In this thread, I proposed that the US military build-up in South Korea was a contributing factor to the current situation in North Korea. Specifically, having the world’s largest military permanently at their borders played a role in North Korea’s paranoid obsession with military strength. If there was some other turn of events (which may not have been feasible…I am in no way saying that the US did the wrong thing or had other options) there is a chance that North Korea would have gone the way of other Communist countries and fizzled out.
I am in no way saying the US did the wrong thing, or that North Korea did the right thing, or that 20th century Communism was in any way good. I think it’s more of a tragic set of circumstances where people did the only thing the could and the result was disasterous. Still, the US played a (perhaps inevitable, perhaps justified, perhaps good) role in what North Korea is today.
How much of a role are you supposing it played? The institutional paranoia of the NK’s started even before their invasion of SK and the US ‘buildup’ (you realize that we have something less than 50k troops in SK, right? Not exactly a massive force compared to either the SK military or NK itself).
Myself, I think their institutional paranoia has more to do with the fact that their leaders have been certifiable from the get go, as well as the fact that NK was a Stalinist state, which pretty much bred that sort of state paranoia with it’s mothers milk at inception.
I’m not saying that America played no role at all in that paranoia (even paranoids sometimes have enemies after all), just that it wasn’t (IMHO) a major factor.
South Korea has 50,000 US troops actually in the country itself.
If US presence was actually as influential as you suggest, why is South Korea so different than North Korea considering they’re even closer to the 50,000 US troops?
The differences between the two are probably more of an influence than the same 50k troops both sides to contend with. Specifically, the fact that one of them is a dictatorial cult of personality that has a long history of giving the entire rest of the world the middle finger while the other is a democracy that trades with and cooperates with the western world.
At best, the US role in shaping NK is that we’re a handy propaganda tool and we prevent them from expanding through conquest.
Stalinism is not historically sustainable. After all, the Stalinistiest of all the Stalinist states followed the now-well-worn path out of Communist. Simply having been a Stalinist state is not enough to explain why they would still be a Stalinist state long after everyone else decided to give up on the idea. Plenty of countries had bad beginnings. Why is North Korea still so bad?
The US presence goes beyond the raw number of troops on the ground. That force represents the promise of the full power of the US military might. The South Korean military is of course also helped by US military equipment and expertise.
Can you flesh out your argument a bit more, rather than just stating it?
Is there some other situation that was similar, and that proves your point? I’m thinking of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Much more of a military presence that we see in Korea. Was North Vietnam then the same kind of hell hole that North Korea is now?
Alternatively, let’s consider that the keeping a population desperately poor, isolated from the rest of the world, and lacking information about the outside world is one of the best ways for a totalitarian regime to maintain control over the populace. That the Kim dynasty purposely maintains a belligerent stance so as to create an enemy threat that the people can rally around.
Another example: Iraq in the decade before the US invasion. More military force directed at Iraq than at NK, and yet life in Iraq was not terribly bad.
We eventually went to war with Vietnam and Iraq. I guess that clarifies NK’s logic quite well. Iran seems to have learned the lesson too. Looks like even sven’s argument has good support.
Not at all, since neither of those populations was impoverished like that of NK. Not even during the wars. NK’s population is impoverished because the government there has chosen to impoverish them. Even if their fear of invasion was valid, that doesn’t justify keeping the populace in abject poverty so that the elite can live a life of luxury. The blame lies squarely on the Kims. They made the choice they did of their own free will.
Doesn’t your argument seem to suggest that proximity to US military power isn’t all that great of an influence here, though? As you say, the Staliniest of Stalinist states transitioned away from that system and liberalized substantially over that time. The Cold War lasted until the very end of the USSR - we didn’t have troops right on the USSR’s borders, but we did have them on the Warsaw Pact’s borders, and our nukes were always within striking distance of Soviet cities. If American military buildups chill liberalization, wouldn’t we expect the Soviet system to have remained thoroughly Stalinist all through the early 90s?
I suppose you could argue that it’s a massive disparity between the military forces of a Stalinist and non-Stalinist state that inhibits liberalization - but, again, the Soviet example seems to suggest this isn’t so. The Soviets were much more on a par with the American military in the 70s and 80s (particularly their nuclear forces) than in the early sixties - but it was in the sixties that Khrushchev carried out his far-ranging program of de-Stalinization. Hell, he ended up condemning Stalin before the Party itself - unprecedented, at the time.
I’ll cheerfully concede that American policy during the Cold War left much to be desired - the blame for a lot of fairly unpleasant dictatorships can be laid at our doorsteps. But North Korea? No. NK developed into a nightmare state because its government chose to do that. And both China and the USSR accommodated them.
I wouldn’t argue with what you are saying but the OP was referring specifically to their obsession with military strength. Although the economic difficulties in NK stem from the attitudes of the elite, part of this attitude is paranoia of invasion. This obsession with invasion and desire for military strength is responsible for a proportion of the economic problems in NK, since trade difficulties have their root in following military policies that are not approved of by the rest of the world. This lack of trade also weakens the population, making them more susceptible to parasites like the Kims and their allies.
Uhhhh I think it makes a slight difference if the guns are pointed towards you or away from you. Having the guns pointed towards you makes it more likely that a cult-of-personality dictatorship can continue to thrive. Insecure countries gravitate towards “strong leaders.” Look at our own reaction to 9/11.
Let’s also not get too rosy-eyed about South Korea. It’s in great shape now, but until 1987 it was run by some fairly ruthless dictators and has gone through it’s own bad economic times. Looking at GDP PPP per capita adjusted for inflation, there really wasn’t a major difference between the two until the 1980s. There have even been points where North Korea was doing better than South Korea.
Look, Kim Il Sung ascended to the leadership of the DPRK well before anyone in the US gave two spits about Korea. Up until the North’s invasion, the Korean issue was far, far behind in importance compared to the occupation of Japan, the Marshall Plan, the looming decolonization issue, and a bunch of other stuff.
So, to put it plainly, Kim Il Sung was and would continue to be an autocratic megalomaniac whether or not the US had spent decades ready for war against the North.
To argue that the North would not have been a militarized, isolationist, authoritarian, unificiationist state if only the US hadn’t been present is an argument that needs a lot more fleshing out than just throwing the idea out there.
Let’s compare the plight of other communist countries with the positioning of US troops. US troops were right next to Eastern Europe. We’ve had China surrounded to its east for almost seven decades. Why did communism fail in those areas, but not in North Korea?
Well, communism failed in Eastern Europe because the Soviets were no longer willing to use force to keep them down. It failed in the Soviet Union because its leadership decided the jig was up. It failed in China because Mao was a nut, and Deng et al thought it was time to get the country out of the stone ages.
In contrast, none of these countries were struck with the disease of crippling xenophobia and a governmental succession plan based around primogeniture. Those commie countries had the good sense to base succession on ideology or good ol’ fashioned political power struggles, not “number one son gets to rule whole country.”
That’s why North Korea is the way it is, not because of where our bases are.
Is it? Let’s leave Iraq aside, because NK was no better off before the Iraq war than they are now. The Vietnam War was just like the Korean War, and in both cases, the US either left things a tie, or cut and ran.
A more parsimonious explanation is that the NK leadership used the fear of invasion as a way of controlling the populace. During the cold war, the NK leadership could reliable depend on its anti-American allies to prop it up. That calculation turned out to be less than satisfactory in a post Cold War world.
Scale. The US could not invade and occupy the USSR or China and expect any kind of positive result. But the US could (have) invaded North Korea, and indeed it proved that it was quite willing to do just that.
Wrong. The US did not invade North Korea; it repelled the North Korean invasion of South Korea. What got the status quo restored was the Chinese military pouring across the border. And the OP’s ignoring the fact that North Korea launched an attack on the South when the US military initially withdrew from South Korea.
Latin American countries have have the US involve itself militarily and diplomatically in their affairs for years and they didn’t develop the stalinist regime seen in North Korea.
I really don’t know why North Korea ended up the way it did. I always figured the regime was so outlandish that they had to drum up endless domestic and foreign threats just to keep the population willing to circle around the leaders.
But I don’t see why 50,000 troops would be that big of a deal to how N Korea ended up philosophically.
It’s not like Kim Il Sung is the first autocratic megalomaniac in the world to yield power. Crazy dictators are a dime a dozen- Mugabe, Turkmenbashi, Mobutu, Gaddafi, Bakossa, Pol Pot…all of them are responsible for some terrible stuff, but only Pol Pot is on the scale of North Korea. Few of them did much of major international consequence, and all of them ultimately failed to maintain control for long.
In other words, it takes more than “he’s insane” to be that bad.
Yeah, but I don’t think they see it that way, and when they are making their foreign policy decisions they are going to base that off of what they perceived…which is that the US doesn’t mind getting up in (what they consider) their business.
Several countries have been surrounded by large numbers of powerful hostile enemies though. Israel, Taiwan, South Korea. They were all next to very hostile neighbors. But all eventually ended up as liberal democracies.
If anything, South Korea was the surrounded nation. They were bordering North Korea which was allied with the USSR and China. But they didn’t develop a militant cult of personality.
Israel does supposedly have an extremely good military and intel agency. I assume South Korea does too. But it isn’t the kind of phony posturing North Korea does. They don’t even have enough fuel to fly their 30 year old planes and their soldiers are 6" shorter than S. Korean soldiers. The North Korean system is mostly front and flash (aside from their artillery, WMD and special forces units) holding up a military that is not equiped to handle all out war.
I think North Korea’s militancy is more explained by desperation and an ingrained cult of personality.