The American Enterprise’s North Korea Issue

UPDATE: I’ve posted grafs from TAE’s North Korea issue here. All authors are excerpted, including Daniel Kennelly, Gordon Cucullu, Victor Davis Hanson, Nicholas Eberstadt, and Ambassador James Lilley. I strongly recommend that you just buy the whole thing. Hey, it’s only seven bucks.

Original Post: The American Enterprise’s June issue focuses on North Korea, and has rounded up the thoughts of some of Washington’s strongest thinkers on the subject, including Victor Davis Hanson, Gordon Cucullu, Nicholas Eberstadt, and Ambassador James Lilley, among others. I’d love to excerpt the best parts for you, but it’s not on line yet and I just don’t have time to re-type them.

The opening piece is by Dr. Norbert Vollertsen (it’s the only one that’s available on-line). I’ve previously mentioned an overlooked problem of reunification: the psychological adjustment of both halves to each other. One can’t live in a society as unnaturally deprived, terrorized, and regimented as North Korea’s some significant mental health effects. Vollertsen details what that has done to the North Koreans:

Most of the patients in the hospitals suffer from psychosomatic illnesses. They’re worn out by compulsory drills, innumerable parades, mandatory assemblies beginning at the crack of dawn, and constant, droning propaganda. They are tired and at the end of their tether. Clinical depression is rampant. Alcoholism is common. Young adults have no hope, no future. Everywhere you look, people are beset by anxiety.

Daniel Kennelly wins “most provocative title” with his piece entitled, “Time for an Amicable Divorce With South Korea.” All of the articles are outstanding, but Kennelly’s is so good that it’s hard to decide what parts not to excerpt (when I get around to that). Kennelly explains why the current structure of the alliance restricts our North Korean options and explains how to rebuild this military and diplomatic relationship on the basis of two independent nations with independent interests, rather than one in which one country is a dependent and the other is what Kennelly calls “straitjacketed.” Not that I needed convincing.

With the exception of Cucullu’s, none of the articles presents a bold new solution (a disappointment, in light of what it says on the magazine’s cover). All justifiably blame both past and present administrations for failing to confront the issue. None suggests that we have any risk-free solutions left. All share a strongly bearish outlook on our relationship with Korea–Kennelly says that “[t]he current government in Seoul is the most anti-American in the short history of the republic of Korea . . . [i]t is a left-wing administration that has fanned public sentiment against U.S. troops.”

Cucullu proposes, as he did in his book, that a responsible international community would create a string of well-ordered refugee camps along the Chinese border. As Cucullu admits, China’s willingness to act responsibly is the limitation here. But for that obstacle, the idea is one of the more practical and humane alternatives that exists, and I think that even China could be strong-armed into it in the run-up to the Olympics.

Most of those in the know in Washington would agree that the views of these authors represent the thinking of most of those making the executive branch’s decisions now. If this doesn’t cause a panicked reaction in the Korean papers, it must mean they’re too shocked to even bring it up. That’s especially true when you read Ambassador Lilley’s comments. Lilley is by no stretch a neocon; he’s an old-school practitioner of realpolitik, but certainly not realpolitik without a conscience. There is seldom an event related to North Korean human rights on the Hill that Amb. Lilley does not attend.

His article’s title? “Don’t Count on China or South Korea.” Update 2: Continue on to see a summary of my conversation with Amb. Lilley shortly before the Korea Foundation reacted by cutting off funding to AEI.

(back to OneFreeKorea)