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CIAO DATE: 8/01
What's North Korea Up To?
On The Issues
July 2000
Although North Korea is establishing or reviving diplomatic relations with a number of other countries, including South Korea, the West should continue to approach North Korea warily. Pyongyang may be trying to secure more aid from foreign countries to prop up its bankrupt dictatorship.
Little is known about North Korea's Kim Jong Il, but the mysterious "Dear Leader" has long been thought an avid cinema enthusiast and film director in his own right. Those rumors were convincingly confirmed in June, at the three-day, first-ever summit in Pyongyang between leaders of North and South Korea. In his landmark meeting with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, the "Dear Leader" not only choreographed a spectacle that commanded the entire world's attention, but gave a star turn that solidly establishes him as a leading nominee for best public-relations makeover of the century.
In return, he gets something more valuable than a golden statuette: The United States plans to lift some economic sanctions on North Korea, giving a green light to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and others to pour in aid. Before the West falls all over itself to reward Pyongyang's enigmatic dictator, it should consider the strong possibility that the Korean summit was just an elaborate public-relations gambit to solicit aid for a tottering regime. Kim Jong Il burst upon the world stage last week playing a voluble, attentive host, brimming with goodwill for his delighted, aging South Korean visitor. ("Don't worry," the kindly jailer of 20 million North Koreans reassured Kim Dae Jung, a former human-rights activist. "I will give you the best treatment possible.")
Critics were charmed. The New York Times described the specialist in international military extortion as "cherubic." In Washington, an unnamed "senior administration official" likened the man behind the Rangoon bombing to the "courageous and visionary" Kim Dae Jung: "Kim Jong Il clearly has some of those qualities, and is displaying some vision himself." And in Pyongyang, Kim Dae Jung even praised the architect of the North Korean famine for his "great efforts" in the country's "economic development." By the time he hugged his South Korean counterpart goodbye, sending him home with a conciliatory Joint Declaration and a promise to visit Seoul at the "appropriate time," Kim Jong Il had succeeded in creating an entirely new international image for himself.
South Korean officials, to be sure, were overjoyed by the summit and its atmospherics for reasons of their own. They correctly hailed the cordial get-together as a milestone for two states that have been locked in hostility since their inception and are today still formally at war. Moreover, in receiving Kim Dae Jung and referring to him as "president," North Korean authorities were implicitly recognizing the Republic of Korea—a government Pyongyang has always depicted as a monstrosity with no right to exist. In Seoul's view, this was a signal North Korean concession and a signal of more to come.
According to Kim Dae Jung's "sunshine policy"—a theory to which Washington and Tokyo now also subscribe—a successful North-South summit is the first step on a path that eventually leads to a grand settlement of the "North Korean problem": the scrapping of Pyong-yang's program to develop weapons of mass destruction, and its embrace of peaceful coexistence with the South, in return for normalized relations with the United States and Japan (and copious transfers of foreign aid).
Let's hope that it turns out this way. Unfortunately, the available evidence can support a rather less optimistic interpretation of recent North Korean behavior than the one entertained by exponents of "sunshine."
Tactical Breathing Space
North Korea's economy is in absolutely desperate condition, and by some indications, circumstances continue to worsen. In June, Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry estimated that North Korea's 1999 export earnings had fallen under $600 million, barely one-third of the 1990 level. Ever less capable of supporting itself, the North Korean government is increasingly dependent upon external aid for survival. Pyongyang's uncharacteristic flurry of diplomatic activity this year—establishing or revitalizing relations with Italy, Australia, the Philippines, and China, and culminating with the bold North-South summit—can be interpreted as an attempt to shore up the beleaguered system's donor base.
This policy is already paying dividends. Seoul has announced that it will budget $450 million in state-to-state aid for Pyongyang in the coming year. For Pyongyang, this commitment is a godsend.
Kim Dae Jung's previous approach to North-South relations—attempting to cultivate commerce by "separating business from politics"—did not fare well. In 1999, Northern exports to the South registered barely one-half their 1995 level. The policy's showpiece venture—Hyundai's tourism project at Kumgang Mountain in the North—has been such a money-loser that the conglomerate's financial viability is now in question. Now, with the promise of life support provided directly by South Korean taxpayers, North Korean authorities can worry less about making compromises with profit-seeking outsiders—or risking the system-threatening "cultural and ideological infiltration" they have long feared from such contacts.
The principal reason why various outsiders are willing to send aid to Pyongyang is that they are worried about its nuclear and long-range missile programs. The famine prompts concern as well, but North Korea would be treated very differently today if it were simply a "humanitarian" problem.
North Korea's leaders clearly appreciate that dynamic, and there is little evidence that they will retire this tried-and-true fund-raiser. To the contrary: When the International Atomic Energy Agency sent a delegation to Pyongyang to make inquiries about the North Korean nuclear program, its representatives were stiff-armed by their North Korean hosts. Just days before the Korean summit, the head of the IAEA pronounced the delegation's mission a failure.
What course North Korea chooses in the afterglow of its unprecedented summit still remains to be seen. Western policymakers are praying that the summit portends a North Korean version of perestroika—with "new thinking" toward its old foes. North Korean authorities, however, have always been unsparing in their criticism of Mikhail Gorbachev, whose policies they blame for precipitating the downfall of the Soviet system. Kim Dae Jung and his Western allies must be prepared for the possibility that the North Korean leaders view the summit not as perestroika, but instead as peredyshka: the tactical "breathing space" that Lenin advised good communists to seek when suffering reversals against implacable enemies.
Nicholas Eberstadt, author of The End of North Korea (AEI Press, 1999), is the Henry Wendt Scholar at AEI. An earlier version of this article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on June 19, 2000.
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