Richard Halloran Prognosticates on N. Korea Regime Collapse

Halloran knows how many predictions of North Korea’s collapse that have passed unrealized, and  he’s  wise enough to abstain from outright predictions.  Instead, he  walks us through  the factors that make it worthy of urgent-yet-careful planning:

North Korean soldiers in a regime that gives priority to the military forces have been reduced to two skimpy meals a day. Factory workers nap on the floor for lack of food and energy.

That has led to conjecture that North Koreans, despite the pervasive controls in the Hermit Kingdom’s police state, may throw caution to the winds. “We just don’t think they can go along with this much longer,” said an American official with access to intelligence assessments.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington reports that North Korea, after ten years of food shortages, stands on the precipice of famine that could have political consequences. “The possibility of widespread social distress and even political instability,” the institute said in a study, “cannot be ruled out.”

Another study, from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, says: “Dismal economic conditions also foster forces of discontent that potentially could turn against the Kim regime -especially if knowledge of the luxurious lifestyle of communist party leaders becomes better known or as poor economic performance hurts even the elite.”

Even so, an assessment from Jane’s, publisher of security reports, said five years ago: “The only significant power base that might challenge the regime is the military. Since Kim Jong Il became Chairman of the National Defense Commission, however, he has promoted 230 generals. Most of the army’s 1,200-strong general officer corps owes their allegiance to him.” Nothing appears to have changed that judgment-except starvation.  [Richard Halloran, Real Clear Politics]

Let me just run down a very, very broad list of  other risk factors I perceive.   No links; this is from just too many sources for me to distill.

• Hunger has reached Pyongyang, and the regime is thinning out the capital’s population to keep the unhappy people as far away from the regime’s power center as possible.  This is a new and very significant development.
• Another new and destabilizing development is the thinning of North Korea’s ruling classes, and possibly a shift away from “military first.”   The more people you kick out of the lifeboat, the more  you  rock it.  The problem is, there isn’t much  evidence to show that either trend is especially deep.  But if either trend is real, then either could be destabilizing.
• Some military units are probably  experiencing food shortages, although it’s hard to say to what extent those shortages are localized in certain areas or units.  Hunger in the North Korean military is not an entirely new development; what’s unknown is its intensity and pervasiveness this year.  Because North Korean troops are usually assigned to locations far from their native regions and seldom form strong bonds with the people in the areas where they serve, hunger in  a local area has less impact on the morale of garrisons in those areas. 
• There does seem to be more hunger in critical industries, including defense industries, ports, and  North Korea’s remaining mines and steel mills,  than in prior years.
• Food prices spiked in the spring  and have since stablized at levels that many North Koreans still can’t afford.  I would not trust any estimates of how many people have died or will die.  No one has enough access to North Korea to make that assessment.  It does not appear that a large-scale famine  will happen  this year, but conditions will probably continue to worsen for at least another year.
• Pre-harvesting of crops, depletion of wild plants, and the consumption of seed crops mean that next year’s harvest will also be bad, even if the weather isn’t.  I haven’t seen reports that people are slaughtering their draft animals.
• Regime policies restricting trade are responsible for much of the misery, have probably caused considerable public discontent,  and have the potential to cause much more.
• Internal control over information has broken down significantly in the last five years, meaning that the only people who actually believe the myth of the Workers’ Paradise inhabit South Korean dormitories, union halls, and press rooms.  There is probably much more discontent in North Korea than most observers realize.  The question is whether people are desperate or brave enough to do anything about it.
• So far, there have been no reports of large-scale migrations by people seeking food.

Halloran also sees the regime as more isolated than before because the six-party talks are “deadlocked with no end in sight.”  That would be true if the United States continues to demand verification and inspection rights worthy of the name, rights that don’t build in opportunities for the North Koreans to “clean up” suspicious sites before inspectors arrive, or to put others off limits.  I suspect that Chris Hill and like-minded colleagues would love nothing more than to allow for exactly that to get any deal they can.

Pyongyang’s alienation of Seoul is a more serious matter:  South Korean aid  probably played a major role in keeping caviar on  Kim Jong Il’s table and Swiss watches on the wrists of his generals.  President  Lee Myung Bak  has cut that aid dramatically.   No evidence suggests that China has substantially increased its aid to the North to make up for that loss of income.  North Korea may have played out its bait-and-switch game witht Americans.  It  may now be courting the Japanese by “reinvestigating” the suspected abductions of more Japanese to North Korea. 

So far, however, none of this has caused much widespread popular discontent, and the discontent we have seen has been localized in outlying parts of the country.  The food situation is likely to be even worse next year, but that  won’t be destabilizing unless it reaches deep into the military and the ruling class.  That said, I agree with Halloran’s implicit conclusion that collapse is more likely than it has been in the past, although there’s no saying when or how.

Last February,  the ROK government announced that it was updating its contingency plans for “unrest” in the North.  The announcement reversed the policy of the Roh administration to functionally boycott planning for the execution of OPLAN 5029.  If you haven’t yet read CPT Jon Stafford’s Military Review paper on North Korea collapse planning, by all means do so.  Also not to be missed is a similar discussion by Robert D. Kaplan in The Atlantic.