Open Sources
Update: So if you saw a sneak preview of a longer post this morning, well, that was an unfinished draft that I published by accident. I hope you can be patient until all of the ideas interweave and are in final form. Apologies.
Nothing says “responsible rising power” like giving billions to despots who shell nearby fishing villages:
China has proposed a huge investment deal to revive North Korea’s faltering economy, a report said Friday, amid an international drive to coax Pyongyang back to nuclear disarmament talks.
China’s state-run Shangdi Guanqun Investment plans to invest about $2 billion in a project to build up a North Korean free trade zone into a regional export base, the JoongAng newspaper said. [AFP]
China actually claims to be doing this to induce North Korea back to six-party talks. Now, I realize there are still people in this world who see great significance in North Korea’s hints that it might return to six-party talks for the right price, but then, with natural selection having been brought to an end several generations ago, a rising percentage of the free world’s population hasn’t the sense not to eat yellow snow. Talks that won’t disarm North Korea but that do fund (and thus perpetuate) the regime are moving us away from resolving this crisis, not toward it. Which is exactly Beijing’s design.
So the gauntlet is down. Either the Obama Administration applies its new financial sanctions to entities like Shangdi Guanqun Investment, or it must accept the failure of its entire North Korea policy and return to the demonstrable failure of agreed framework diplomacy.
In actuality, now is the winter of Kim’s discontent. He must contend with the collective weight of a nearly two decade-old food catastrophe, increasing influx of information, and outflux of citizens across the border. Add to that another hereditary communist power transition (to his son, Kim Jong-un), and the growing reality that even in the case of a leader-for-life, death will have its day.
Now is the time to constrict the Kim regime by exploiting these weaknesses rather than legitimating the regime with more concessionary diplomacy. Negotiations, in order to be effective, must be buttressed with sustained sanctions (pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1874) and crackdown on North Korea’s multifarious illicit financial transactions. To relax these measures in return for empty promises of good behavior would be a folly of the first degree.
But if China is this determined to undermine financial sanctions, and if we’re not willing to protect our last non-violent deterrent by sanctioning Chinese companies, too, then we’re clearly beyond the point of deterring North Korea’s violence without sowing some violence ourselves. I think we can all agree that conventional deterrence is failing because we’re rightly afraid of how far things could escalate. Yet escalated provocations call for escalated responses. North Korea clearly breached the line between war and peace in 2010. I increasingly incline toward the view that we need a more incremental military deterrent, ideally one that shifts the conflict zone away from the DMZ and Seoul. The least violent way to deter North Korea and back our diplomacy with much-needed force may be to sow unrest and sponsor insurgency inside North Korea itself.
North Korea has been named the world’s worst persecutor of Christians in 2010. For the eighth year in a row.
LiNK is producing a documentary, Hiding, on North Korean refugees in China, and you can help get this film completed and distributed:
While the world focuses on North Korean security issues, hundreds of thousands of North Koreans continue to be enslaved in prison camps today. Up to 300,000 are estimated to have escaped to China ““ seeking food, medicine, work, or freedom from political and religious oppression. Over 70 percent of North Korean women are trafficked and sold into the sex trade, and more and more refugees are fleeing to Southeast Asia to escape repatriation and imprisonment.
You can learn more and watch a trailer here.