Am I Being Irresponsible?
03.25.2008 - 10:41 AMIf there is a political law of gravity, sooner or later the totalitarian regime in North Korea is going to come to an end. A socio-economic system so mired in failure, a political system so contrary to the basic human aspiration for freedom, cannot stay aloft forever.
That, at least, is the optimistic assumption of Andrew Scobell, a professor of international affairs at Texas A & M, who has engaged in the fascinating exercise of forecasting exactly how it will collapse.
Scobell posits five possible scenarios, each of which correspond to the demise or transformation of other Communist regimes:
Suspended animation — Albania
Soft landing — China
Crash landing — Romania
Soft landing/crash landing hybrid — the USSR
Suspended animation/soft landing hybrid — Cuba
Scobell explains each possibility at length and tries to see which one best fits the North Korean future. He finds, tentatively, that “the closest to the reality of the North Korea’s current situation is a Cuban mix of ad hoc reforms and regime holding pattern.”
Scobell may or may not be wrong about that. But after watching North Korea for years, traveling there in the early 1990’s, and, most recently, reading The Reluctant Communist, the horrifying tale of an American soldier kept there in captivity for forty years, I would much prefer to see a Romanian-style crash landing.
Scobell thinks it likely that if the regime abruptly disintegrates
this could mean not just extreme disorganization of power but a civil war or a collapse situation with significant pockets of organized armed resistance. In the latter situation, while elements of the coercive apparatus would surrender or disband and flee, others might vigorously resist. Some hardcore elements might engage in insurgency operations for months or even years.
Obviously, this could a very dangerous scenario, costly in human life, and one that might spill across international borders with unpredictable consequences. But am I being irresponsible in stating that for a regime so profoundly evil, the day of violent reckoning cannot come too soon? If there was ever a case where the tree of liberty was in need of some refreshment from the blood of tyrants, this would appear to be it.
Unfortunately, all of this may be idle speculation. Scobell also notes that
the deathwatch for the Pyongyang regime has lasted more than 15 years. Those who predicted or anticipated its imminent demise have had to eat their words or do a lot of explaining. Pyongyang is far from dead, and there is evidence that the regime may be regrouping.
I hope he’s wrong.
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March 25th, 2008 at 12:06 PM
I would dispute the characterization of China’s far-from-complete “transformation” as a “soft landing,” and vigorously dispute the proposition that Cuba has been transformed at all in any meaningful way. Cuba lost the robust patronage of the former Soviet Union; that is the deal with Cuba. Havana may not be pumping troops into Africa today, but its Castro boys are materially involved partners with Hugo Chavez in chapping Central America’s behind. Their zeal for repressing their own people is unabated.
That said, I imagine Pyongyang’s current regime will go out with a whimper more than a bang.
It’s interesting that Scobell doesn’t consider the parallel to North Korea that is most apposite: East Germany. Korea itself is not historically the “Germany of East Asia,” but China certainly has the same interest Russia did regarding Germany, in keeping Korea divided and quiescent. The Koreans have the same interest Germans did in reunification, attended by the same moonshine occasionally emitting from the policies of the free half of the country. The Kims have been more vicious and widely repressive than East Germany’s successive governments, but East Germany’s enormities in the Warsaw Pact decades were atrocious enough.
East Germany disintegrated from within when the USSR began to show serious weakness in the mid-late 1980s. When Moscow was literally unable to repeat the East European tank-in-the-square escapades of 1968 and 1956, as Czechoslovakia and Poland asserted a measure of political independence and Austria opened her frontier with the Warsaw Pact, the Germans saw their way clear to break free.
The situation of China and Korea is different from that of Russia and Germany in some key ways, but one thing is the same: Korea cannot reunite under a common, Western-oriented government without Beijing considering that a substantial impact on her security situation. China will labor to keep Korea divided, and one of the halves her client — as long as China is able. In considering the future of North Korea, the China factor is equal in significance with both Pyongyang and Seoul.
March 25th, 2008 at 9:08 PM
If we’re waiting for a revolution, we’ll wait a long time. Unlike the Iranian people, these folks have heard a one note tune all their lives, and know nothing other than what their dear leader tells them. Many of them actively hate America, believing we are imperialist warmongers as they are told. All radios sold in North Korea can only receive one radio station, and possession of a different kind of radio will get you killed.
The ones who know better are too afraid to act, or even speak. Gulags await, or public executions. And we all know the penalty for crimes against the state– not just the ‘criminal’ goes to Gulag Junction, but all his family, descendants and predecessors, to wipe out the entire family line. Leadership claims anti-state activities are a disease, and extermination is necessary to prevent further infections.
It really is a dreadful place, hopeless, miserable. Only the army even EATS properly.
It is well nigh impossible for Americans to even understand that place.
But the Iranians are even now revolting, slipping the grip of the mad mullahs. They know there are better ways to live. That is NOT going to happen in the People’s Republic.