, but not really plausible. Judging by the state propaganda machine’s limited progress toward deifying Kim Jong Eun, Kim Jong Il probably died a year or two before Jang Song Thaek expected.  Still, the general direction of North Korea’s succession has been fairly clear for two years.  Of course, I have no idea what specific outrages North Korea will carry out or abstain from next, other than the everyday ones that we’ve mostly quit thinking about.  All I offer are ways to influence North Korea’s pavlovian calculus over the long term.  Prof. Lee expects to see more provocations sooner, and his argument for that expectation seems likely and is worth reading in full.  But there would not have been equally good arguments for that outcome in 2009 and 2010, and those provocations so outperformed even the most pessimistic predictions that they were tantamount to a limited unilateral war.  That’s really my point.  Some people will want to see reasons for hope in North Korea’s transition.  But for now, those hopes lack a basis in the available evidence.  Thankfully, we’ve seen relatively few of them so far.  I may even be arguing against a straw man.  If that changes, I may find time to revisit the topic.  But for the foreseeable future, I don’t expect to find much time to write here, and the light blogging will resume again.

Recall that the Associated Press was taken in by an altered KCNA image several months ago, just after a splashy announcement that it was entering into an agreement with KCNA that allowed it to station a correspondent in Pyongyang and use KCNA content.  Some of the reporting from the AP’s Jean H. Lee that followed seemed to reflect either an unhealthy sympathy for the regime or a degree of ideological captivity engendered by the new relationship.  I haven’t seen anything so questionable under Lee’s byline since then.  That time, the apparent objective was to make North Korea’s floods seem worse than they really were to gain foreign sympathy and aid.  This time, the apparent objective is to portray a regimented image of North Korean society.  A good starting point for analysis is to suspect the opposite of whatever illusion this regime projects.  Casual observers of North Korea are usually taken in by the images of discipline, obedience, and adoration.  Those who watch North Korea more carefully — and this knowledge is what tends to set them apart from the former group — know that life outside of Pyongyang increasingly totters on the edge of anarchy.

Late word is that another photograph of the funeral, this one distributed by the AP (courtesy of KNCA) has come under suspicion for the unnatural size of a lone soldier standing behind a formation of soldiers.