Still Collapsing?
The Weekly Standard publishes a very non-specific, unsourced prediction that North Korea is on the verge of collapse. Read it for yourself, but I don’t find it very persuasive. While collapse is a distinct possibility for the reasons Andrei Lankov has recently repeated (see yesterday’s post), I don’t see signs that it’s more imminent today than it was a year ago. If anything, the North Korean leadership has gained strength from its acceptance by the Bush Administration.
North Korea is of course on a long spiral down since the famine of the mid-1990s, but is not about to collapse. That article makes too many leaps of logic to be taken seriously. It reads as if the author just found out all these things after having last looked at the region in 1980, then Googled the situation and whipped something up.
I just wrote the other day a long post detailing how and why I thought my prediction the North wouldn’t live to see 2009 was pretty much dead or in a deep, deep comma.
The ironic thing is that NK still playing along with the Agreed Framework still gives me some hope it will collapse or that Pyongyang is afraid collapse could come in the near future, because I am convinced the North is only negociating out of desperation.
However, the Bush administration has so bent over backward to accomodate the North, Kim Jong Il would be hardpressed to find a reason to break the deal even if he were satisfied with the amount of goodies he’s already received from SK and China and what little from the US since the deal was struck.
I wish I knew more about what goodies the North has gotten from China and South Korea – on what scale – since Washington thawed the sanctions that had Pyongyang squeeling. I haven’t heard enough and couldn’t quantify it even if I had……but I haven’t heard enough to even get a gut feeling….
The slight gut feeling I do have is that the North hasn’t gotten enough stuff yet to feel safe about the kind of collapse I thought they were fearing last year when I made the prediction. But, my gut tells me that Pyongyang is probably very confident it is going to get that level of protection money as the coming months unfold.
Maybe NK isn’t out of the woods yet – because I still have some faith in my feelings when I made the prediction — but I believe they should be seeing a golden light at the end of the tunnel – to mix metaphors – thanks to the Bush administration blinking at the prospects of collapse.
I really do believe that is what we will discover 25 or 50 years from now when all is said and done and documents start to surface.
I agree with Richardson that this article seemed hastily written with little analysis. North Korea came close to collapse in the 90’s but is not near collapse now. There is still to much revenue and goodies coming in to cause the nation to collapse. Plus China is not going to let it collapse a year before the Olympics anyway.