Sung-Yoon Lee: Why do we appease N. Korea?

Professor Lee recounts the long history of North Korea committing outrages against peace, international order, and every standard of human civilization, and of American presidents of both parties doing approximately nothing about it.

Pyongyang’s countless provocations since the Korean War have never set off a meaningful punitive response. Even in egregious cases like assassination attempts against South Korean leaders or the shooting down of an American reconnaissance plane in international airspace in 1969, the United States and its allies have answered with restraint.

Since the early 1990s, American presidents have treated the growing threat of the North Korean nuclear program as a priority — but one to be dealt with later. North Korea’s deep poverty and the apparent clownish nature of its leaders have sustained the illusion that its nuclear program could be bought out, the regime itself could be waited out, and that its largely concealed crimes against humanity could be tuned out.
While the United States has vacillated between expedient deals, halfhearted sanctions, pleas to China for greater intervention and doing nothing, the North has methodically advanced its nuclear arsenal and missile capacity.

[….]

Through each of Pyongyang’s tests, American policy makers have harbored the hope that Beijing would come around and put real pressure on the regimes of Kim Jong-un and his father, Kim Jong-il. But all Beijing has done is demonstrate a disingenuous pattern of diplomatic ambidexterity. China has made token gestures like signing on to United Nations Security Council resolutions while failing to enforce them fully, and at times even increasing trade with Pyongyang.

Although most North Koreans are cut off from the global economy, the regime elite remains beholden to international finance for moving proceeds from weapons trafficking. Pyongyang’s international currency of choice is the United States dollar.
North Korea is the only state known to counterfeit dollars as a matter of state policy. And the United States has largely declined to go after the Kim regime’s money trail because of concerns that doing so would push Pyongyang to escalate its provocations. The United States has also mostly shied away from imposing sanctions on the regime’s Chinese partners. [NYT, Sung-Yoon Lee]

Read the whole thing. For all its tough talk, the Trump administration shows little sign of implementing the tough policy it has articulated. It’s increasingly conspicuous to close observers that this administration has imposed no sanctions or taken any perceptible action to execute its “maximum pressure” since Xi Jinping came to Mar-a-Lago and confirmed his intention to turn Korea into its next semi-autonomous ethnic reservation. Trump is now in danger of falling into the same pattern as his predecessors, at a time when we can no longer afford to wait for some other president to solve this problem. By then, an extortionate, mass-murdering crime syndicate will have the means to nuke Seattle, its hegemony over a consensually finlandized South Korea will be functionally irreversible, and no sensible leader would ever trust America as an ally and security guarantor again.

In conclusion, terrorize your neighbors and your critics. Make sure you only let in the most pliable, controllable, and corruptible journalists. Hide your atrocities well — if there’s no video, no one really gives a shit anyway.

[Also, most people still don’t give a shit when there is video.]

Bolster the credentials of the most gullible academics and washed-up, has-been bureaucrats by giving them special, preferential access while denying it to those with the principle and basic common sense call you out. Proliferate with abandon and sell your work to the highest bidder. Keep your proles and peasants hungry. If your model of statecraft doesn’t include providing for them, and if you keep them too famished, isolated, exhausted, and cowed to start downloading plans for DIY Sten guns and shaped charges that might make the local SSD boys hesitate before hauling their families off to the gulag, it’s a winning strategy. After all, we’ve established that international institutions are either apathetic, impotent, or both, and that no democratically elected leader would sacrifice a portion of his domestic political support — such as it is — to challenge that business model.