I’ve seen some experts claim that without an existential military threat, the North Korean regime has no legitimacy and therefore no way to justify its own existence. Pretty much the only thing they had going for them was their economy and their military threat, and their economy turned out to be a shambles so they have nothing left but military posturing.
I disagree with this argument. Kim Jong Un has gotten a lot of mileage out of trying to restore the economy and they were quick to play up his PR wins with President Trump. They had no problem at all broadcasting a pro-US message because it suited their needs at that particular moment. If Kim said the military threat was ended and they were now 100% about liberalizing the economy, they would hardly bat an eye. Consistency is overrated, and the North Koreans don’t need an objective reason to justify their way of life.
Highlighted the important part. How much of that is just “propaganda”? Sure, if they really believed this, they’d say it, but it also makes sense for Kim to say it in the “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia” sense. It’s what he needs to say to keep his people invested in the “struggle” to win the war, even if he intends that struggle to last forever, because his real interest isn’t in conquering South Korea, it’s in propping up his control of North Korea.
That’s the problem with propaganda, after all. We know that it’s often used for purely cynical reasons, and as such, can’t be trusted as a true look into the mindset of the person publishing the propaganda.
Hell, two weeks ago you’d have been hard pressed to prove that Donald Trump really didn’t care about that migrant caravan, with all the tweets he posted about it, but this week, it’s just crickets. There’s no way to objectively know when they’re lying and when they aren’t, until well after the fact.
I don’t think it’s so much about a military threat. But there’s a reason or reasons North Korea hasn’t followed far in China’s footsteps economically, let alone South Korea’s. It’s not a different underlying culture less amenable to economic development, it’s still basically the same as South Korea’s. It might be to some degree specific stupidity, incompetence, insanity etc of the Kim dynasty. But I think a big reason is justified fear of losing legitimacy and control in a more open economy, even as open as China’s.
Because NK must function alongside another Korea that is now light years ahead economically, and pretty much every other way as a society. China doesn’t have that problem to the same degree (everyone was never going to pick up and move to Taiwan). South Korea in its development didn’t have it at all. That makes the NK regime somewhat justifiably, from POV of their own survival, paranoid about major transformations.
‘Now you are trying to be like them, why then don’t you just go away’. Again, the same reason there was no such thing as a viable post-Communist East German regime. But in that case, OK, no viable post-Com DDR regime, just merge. But that’s impractical in Korea. It’s a basic dilemma.
I don’t think NK ever deliberately wanted to sabotage their own economy. I agree that a lot of it had to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union and a series of incredibly stupid decisions on NK’s part. Mostly, it is because they cling to their fantasy-land notions of what their centrally managed socialist economy “should” be, which is whatever delusional or misinformed idea the current Kim happens to have. It is really hard to understand the NK decision making process.
Anyway, I agree that they are at the point where improving the economy would require loosening the reigns of control and accepting more risk. The problem is that is happening whether they like it or not. NK’s economy - such as it is - is increasingly functioning through independent black markets that sell goods smuggled from China. As NK’s underground capitalist market expands, the people become increasingly self-reliant and the state continues to lose influence. I don’t want to make predictions about how long the NK state will last, because by all logic it should have collapsed long ago.
Until recently the propaganda said that NK’s citizens needed to endure hardship because of the military threat from the US. That implies the NK government would do anything to maintain that threat - or at least the illusion of a threat - because the American bogeyman is how they justify their abuses. I don’t think that logic is true anymore (assuming it ever was.) I think the NK regime is just going to keep plugging along with institutional sclerosis and the idea that they “need” to justify their regime’s actions is overrated.
The elephant in the room is China. They don’t want the U.S. military to be able to waltz up to their border through North Korea and South Korea doesn’t want the Chinese knocking on their door through North Korea.
If Kim’s regime falls, I suspect they’ll work, either through direct support or proxy to get someone who’s favorable to them in power. Reunification talks will likely center around China wanting the U.S military out of South Korea and South Korea fighting to keep them there.
What base? You think this is an election issue in the South? And in the North he hardly need play to any base, I should think.
What is it you think they are signalling to other nations? And which nations do you think care? Cannot everyone see the very thoughts often opined here, ‘Yeah, that ain’t gonna happen!’, and clearly see it’s just show?
It’s geared towards the North winning a few months or years of quiet, so they can finish developing their nuclear weapons.
Kim isn’t stupid. He knows he needs nukes to survive. So he’s willing to make a few meaningless gestures, to gain time.
If the Kim regime collapses, China will step in. They will select their favorite ally in NK and set up him/her as their puppet ruler. Chinese advisers and troops will be stationed in NK to stabilize it but also to guide its development into a more [del]useful neighbor[/del] normal nation. They will restructure NK’s economy so as to bring more benefit to China. This will probably mean opening up heretofore restricted markets.
I still have never understood this “China is terrified of having a US ally (united Korea) on its doorstep.” China has Taiwan 100 miles away, a US ally. Vietnam is a US ally in some ways these days. Mongolia allows some China-hostile nations to operate listening posts and intel-gathering stations on its soil. India in some ways is a US ally, Pakistan gets US aid. A united Korea would never invade China; that would be suicidal. Maybe a united Korea would put some more SIGINT posts on the Yalu River, but so what?
Such events also promotes de-escalating the tensions between NK and SK. Even if they never re-unify, just backing away from the edge of war would be beneficial to everybody involved.
Look at the joint teams for the Olympics, for instance. NK gets international recognition on the cheap, while SK gets a belligerent neighbor to tone things down for a bit for a lot less money than keeping thousands of troops on alert all the time. Win-win.
On it’s own, no, of course not. But it is one election issue of many for older Koreans, who, as in the US, do wield more political power than the younger set and will do so for some time yet.
This part isn’t correct. The NK base (to the extent it matters for international affairs) is a small cadre of the elite who jockey for position in their society.
There’s not a single head of the nation and everybody follows without question. There are several members of Kim family and high ranking members of the military and political elite. At this point, they and their families have shown loyalty to the regime (at least the part of the regime that itself survived purges and power struggles) for several generations and rule North Korea like you’d expect of a group of greedy people with few scruples and fewer checks on their power. They profit massively from their system and show very few compunctions about their own corruption despite the conditions their own people suffer daily.
Those occasional power struggles and purges happen with some regularity. More recently, Kim Jong-Un purged members of his own family and other high ranking members of the NK military and members of the communist party. This isn’t unprecedented or unusual over the last couple of generations. He was shoring up his own position. Some individuals (and their families) suffered, others profited.
Most forms of actual reconciliation with South Korea and not just some playacting for the press wouldn’t just mean a loss of power for Kim Jong-Un but also a loss of money and power for the NK elite. And they would definitely have something to say about that.
Some photo ops and a perfunctory factory or two don’t really stop any of this.
Reuniting north and South Korea is of course economically difficult. West Germany’s GDP per capita was three to five times that of east Germany at reunification, but today South Korea’s GDP per capita is 40 times that of its northern sibling. After west Germany annexed east Germany it endured enduring economic hardship and imposed a unification tax that seemed unthinkable. But I think you are underestimating the pride of the Korean nation, and as long as Kim has limited openness and strong leadership, they will not see themselves as a failed state, but as a desperately backward but hopeful state. They will work harder, Huge amounts of capital will pour into it. China, Japan and South Korea can fuel the country’s rocketing rise.
I don’t see it as a realistic probability at this stage. They have been making noises about this for years now. There are cooperative economic development areas, and they make the token sports team thingy, but fundamentally they aren’t really moving towards re-unification. Basically, the only way I see this ever happening is an internal coup that kills off basically every one of the Kim family and most of the top communist government leadership and imposes a different type of totalitarian government…but one that wants to work with the rest of the world and is willing to leverage the worlds basic requirement for no nukes in North Korea. They would have to balance their essential dependence on China with their need to open markets with South Korea and allow in investment, which would almost certainly be fairly one sided to start with. I don’t think anyone could juggle those conflicting requirements with respect to China and South Korea and balance them somehow to enable massive investment (hell, just getting folks TOO invest would be a challenge), especially from South Korea and Japan (the US too) without pissing off China. Then, once you have some level of investment and prosperity you could, perhaps, consider reunion. You’d need to make systemic and fundamental changes to North Korea to do it, and it would take decades, but it could be done. But, the thing is, by the time you get to the point you could do it, you don’t really need to anymore. You’d already have travel open between the countries, investment and trade as well, so why would you need to reunite?
If it all drops in the pot and NK goes completely tits up, well…my WAG would be China would probably step in and administer the North, perhaps annex it or put in their own (better) puppet, or the US, South Korea, Japan and probably a lot of the west would have to do so, at least to stabilize the situation so it wasn’t a total humanitarian cluster fuck. In both of these scenarios the regional political tensions would ramp up enormously and you’d have a humanitarian crisis AND a major political shit storm in the region either way.
Simply put, there is no easy way, or really any way to do this without a lot of issues, and a lot of folks dying. It won’t be like East Germany merging into West Germany, or like the fall of the USSR…it will be more like every day is Tiananmen Square along with a healthy measure of Venezuela.
North Korea: 21 million people effectively living in the 1920’s as far as roads, telephones, electricity, housing and medicine. With a useless education system.
South Korea: 52 million people living in one of the most advanced nations on Earth.
The gulf between them has become too great. North Korea would need to operate as a vast re-education camp (a good one, not a punishment one) for 20+ years with trillions in aid to bring the country up to any kind of modern standards, infrastructure and education. You’d need to send in tens of thousands of doctors, medical personnel and even greater numbers of construction workers, teachers and the like to build them up and teach them how to do it themselves.
Not happening as long as China takes the short term view and continues to prop up the failed nation on their border.