For as long as I have been writing about Asia, North Korea has been the
black hole of American foreign policy. To right-wing hawks, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a monster mash-up of Stalin, Hitler and Godzilla, for which
humanitarian mercy has no place. To left-wing doves, North Korea is nothing more than the brutally mismanaged half of a
broken peninsula on which someday the sun will shine, slow-melting frozen halves into holistic happiness.
Into this disarray strides the mercurial Trump with a pressing problem – the
Russian connection – and possibly with only one way out of the Russian box: some spectacular success. Is he perhaps musing, “Thank heavens for Kim Jong-un. He scares Americans even more than special counsel
Robert Mueller scares me”?
Even so, may a serious-minded
Trump-Kim summit proceed apace, though with cautions galore. US relations with North Korea have been abominable, so there is no mutual trust or social capital on which to build, and less-than-perfect technical means of verifying a hoped-for
denuclearisation protocol. And – one worries – might
Kim actually be a dim bulb? Our best experts are rightly modest about what they claim to know about this
young authoritarian, his governing elite and its Workers’ Party of Korea, and his underdeveloped country. At a recent pair of policy-wonk meetings held by the think tank RAND and at an awards dinner organised by the Pacific Century Institute, former diplomat Robert Gallucci, who was America’s chief negotiator during the temporary settlement of the Korean nuclear crisis of 1994, put this out as his bottom line: neither hawks nor doves in the ideological aviary know what they are squawking about.
Neither knows much about anything North Korea, was his point. Did the Kim regime fast-forward its
missile programme to put in motion a game plan to unite all Korea under the flag of Pyongyang? Or did the regime grind out more missiles and cook up more
nuclear weapons out of the sheer terror of being made toast by the West, as per Iraq’s
Saddam Hussein and Libya’s
Muammar Gaddafi? Or is it that Kim (wily, not dim) desperately needed to gain full control over the military by buying off those generals, who couldn’t simply be eliminated, by letting them have their macho missile launches? Is Kim now in a position to be dovish? Or is it still the house of cunning communist hawks?
Reasonably informed answers to such questions would help American policy avoid guesswork and increase the odds of avoiding unintended consequences. Never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate – unless you lack basic facts. And we have so few, and we fill the embarrassing vacuum with pompous perspectives that confuse the public. As Gallucci, who for years was the dean of Georgetown University’s Foreign Service School, pointed out: maybe there is a price to be paid that could bring down or slow down the build-up? Under what circumstances, if any, would it be in North Korea’s interest to coexist in a nuclear-free peninsula? Or maybe North Korea is as confused and muddled as the US is so that no price could ever fill the bill?
