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Stalin's ghost and North
Korea
By Stephen Blank
Joseph Stalin reportedly told his subordinates
in the Politburo that the difference between him and
Adolf Hitler was that whereas Hitler did not know where
to stop, he did. Unfortunately, as new revelations come
to light, it is not so clear that at the end of his life
Stalin knew where and when to stop. The Korean War,
which was a resounding political defeat for Moscow, was
very much his doing and continuing research on his later
career strongly suggests that he was planning a new war
with the West when he died.
These remarks
strongly pertain to the current North Korean crisis
because it is by no means clear that North Korea knows
where to stop. Therefore Pyongyang might well provoke
the United States - whose response has so far been too
restrained - into acting.
From the outset of the
present crisis, North Korea has deliberately and
steadily engaged in provocative actions. Indeed, the
program of uranium enrichment and of building a nuclear
weapon was a violation of the Framework Agreement that
preceded George W Bush's election as president of the
United States. Since October, Kim Jong-il's government
has steadily taken a series of steps, up to buzzing US
reconnaissance planes and threatening to withdraw from
the Korean War armistice and revert the Korean Peninsula
to a state of war.
North Korea's deliberately
provocative and reckless actions have been intended to
force Washington to acknowledge its legitimacy and
security and treat it as an equal. These actions also
entail threatening South Korea and Japan with war, even
the use of nuclear weapons. Its actions also appear
calculated to foment as much division as possible in the
US-South Korean alliance. At the same time North Korea
is doing all it can to induce and subtly coerce South
Korea into continuing and even expanding its extensive
subsidies through trade and covert payments to the North
Korean economy. There is no sign that North Korea is
prepared to abandon its long-held creed that it alone is
the only legitimate Korean state and that South Korea
must disarm or allow itself to remain vulnerable to
North Korean attack (ie, American troops must leave) in
advance of any reunification.
Not surprisingly,
the US government, hardly one to retreat from a fight,
has begun to raise the specter of using military action
against North Korea. Bush himself hinted at this early
this month and reinforcements of naval and air forces
have been deployed to the western Pacific, from whence
they could be dispatched to the Korean theater. In other
words, under the relentless harassment of North Korea
and its equally unrelenting provocation, Washington has
begun to hint that it too might act forcefully. Thus
North Korea's room to maneuver may be shrinking even as
it thinks of further ratcheting up the pressure and
actually withdrawing from the armistice or of publicly
making nuclear weapons.
Given the predisposition
of the Bush administration to resort to preemptive
strikes and preventive war against states standing at
the "crossroads of radicalism and technology" and the
stakes of the game, this may be not just a series of
reckless and/or provocative actions but even a suicidal
one with terrifying consequences for the two Koreas'
populations. Certainly an episode like that in April
2001 that occurred when China accidentally forced down a
US reconnaissance plane that was operating in
international waters might not lead this time to a
peaceful resolution. That incident, it will be recalled,
was triggered at least in part by a Chinese pilot with
an excessively belligerent attitude who may well have
exceeded his orders. Subsequent revelations strongly
suggested that the Chinese military had an interest in
provoking a crisis that was only resolved by both sides
with great difficulty.
Given Kim Jong-il's
military-first policy that aims at satisfying the North
Korean military's interests first and foremost, and his
consequent dependence upon its support, there is reason
to believe that one driver in this crisis is his desire
to placate their unyielding hostility to the United
States and to domestic reform. Under the circumstances
it is not hard to imagine a similar scenario to the
North Korean spy plane with a rather different sequence
of events that leads to an entirely different kind of
resolution.
Other kinds of miscalculation or
loss of control are also not hard to imagine, and we
need to remember that one of the occupational diseases
of regimes like North Korea's is that the dictator does
not know where to stop. In 1864, Russian foreign
minister Prince Alexander Gorchakov famously addressed
other European powers regarding Czarist Russia's
imperial conquests in Central Asia. In justifying them,
Gorchakov resorted to the time-honored rationalizations
of imperialism, but at the end he observed that "the
difficulty lies in knowing where to stop". Given the
institutional pathologies of dictatorial regimes like
Stalin's and his successors', as well as those of North
Korea, and the nature of contemporary US policy
regarding proliferating states, this difficulty is, if
anything, substantially greater than it was in 1864.
In another example from a long time ago,
Alexander Orlov, an NKVD (Narodny Kommisariat
Vnutrennikh Del, or People's Commissariat for Internal
Affairs) general who defected to the United States
during the Great Purge, wrote a famous work called A
Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare in
which he stressed that the first rule was not to respond
to provocation. Orlov was a highly astute thinker, but
what happens when one side constantly resorts to
provocation and cannot be trusted to know when and where
to stop and the other side is either increasingly in no
mood to heed his advice or is obliged to respond because
the act of provocation is finally too great to let
happen?
Stephen Blank is an analyst of
international security affairs residing in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
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