On ‘Strategic Disengagement’

I don’t really know, of course, but what a discussion Richardson has started with one of this blog’s best-written and researched posts (pursued by James, with characteristic excellence, here). The topic: why North Korea would do something so counterproductive to its extortionate, mendacious, highly successful diplomacy as this ballistic tantrum. Richardson believes the main motive to be an intent to isolate itself from the world. He calls this Strategic Disengagement.

I disagree with Richardson’s ultimate conclusion, that Kim Jong Il is intentionally blowing the bridges around his moat. I do not believe it necessarily follows from his main premises, with which I strongly agree: that North Korea must keep its people isolated and will never accept even minimal transparency, because there are too many things it must keep hidden from its own people, and from us, if it is to survive. I have also argued that this regime seeks essential foreign exchange, but never at the cost of allowing the entry of foreign thoughts. If that means rejecting foreign food aid and starving another two million of its people, so be it. This is why I’ve never believed in the reform-through-trade theory (here, Nick Eberstadt’s extensive quotation of the North Koreans is devastating). To me, however, it doesn’t follow that the regime doesn’t also want easy money. I think it needs easy money, and is counting on more easy money. If the effect of this test is to cut off that easy money, it miscalculated.

How to explain that? I could only venture some uneducated guesses whose value would equal the cost of a reader’s subscription to this blog. The entire debate may well be pointless, given how little we know about how (or even by whom) decisions like this are made. From what Kim Jong Il says and what we know of him, he’s impulsive yet calculating, yet neither insane nor stupid (plain English = evil). The fact that behavior is impulsive, of course, doesn’t explain what impulse is being acted upon.

My best guess about the primary motive tracks Nick Eberstadt’s: extortion. If you’re isolated in your palace, with just an internet connection and your pleasure squad to keep you company, odds are that you will do what’s worked for you before. Nothing the United Nations is doing now is proving Kim Jong Il wrong, either, although I’m betting that things will change in a few days.

I also suspect that there’s more to this than extortion alone. For example, if the U.S. financial crackdown has affected Kim’s own lifestyle — an experience I’d gather is new for a guy who, according to Jasper Becker, shot his barber over a bad haircut — it’s possible that he’s just plain pissed off.

Finally, peer pressure may have played a role. I was just rereading some passages of Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times” about the cocooned, radical, and violent psychology of pre-war Japan. Everyone who expressed a moderate view could expect to be assassinated by some young officers’ cabal or secret society. Imperial Japan can be a surprisingly good model or North Korea’s bureacratic psychology. North Korea’s political culture also shows its illegitimate Japanese genes (f’rinstance, the propaganda: pic 2, pic 3, pic 4).

I think there’s an element of this in today’s North Korea, which has at least seven separate and (presumably) competing intel agencies, multiple rent-seeking bureaus in the Workers’ Party, and several branches of the armed forces. Inevitably, each will form tribal hostility toward the others as it competes for the favor of those who control resources and write one-way tickets to the gulag.

It’s an unfortunate fact of bureaucratic life everywhere that this kind of competition often involves obsequiousness, deference, affirmation, and cultivating an appearance of aggressiveness. Now imagine yourself as one of Kim Jong Il’s advisors. What advice do you give? Remember: your life, you wife’s life, and the lives of your children all depend on your answer.