Sue Mi Terry in the New York Times: Let N. Korea Collapse

Writing in The New York Times, Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA Senior Analyst and current Columbia University Senior Research Scholar, calls for the five parties to accept and prepare for the collapse of North Korea. In the process, Terry also gives Park Geun-Hye’s “jackpot” concept a coherence that Park herself never quite could.

Considering all these benefits, the United States and its allies must revise their approach to North Korea. Rather than continue to prop up a government they worry might topple over on its own, they should pursue a tougher version of containment, knowing that that may accelerate the collapse of the Kim regime.

This harder policy would entail trying to cut off all the regime’s illicit sources of revenues, including drug smuggling, currency counterfeiting and exports of military equipment, while expanding sanctions to freeze all of Pyongyang’s overseas bank accounts. The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved legislation along these lines on May 29; that proposal deserves to become law. The United States government should also do more to undermine Pyongyang’s hold on its population by increasing broadcasting by Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. [Sue Mi Terry, New York Times]

To clarify, the objective of H.R. 1771 isn’t necessarily to euthanize the Kim regime, but to alter how North Korea behaves, one way or another. It would be lovely if tougher sanctions could give us the leverage our diplomacy has always lacked to be effective, but we’d have little leverage if we didn’t express our preference to see Kim Jong Un face summary justice by his own people than let him continue to starve and murder them, and to nuke up and proliferate his wares to Iran, Syria, and God-knows-who-else.

Once you’ve read Terry’s New York Times op-ed, read her longer article in Foreign Affairs, starting with its excellent title.

If I have any regret about Terry’s piece, it’s the timing of its publication, as it becomes clear that after winning two wars in Iraq — one to dethrone Saddam Hussein, and one to extirpate Al Qaeda from it — our government has managed to lose the peace there. (Thanks in part to Christopher Hill, who must be the greatest human wrecking ball in the history of American diplomacy. If only I’d warned you. Oh, right.) No doubt, the Times editors were making their final edits to Terry’s work just as Al Qaeda was making its final plans to sack Mosul and slaughter its dispirited defenders.

A simplistic reaction to subsequent events is that enough regimes have collapsed for the time being, and we’re tired. The most thoughtful response this reaction deserves is that Korea is not Iraq. I don’t know Terry’s views on a U.S. role in post-collapse North Korea, but I’ve frequently argued that at most, it should be very brief and minimalist — secure the nukes, the borders with China, and the camps; help fill the most imminent humanitarian needs; and get out fast. South Korea, the only occupier that North Koreans would accept as legitimate, needs to prepare for that contingency by raising an effective Army Reserve.

The problems we will face in North Korea will be nothing like those facing Iraq or Syria. Those “nations” are geographic fossils, each a pile of cultural and demographic sweepings that never shared a common sense of nationhood, and which has been at war with itself for a millennium.

Post-collapse Korea will be riven by class and ideology, but one thing you can’t accuse Koreans of is lacking a sense of nationhood, or a capacity for unified action in its service. Not even religious differences have managed to divide Koreans’ powerful sense of national identity. I’m not sanguine about the problems of de-juchification, reunification, and reconstruction, and I’ve discussed them in stark terms more than once. Those are also problems we’re going to have to face eventually, whether we want to or not. They’re problems that good diplomacy, information operations, and contingency planning could do much to mitigate. More specifics here.