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Pyongyang: An immoral program of
provocation
By Stephen Blank
In the storm surrounding North Korea's nuclear
program it is still unclear to many observers exactly
what Pyongyang wants. North Korea has variously stated
that it wants to deal directly with the United States,
forcing Washington to recognize it as a functioning and
legitimate government, and that it seeks aid to
regenerate its shattered domestic energy program, and it
has consistently demanded that the United States and its
forces leave the Korean Peninsula and let Koreans alone
solve the problems stemming from the division of Korea
and the Korean War.
These are contradictory
demands. The demand for Washington's engagement cannot
and should not lead to Washington's withdrawal from
South Korea or to any diminution of its support for the
Republic of Korea (ROK). Many commentators on this
crisis have also observed that what Kim Jong-il also
craves is respect, the restoration of face that has
allegedly been lost through US President George W Bush's
"personal insults" of him and North Korea and by the
categorization of North Korea as part of an axis of
evil. While Kim undoubtedly wants Washington to eat
crow, the decision to build nuclear weapons in violation
of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Agreed Framework
of 1994 predates Bush's words and administration by at
least a year or two. Thus the objectives inherent in the
program predated any such loss of face, and the decision
to go nuclear had nothing to do with issues of respect.
Here it pays to examine the public record of
this crisis. When assistant secretary of state James
Kelly revealed to Pyongyang the United States' knowledge
of the nuclear program, although the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) and South Korea had known
about it since 1999, it took North Korean officials a
day to return with the announcement that not only were
they engaging in a nuclear program, they were entitled
to build nuclear weapons and were attempting to do so
because of some imaginary US threat - which nobody else
has discerned, it should be noted - to invade North
Korea. In other words, caught in a barefaced violation
of solemn treaty and international agreements, Kim
deliberately opted to escalate to a crisis level, to
adopt a strategy of nuclear blackmail, and to mobilize
the entire North Korean propaganda system to throw dust
in everyone's eyes. The "dust" was these imagined US
threats, and the supposed lack of respect shown by Bush,
which supposedly served as legitimate justifications for
breaking the treaty and the limited framework agreement.
While North Korea undoubtedly does demand a
direct engagement with Washington so that it gains
legitimacy, more aid and a corresponding weakening of
the US-ROK alliance and delegitimization of South Korea,
these have long been North Korean goals and could have
been pursued without restarting the effort to nuclearize
its weapons. On the other hand, while the earlier threat
in 1991-94 of going nuclear obtained this engagement, it
is possible that, having been caught in the current
violation, Kim thought he could sell the same horse
twice and even get paid twice for doing so. Yet it is by
no means clear, even if one tries to look through
Pyongyang's spectacles, that those are the goals or,
indeed, were the original goals of the post-1999 nuclear
program. However, when seen in a comparative
perspective, the motives for North Korea going nuclear
are quite clear and have little to do with Washington's
supposed responsibility for the crisis or aspersions
against the North Korean government and its leader.
States opt for nuclear weapons to defend
themselves against threats, eg Israel and Pakistan, or
to gain respect and status, eg France and India. North
Korea, facing a declining military capability - and
having embarked upon a domestic military-first program
that demonstrates where Kim's true preferences lie and
which precludes meaningful economic reform - needs
nuclear weapons in order to deter an invasion, coerce
aid from its interlocutors and neighbors, and to sustain
its evil (and there should be no equivocations about the
nature of this regime) system without making significant
reforms. Although some economic reforms have been
undertaken out of necessity, it appears that North Korea
cannot and will not move beyond them. And in any case,
little or no foreign investment will come now.
North Korea also sees a nuclear-weapons system
and the attendant infrastructure of missiles as a source
of profit and revenue. According to the CIA's annual
reports on proliferation, it is the largest exporter of
ballistic missiles in the world and thus a major
facilitator of proliferation. Its bilateral ties with
Pakistan and Iran alone, not to mention other Middle
Eastern governments interested in such weapons,
including Syria and Egypt, constitute evidence of the
danger it poses to international and not just regional
security. Likewise, North Korea as a government is a
major seller of narcotics on the world stage. Its
diplomats have been caught smuggling drugs and it is
clearly official policy to engage in this trafficking in
order to make money and sustain the
government-and-military-first program that consigns
millions of people to malnutrition, deprivation, and the
worst form of oppression.
Every account of Kim
Jong-il depicts a man who is all too typical of the
dictator genre with all its sybaritic and sensual
corruptions due to the possession of absolute power and
the ability to gratify all one's whims. Though it may be
a hermit kingdom, North Korea, the more one studies it,
assumes an all too recognizable and depressing
similarity with the corruptions of dictatorships from
Augustan Rome to Mao Zeong's China and their epigoni.
In this connection the pursuit of nuclear
weapons, beginning when the administration of US
president Bill Clinton, a much different regime from
that currently in Washington, was in office, is of a
piece with the goals of other previous and similar
totalitarian dictatorships. For them and for subsequent
proliferators such as Iraq and Iran, the other members
of Bush's axis of evil, the pursuit of nuclear weapons
has an overriding strategic goal beyond simply defending
oneself or deterring others, or forcing others to engage
with you, or even using it to force them to sustain the
regime.
As many commentators have observed, the
outstanding consequence of possessing nuclear weapons is
that the possessor state is then freed from the
constraints of any international supervisions or
monitoring and is as free as can be imagined to pursue
whatever military policy it chooses to adopt. It is
secure in the knowledge it cannot be attacked except at
the price of unacceptable civilian devastation and uses
that knowledge to intimidate its neighbors, partners,
and enemies.
This is surely what we can expect
from a nuclear Iraq or Iran and it certainly is the case
with North Korea. Fear of North Korean and Chinese
pressure has already induced South Korea to forgo a
missile defense program either on its own or with
Washington and Tokyo. A usable North Korean
nuclear-weapons system next to a non-nuclear and
undefended (in the nuclear sense) South Korea makes the
ROK vulnerable to endless attempts at nuclear blackmail
and subversion.
Apart from the goals of
self-defense or deterrence against Washington and
coercion of aid from its interlocutors, North Korea's
fundamental aim in breaking these treaties and
agreements has nothing to do with face. Rather, it has
to do with becoming a fully emancipated rogue state able
to terrorize all its neighbors, intimidate South Korea
and Japan, proliferate freely throughout the world and
force others to support it in its present form ad
infinitum. This has nothing to do with Bush's
characterization of North Korea, offensive as Pyongyang
may find it, or with supposed US threats.
Instead, by going nuclear North Korea proclaimed
its intention to be a rogue state and act accordingly.
While it may be culturally necessary to work through the
issues of face and respect to resolve the crisis, the
fact is that the government in Pyongyang richly deserves
the sobriquet President Bush attached to it and went
nuclear in order to continue justifying the behavior
that gave rise to it.
Thus in the final balance,
acceptance of North Korea's nuclear status is not only
strategically foolish and reckless, it is also immoral
and provocative. Whatever the outcome of this crisis may
be, any legitimization of a nuclear North Korea and
indeed the existence of a North Korea with nuclear
weapons is neither a basis for peace nor a force for
strategic stability in Northeast Asia.
Stephen Blank is an analyst of
international security affairs residing in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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