Must-read: Myers (again) and Noland on the ethics of engagement

Brian Myers isn’t finished making his argument that “engagement” transforms its foreign participants more than it transforms North Korea.

The [Associated Press’s] presence in Pyongyang is a good example, I think. Its staff is too afraid of losing access even to test the limits of what can be said, so the regime gets the image benefit of hosting foreign reporters without having to worry about negative consequences. Whether those contacts are moral or immoral is a much more difficult question to answer in a generalizing manner. [Global Post]

You really just have the read the whole thing. And like Myers, I lived in South Africa during the apartheid regime (the final days of it, in my case), so his comparison to South Africa also resonated with me.

I was in an all-white high school in South Africa at the time, and it’s funny: I don’t remember foreigners advocating more engagement with the white elite. I saw no busloads of American college kids bowing at the Voortrekker Monument. If you broke the boycott, you were reviled, as Freddie Mercury found out. And no one said, “The boycott hasn’t worked yet, ergo it never will.” They knew it would take time. 

Myers makes one point that seems off-key when he insists that his argument is “not a moral one.” Myers is oddly silent about what it is about North Korea’s conduct that troubles him, but a central theme of his book is that North Korea’s ideology is racist. But this charge itself is morally radioactive, as are his (defensible) comparisons to Nazi Germany or apartheid-era South Africa. Indeed, the best passages in Myers’s arguments are his dissections of the self-serving moral defenses of engagement, and his illustrations of their hypocrisy. Even so, the vast majority of it is so spot-on, and so deftly written, that I hope to see more of it. Myers is the single best writer who is talking about North Korea today. Judging by the tone of Joel Wit’s reaction alone, he is forcing people to think about the ethical implications of what they advocate, and in ways that make them deeply uncomfortable.

After you’ve read Myers’s piece, don’t miss Marcus Noland’s follow-up commentary, which also hits the South Africa analogy hard. Noland ends up calling for engagement, but subject to tighter labor standards that are intended to force changes on the North Korean system. It’s a tempting idea, because it has the potential to be transformational, but it also raises some familiar questions. Wouldn’t North Korea simply refuse to accept such conditions and partner itself with Chinese and (sadly) South Korean investors, who are unfettered by such ethical constraints? Would setting labor standards come at the price of overlooking other standards, such as requirements for financial transparency imposed (but not enforced) by U.N. Security Council resolutions?

And at the end of the day, doesn’t all engagement with the regime do more to finance and maintain the isolation of the North Korean people than to erode it? All that barbed wire and surveillance equipment costs money, after all, and North Korea works on a strict pay-for-play system. The regime has more information about the relative costs, profits, and end-uses of these transactions than any partner or investor. Rest assured that it allows those transactions to happen for a reason.

To me, all of the justifications for engaging North Korea through its regime sound disingenuous, and not just because of the lack of evidence that engaging the regime has done any good. If engagement is supposed to transform North Korean society, why advocate the most controlled and compromised forms of interaction? After all, engagement that bypasses the regime really is transforming North Korean society and improving the lives of its people. Why not, for example, advocate setting up NGOs and microcredit banks to facilitate and finance cross-border trade in food, consumer goods, DVDs, flash drives loaded with books and newspapers, or escaping refugees?* Or teach those refugees life skills or English? Or help them establish small businesses in South Korea? Or train refugees to return to North Korea as midwives, nurses, doctors, journalists, mechanics, and arbitrators, or help provide them with a steady income and supplies of medicine? Or apply their technological savvy to giving North Koreans an affordable and undetectable way to call each other from city to city, province to province, and country to country?

The simplest answer may be that no one will get rich this way, but another is that no one who advocates these things will be welcome in Pyongyang for long (he might even end up like Ken Bae). Instead, they choose to interact with an infinitesimal number of handpicked and carefully indoctrinated regime operatives, many of whom are no doubt working for the state’s intelligence services. If the majority of engagement advocates aren’t primarily motivated by the justification they claim, it’s time to look for other motivations.

* Lankov, who advocates trade with the regime, stands mostly alone in that he also advocates these non-permissive forms of engagement. Because he advocates “whatever works,” rather than only what doesn’t, his motives don’t come into question.