Sung-Yoon Lee: Why do we appease N. Korea?

Professor Lee recounts the long history of North Korea committing outrages against peace, international order, and every standard of human civilization, and of American presidents of both parties doing approximately nothing about it.

Pyongyang’s countless provocations since the Korean War have never set off a meaningful punitive response. Even in egregious cases like assassination attempts against South Korean leaders or the shooting down of an American reconnaissance plane in international airspace in 1969, the United States and its allies have answered with restraint.

Since the early 1990s, American presidents have treated the growing threat of the North Korean nuclear program as a priority — but one to be dealt with later. North Korea’s deep poverty and the apparent clownish nature of its leaders have sustained the illusion that its nuclear program could be bought out, the regime itself could be waited out, and that its largely concealed crimes against humanity could be tuned out.
While the United States has vacillated between expedient deals, halfhearted sanctions, pleas to China for greater intervention and doing nothing, the North has methodically advanced its nuclear arsenal and missile capacity.

[….]

Through each of Pyongyang’s tests, American policy makers have harbored the hope that Beijing would come around and put real pressure on the regimes of Kim Jong-un and his father, Kim Jong-il. But all Beijing has done is demonstrate a disingenuous pattern of diplomatic ambidexterity. China has made token gestures like signing on to United Nations Security Council resolutions while failing to enforce them fully, and at times even increasing trade with Pyongyang.

Although most North Koreans are cut off from the global economy, the regime elite remains beholden to international finance for moving proceeds from weapons trafficking. Pyongyang’s international currency of choice is the United States dollar.
North Korea is the only state known to counterfeit dollars as a matter of state policy. And the United States has largely declined to go after the Kim regime’s money trail because of concerns that doing so would push Pyongyang to escalate its provocations. The United States has also mostly shied away from imposing sanctions on the regime’s Chinese partners. [NYT, Sung-Yoon Lee]

Read the whole thing. For all its tough talk, the Trump administration shows little sign of implementing the tough policy it has articulated. It’s increasingly conspicuous to close observers that this administration has imposed no sanctions or taken any perceptible action to execute its “maximum pressure” since Xi Jinping came to Mar-a-Lago and confirmed his intention to turn Korea into its next semi-autonomous ethnic reservation. Trump is now in danger of falling into the same pattern as his predecessors, at a time when we can no longer afford to wait for some other president to solve this problem. By then, an extortionate, mass-murdering crime syndicate will have the means to nuke Seattle, its hegemony over a consensually finlandized South Korea will be functionally irreversible, and no sensible leader would ever trust America as an ally and security guarantor again.

In conclusion, terrorize your neighbors and your critics. Make sure you only let in the most pliable, controllable, and corruptible journalists. Hide your atrocities well — if there’s no video, no one really gives a shit anyway.

[Also, most people still don’t give a shit when there is video.]

Bolster the credentials of the most gullible academics and washed-up, has-been bureaucrats by giving them special, preferential access while denying it to those with the principle and basic common sense call you out. Proliferate with abandon and sell your work to the highest bidder. Keep your proles and peasants hungry. If your model of statecraft doesn’t include providing for them, and if you keep them too famished, isolated, exhausted, and cowed to start downloading plans for DIY Sten guns and shaped charges that might make the local SSD boys hesitate before hauling their families off to the gulag, it’s a winning strategy. After all, we’ve established that international institutions are either apathetic, impotent, or both, and that no democratically elected leader would sacrifice a portion of his domestic political support — such as it is — to challenge that business model.

2 Responses

  1. We will continue to appease North Korea until way more than 40 percent of our society can accurately pinpoint where the Kim dynasty is located on a global map. That day comes when Kim Jong Un shows the world that he can bomb Seattle and beyond with a push of a button.

    Based on failures of the past and the likely failure of the current administration, perhaps the only way to stop the impending Seattle attack is to eliminate Kim Jong Un as soon as possible..

  2. Tillerson has asked Kim Jong Un to “trust” the US and that we are not interested in a “regime change”. This posture, of course, requires for Kim to drop his nuclear weapons ambitions.

    So let me get this straight. So, if Kim does not stop, does this this mean we will change our mind one more freaking time and then will finally advocate for a regime change?

    Kim Jong Un will never drop his nuclear weapons program. We all know this. So let’s stop wasting our time. Let’s start working on getting rid of this fat s.o.b. as the leader of this country that has suffered enough.

    1. Give Moon & Tillerson reasonable amount of time with a deadline to negotiate a deal. Any nuclear and or ICBM testing
    by Kim during this time shall nullify this option.

    2. Enforce current sanctions full and completely (identify the countries, companies and most importantly publish the names of those in charge of these entities in violation) and educate the mass as to what we can do as consumers/citizens in US to put moral and economic pressure.. Secondary and sympathetic violators to be included here.

    3. Start social media campaign to select Kim Jong Un as the worst violator against the humanity in the world.