Washington’s “Conventional Wisdom” About North Korea Is an Oxymoron

Professor Sung Yoon Lee, writing in the Asia Times, says:

[T]he North Korean regime is in the midst of the most serious internal political challenge in nearly 20 years. Facing severe economic stresses, increasing infiltration of information into North Korea, ever more North Koreans attempting to defect to the South, and the challenge of handing over power to an unproven son only in his twenties, the allegedly ailing North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, must wrestle with profound questions of regime preservation as time runs out.

Here lies a rare opportunity for policymakers in Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo to accelerate and effect positive changes in the North Korean regime. Engaging the North Korean people rather than the regime through information operations and facilitating defection, while constricting Pyongyang’s cash flow, is the best means to that end. It’s also important for Washington to hold quiet consultations with Beijing to envision and prepare jointly for a unified Korea under Seoul’s initiative, a new polity that will necessarily remain free, peaceful, capitalist, pro-US and pro-China.

Bingo. And what better window of opportunity will we have than the nepotist succession of a 27 year-old kid in a society that reveres age and battle experience, and which at least purports to be different from its feudal predecessors?

It’s gratifying to see someone of greater consequence than, say, some crank with a blog circulating ideas that have real promise, rather than the same old crap that’s failed and failed again. This is pretty much what the Council on Foreign Relations recently gave us — a lot of has-beens and wrung-out minds repeating and re-writing unoriginal proposals that haven’t been plausible since 1997. Don Kirk is a bit more generous than me:

Perhaps the most unrealistic aspect of the report is the blind faith placed on China as a potentially faithful partner in restraining North Korea. The task force “calls for a US strategic dialogue with China to discuss the future of the peninsula”, in order to, ” clear misunderstanding, build trust”. China does not want anything to happen that might create instability on the Korean Peninsula, and the record shows that the Chinese are not going to cooperate with the US on getting tough on North Korea.

Considering some of the well-known figures involved in this report, one has trouble understanding why they settled on such tired cliches. The problem may be that the task force members represented different strands of thinking on North Korea, and they had to synthesize their viewpoints.

If the CFR report was meant to be helpful advice to the President, and I believe it has those delusions of grandeur, then its authors might consider that no advice is less helpful than, “Don’t just stand there, do something.” That’s really what the CFR’s report amounts to. It offers nothing that hasn’t been tried and conclusively refuted by recent events. Yet these people, my ex-theater commander among them, have the nerve to expect the rest of us to think of them as a brain trust of some sort.

I’d like to see Professor Lee develop his own proposals a bit further. They might just stimulate more productive conversations in a town that, not far below the surface, knows it has run out of ideas. My only quibble is that Lee cites the higher, uncorrected figure for U.S. casualties in the Korean War that includes non-theater deaths. But I can’t think of a better way to honor these men than to complete their victory for the lowest possible cost in lives.