North Korea has been back in the news the last couple of weeks. The most recent development came just yesterday as the hermit government ordered international nuclear inspectors out of the country and announced that it was restarting its nuclear facility. Predictably, the story was international news and resulted in the usual hand wringing and diplospeak, however the more reasoned approach is probably some variation of, “So what?”
Over the last six years, North Korea has tested three ballistic missiles and one nuclear device. All were failures. The missiles either splashed down thousands of miles from their intended locations or, in the latest case, spectacularly failed to reach orbit. The nuclear device (it isn’t a bomb until it can be put into something small enough to fit on an airplane) fizzled and barely registered as nuclear test. All facts to the contrary each event was greeted with international dismay at the unpredictability and dangerousness of North Korea and hailed within the DPRK (that’s the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, aka North Korea) as a sterling triumph.
Those events, and North Korean problems more generally (it’s not a good thing when the route out of your country is both highly dangerous and well worn), point toward a somewhat comforting conclusion however: the DPRK is mostly talk. The rockets and the nuclear device weren’t deliberate failures; these were the best efforts of a paranoid and meticulous government that simply doesn’t have the technical capacity to match its sterling propaganda efforts. The North Korean government has consistently proved that it can repress and bullshit its own people and make the outside world nervous, but a flair for language and domestic surveillance causes neither the rockets fly true nor the atoms split.
It is the very dysfunctional nature of the government which makes it both inept and threatening. Try to imagine the paranoia and secrecy it must take to become a high ranking North Korean official, now imagine how many secrets within secrets, hidden agreements and personal agendas pervade that organization. Even if the CIA had half the Supreme People’s Assembly and Kim Jong-Il’s personal chef on the payroll we still wouldn’t have a good idea of what’s going on in that country because they probably have no idea themselves. Parts of that government are rigidly concealed from other parts and the true internal power structure is quite likely a mystery to even the most senior and inside players. The Dear Leader himself probably has significant plans and information being withheld from him by subordinates who would be fools not to at least think about what might happen should he die.
(None of the above changes the fact that the United States hasn’t exactly been a model actor here. After the fall of the Soviet Union, North Korea found itself on its own in a world that increasingly saw it as an irrelevant and anachronistic throwback. The Agreed Framework from 1994 was broken on both sides and the Bush Administration didn’t exactly do a lot of good when it spent eight years alternately threatening the DPRK and then sullenly speaking with it.)
The only reasonable course of action, for us, our allies, the Russians and the Chinese is to sit down and say, as calmly and repeatedly as possible, that war isn’t an option for anyone and where would you like to go from here? Otherwise we’re just left with absurdities like analyzing grainy video and doctored photos for evidence of the health of a sixty-eight year old man. The DPRK can be trusted not to outright start a war, they aren’t suicidal. In the meantime the rest of the world can safely ignore them until they are ready to talk about more than an on again off again nuclear program that doesn’t even work.
