Götterdämmerung Watch

Today, I catch up with KCJ and the rest of you who’ve commented on Kurt Achin’s intriguing new VOA report on the prospects for regime collapse:

For the first time in years, international experts say North Korea’s isolated government is increasingly frail, and potentially unstable. Part of the reason, they say, is Pyongyang’s attempt at currency reform last year. [….]

“I think there’s some increasing views in Seoul that after 20 years of wrongly predicting the demise of North Korea, there’s something going on in Pyongyang,” said Gordon Flake. “There are a growing number of people in South Korea who say that we’re getting close to the end game here.”

Among them are Andrei Lankov, a scholar at Seoul’s Kookmin University, who is quite blunt about the prospects of a North Korean collapse. “It’s a very likely probability,” said Andrei Lankov. “And personally, if you ask me, I don’t believe there is going to be a peaceful, gradual end of the North Korean regime. It will be dramatic, and probably violent.” [VOA, Kurt Achin]

It’s interesting that I was speaking with Lankov about this very topic over coffee just a week ago. I asked Andrei what he thinks has gotten into the North Koreans recently. We agreed that financial and political desperation, and posturing for succession, are reasonable explanations, but Lankov raised a possibility that had never even occurred to me: that Kim Jong Il hasn’t been himself, mentally speaking, since the stroke. That’s a fairly frightening thing to contemplate.

I’m going to have much, much more to say about this topic soon enough. I spent the better part of last weekend writing a whole manifesto about this topic while attending to a sick kid. The short version is that changes in North Korea’s internal political situation and external behavior call for new thinking by the United States and South Korea. Unfortunately, I’ve come to the conclusion that the North Koreans still aren’t in a position to overthrow their government because they still have no means to organize against it, and because the military would open fire on any mass demonstrations. The people need our help to organize and coalesce around a better idea. Once a political underground takes root, they may be able to do the rest on their own. An optimist would say that a few dramatic shows of force would be enough to split the security forces or shift China’s thinking about its sponsorship. A pessimist would say that catalyzing Götterdämmerung would require a bloody period of insurgency, mutiny, and anarchy. I still posit that it would be less bloody than a continuation of the status quo, or what could happen if the regime fully recovers its capacity to repress.