Open Sources, 11 September 2012
LEVI AMMUNDSEN IS BIKING ACROSS NORTH AMERICA to raise awareness about human rights in North Korea. Ammundsen attributes his inspiration to Blaine Harden’s “Escape from Camp 14.”
MICHAEL TOTTEN watches the ascendancy of the Salafists from Syria’s formerly non-violent, pro-democratic protest movement and concludes, “I’d like to sketch a plausible endgame for Syria that isn’t horrifying, but it gets harder and harder each month.” I’d add that the longer it takes us to identify and empower the least offensive elements of the Syrian opposition, the more horrifying the outcome is likely to be.
WHEN ANDREI LANKOV AND I DEBATED the evidence for North Korean reform recently, he added that serious reforms would also cause the collapse of the regime (Andrei has a new blog, so be sure to bookmark it). At the time, I agreed, but the more I think about it, the less sure I am that I still do. For all the speculation about economic reform in North Korea, no one is suggesting that North Korea is considering political reform or disarmament. We tend to associate reform with the collapse of totalitarian systems because that’s how it worked out in 1989, but the reforms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were both economic and political. The specific trigger was probably the Polish election that Solidarity was “allowed” to win, signaling (just as the Soviets were withdrawing from Afghanistan in defeat) the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine. In the space of a few months, the coiled springs of 1953, 1956, and 1968 were released. Things didn’t work that way in China, which had a short internal debate about political reform and then ended it with a massacre. China’s economic reforms pacified the people to a degree, and also enriched the regime enough to make it a world power and buy all the internet monitoring software it has needed to suppress political reform for a quarter of a century and counting.
Among most North Korea watchers, the accepted wisdom is that economic reform is the gateway to peace, disarmament, and the relaxation of North Korea’s internal oppression, at least enough to shut people like me up while investors rush to enrich in the system (for the greater good, they’ll assure us). But what if economic reform is actually the gateway to a more dangerous and persistent North Korean threat? I ask this because despite while everyone seems to be watching Ri Sol-Ju’s fashions, the IAEA is worried about North Korea’s accelerating nuclear programs, something I suspect we’d be hearing more about if we had a Republican President right now. Similarly, North Korea’s chemical weapons proliferation threat hasn’t abated. Lest we forget, North Korea’s political system seems to have as little regard for human life as ever. North Korea’s disarmament commitments have short half lives (remember this?) but its most conciliatory moments came in 2005 and 2006, as the Treasury Department’s sanctions posed a threat to the regime’s survival. So if North Korea’s amenability to diplomacy is inversely proportional to its economic security, should we really wish it success with economic reform? Could North Korea reform its economy just enough to become more dangerous, oppressive, and intractable than ever? If North Korea is reforming at all, that’s almost certainly its objective.
As regards the reform and DPRK biological weapons questions, KCNA put out something on Sept. 12 that addressed both pretty directly, along with a little commentary on the US elections. Incidentally, have you or any of your readers heard a peep from Evan Feigenbaum or other Romney East Asia advisers as regards North Korea? Seems to be a non-issue in the campaign thus far.
http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2012/201209/news12/20120912-17ee.html
KCNA Commentary Lambastes U.S. Logic of “Disarming DPRK” and “Bringing down Its System” //Pyongyang, September 12 (KCNA)
— U.S. Secretary of State Hillary again cried out for “changes” and “reforms and opening” in the DPRK….Her remarks are nothing but rhetoric urging the DPRK to make a “policy change” such as “abandonment of nuclear weapons” and opt for “reform and opening” allegedly aimed at “improving the standard of people’s living and recovering the economy” and calling for intensifying the offensive against the DPRK to pressurize it to do so.
…New voices such as “concern over north Korea’s possible use of bio-weapons” are heard one after another.
The commitments to the policy toward the DPRK made by the ruling and opposition parties of the U.S. and their candidates in the run-up to the presidential election are enough to prove this.
The Democratic Party of the U.S. in its new political guidelines said that “north Korea should take a crucial option: to take a verifiable step for denuclearization or pay a dear price after being further isolated in the international community.”
The same can be said of the Republican Party side. It went the lengths of talking about even “steps after the collapse of the DPRK” in the wake of openly setting it as the target of its policy to “disarm the DPRK.”