Götterdämmerung Watch: Evan Ramstad and Aidan Foster-Carter

It is now possible to say that a new consensus is emerging that the North Korean regime’s stability is in doubt. The latest article to strike this tone is from Evan Ramstad in the Wall Street Journal:

North Korea’s authoritarian regime appears to be weakening and the prospect of its collapse is being discussed anew by longtime observers, though there is still a broad debate about when that could happen. [Wall Street Journal, Evan Ramstad]

You’re on your own from there, unless you’re a subscriber, but it’s worth reading.

Aidan Foster-Carter recites a history of Kim Jong Il’s political and economic malpractice, registers the increasingly evident effects of this, and concludes that “North Korea has run out of road; the game is finally up.” As is so often the case with North Korea, you have to wonder what else but pure spite could motivate such stupidity as trying to create a favorable balance of payments by specializing in things that are either illegal or just plain nasty:

[M]orality aside, it is stupid policy. Pariahs stay poor. North Korea could earn far more by going straight. The Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC), where South Korean businesses employ Northern workers to make a range of goods, shows that co-operation can work. Yet Pyongyang keeps harassing it, imposing arbitrary border restrictions and demanding absurd wage hikes.

Now it threatens to seize $370m (€275m, £247m) of South Korean assets at Mount Kumgang, a tourist zone idle since a southern tourist was shot dead in 2008 and the north refused a proper investigation. Even before that, Pyongyang’s greed in extorting inflated fees from Hyundai ensured that no other chaebol has ventured north. Contrast how China has gained from Taiwanese investment. [Aidan Foster-Carter, Financial Times]

And I’m with Aidan right up until he writes this:

China is quietly moving into North Korea, buying up mines and ports. Some in Seoul cry colonialism, but it was they who created this vacuum by short-sightedly ditching the past decade’s “sunshine” policy of patient outreach. President Lee Myung-bak may have gained the Group of 20 chairmanship, but he has lost North Korea.

I’m generally a big fan of Foster-Carter’s, but … wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that Kim Jong Il was the one who ditched Sunshine? (And to say that Lee “lost” North Korea rather ridiculously suggests that Roh Moo Hyun ever “had” it.) Lee certainly did insist, early on, that the unrestricted flow of the taxpayers’ cash to North Korea must be conditioned on real progress in nuclear disarmament, but that cash bought South Korea no perceptible equity in North Korea itself, it merely sustained the regime and bought superficial quiet (while funding WMD development). Lee also insisted, quite commendably, that humanitarian aid must henceforth be monitored, so that it would actually serve a humanitarian purpose.

But when I think “Sunshine,” I usually associate that term with Kaesong and Kumgang. Foster-Carter himself has accurately described the reasons for the demise of Kaesong, so there’s nothing I need to add to that. As for Kumgang, it would still be running today had North Korea not shot and killed Park Wang-Ja, and then refused to cooperate in an inquiry into her death or guarantee the safety of other South Korean citizens.

All the while, China has been increasing its stake in North Korea to an extent South Korea would never have been permitted. China, after all, does not represent an existential threat to the legitimacy of Kim’s rule. North Korea may see it as a threat — as it sees all foreign influence as threats — but Chinese in North Korea were never so carefully contained as South Koreans in North Korea. Indeed, it was during the Sunshine years that China began to buy up North Korean mines and ports in earnest. Arguably, the best ways to break that trend are to fracture the regime that permits it, raise the political risk of investing in North Korea, foment anti-Chinese nationalism in North Korea, and make it clear that investment agreements negotiated with an unaccountable regime will be subject to renegotiation after unification.