Diplomacy, Hubris, and the ‘Management’ of Sociopaths

The United States warned North Korea Tuesday that any testing of its longest-range missile would be seen as “provocative,” amid signs the reclusive Stalinist state could be preparing a launch.

“North Korea’s missile activities and, you know, missile programs are a concern to the region. There’s no secret there,” said State Department spokesman Robert Wood.

“And a ballistic missile launch by North Korea would be unhelpful and, frankly, provocative.” [AFP]

Who believes that a statement like this is anything other than exactly the reaction that the North Korean regime seeks? With that point unworthy of further discussion, let me turn to one of the most profound sentences I’ve read for some time, courtesy of a writer and a site I’d never even heard of until yesterday. This will all fit together soon enough:

Put differently, the graveyards of Srebenica and Kigali are testaments to a foreign policy determined to manage problems out of the headlines, rather than out of existence. [Christopher Badeaux, The New Ledger]

Badeaux doesn’t spare the Bush Administration from the same criticism, and this should have a very familiar ring to careful observers of the Clinton and Bush administrations’ policies toward North Korea. The only difference among the mostly continuous policies of the last four administrations is relatively more or less aversion to propping up a regime as repellent as any since Pol Pot’s (which, some insist, is beside the point). But the similarities are far greater than the mostly superficial differences. Recent U.S. policies have been focused on the conclusion of agreements that did little to control North Korea’s nuclear armament or proliferation, but both of the last two administrations congratulated themselves lavishly for illusory crisis management that their successors had/will have have to continue managing, only under progressively greater disadvantages. No American president ever made a serious effort to recognize and address with the root of the problem: the fount of the regime’s hostility, mendacity, opacity, and complete disregard for the standards by which the rest of humanity lives, mostly anyway. By missing that essential point, Americans perceived no better solutions than to tug at different loops of the Gordian Knot.

The same unquestioned assumption afflicts most of those who write our news and shape our opinions. Most of the pulp pundits who are paid to write about newsworthy topics — including, occasionally, North Korea — see North Korea as just another problem that can be “managed,” and who attribute each new crisis to an insufficiency of American attention, effort, and “management.” Unfortunately, very few of those writers understand anything about how North Korea’s leaders think and act, and few possess the intellectual depth to process even insufficient facts into rational conclusions. Possibly the only writer who understands the political ethos and motives of Kim Jong Il and his minions, and who can describe them with insight and eloquence, is B.R. Myers, who recently wrote:

To hope that a new administration in Washington can build trust with the North Koreans where their most sympathetic blood-brethren have so abjectly failed would be to take American exceptionalism to a new extreme. Let us hope that in his effort to avoid repeating George W. Bush’s mistakes, Obama does not simply end up repeating Kim Dae Jung’s. [B.R. Myers, The Atlantic]

In defiance of decades of evidence to the contrary, the hubris of “managing” North Korea begins by assuming that the root of the problem is North Korea’s country’s poverty and isolation. This belief system vascillates between believing that North Korea only wants to be left alone (on human rights and proliferation), or to be loved and accepted (economically) with all its faults. All of this is based on a misdiagnosis of the very cause of that poverty and isolation, but it has the convenience of placing the burden on America to “manage,” and to continue its pursuit of endlessly vanishing horizons. Too few understand that at the root of the isolation, the poverty, the proliferation, the atrocities, and the state terrorism is a state sociopathy that has nullified every standard of humanity — most noticeably, the very value of human life — except those that conform to the regime’s convenience. This is not symptomatic of anything else, it is existential to everything else. If we think we can manage that, we’re only fooling ourselves.

Badeaux’s interest is clearly focused on China, and because he makes some points of potentially incalculable significance that I haven’t seen expressed elsewhere, I will close with them. I wish I knew enough about the topic to confirm or deny, but they sound plausible and consistent with other things I’ve heard from sources I believe. If they’re true, they amount to very bad news for Taiwan, for Korea, and for the United States:

Most Americans have no idea that somewhere on the order of ten percent (according to official government figures, which in turn probably means closer to fifteen percent) of Chinese are migrant workers, moving from rural homes to work in factories and other blue collar jobs in the coastal cities. In other words, scores of millions of Chinese are basically rootless, and for the last fifteen years have put bread to mouth by moving between the booming areas of China and doing whatever jobs needed to be done. Those people have only not become wandering mobs because of the booming economy, which of course went ka-boom a few months ago.

The results are terrifying. According to official Chinese figures — which are usually only half to three-quarters as bad as the truth — twenty million of the country’s migrant workers “have returned home,” by which they mean, have fled the coastal areas and relocated in the rural areas that could not support them when they left. Given that the number is probably more like thirty million, to put this in perspective for Americans, imagine that the entire population of the Houston Metropolitan Area simply packed up and headed to Nebraska and resettled there. Now imagine that those people generally don’t have cars and instead have to rely on an unreliable train system; that they don’t have the money to buy all of the food and water they need on the way and once they get there; and that even if they did, the infrastructure and the resources to supply them simply don’t exist.

All of this, in the first six months of a global recession which shows no signs of ending soon. Against the backdrop of a rapidly slowing economy — official Chinese estimates put growth down to nine percent per annum, which probably means that China is at or near a recession — China’s internal stability and the cool decision making that come with it are in doubt. This comes well in advance of the demographic bomb awaiting China in less than ten years. [Christopher Badeaux]

Who is this person and why haven’t I ever heard of him? Who else senses a great disturbance in The Force that so many more readers/listeners consume the superficial, unoriginal, third-grade-level “thoughts” of, say, Joe Klein, Daniel Froomkin, or Sean Hannity than this writer?