Why Did So Many Influential Americans Think North Korea Would Collapse

Abstract

IntroductionIf "know your enemy" is the sine qua non of effective warfare and diplomacy, the United States has been badly served by those who claim expertise on North Korea in Washington. It is now twenty years since a bipartisan consensus emerged inside the Beltway that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) would soon "implode or explode," a mantra that began with Bush I and lasted through Clinton and Bush II, right down to the present. This was the hidden premise of the American pledge to build two light-water reactors to replace the Y¢ongby¢on plutonium complex in the 1994 Framework Agreement: since they wouldn't come onstream for eight or ten years, by then they would belong to the Republic of Korea (ROK).Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz journeyed to Seoul in the aftermath of the apparent American victory over Saddam to opine (in June 2003) that "North Korea is teetering on the brink of collapse." In intervening years we heard Gen. Gary Luck, commander of U.S. forces in Korea, say (in 1997) that "North Korea will disintegrate, possibly in very short order;" the only question was whether it would implode or explode.1 In this he was plagiarizing another of our commanders in Korea, Gen. Robert Riscassi, who never tired of saying Pyongyang would soon "implode or explode." (Riscassi retired in 1992.)When does the statute of limitations run out on being systematically wrong? But I know from experience that any attempt by outsiders to break through this Beltway groupthink merely results in polite silence and discrete headshaking. North Korea's coming collapse is still the dominant opinion today.2In what follows I want to briefly examine this Washington consensus, and then attempt to explain why the collapse scenario was, is, and will be wrong. But my argument can be stated simply:* North Korea is sui generis and not comparable to any other communist regime.* It is much less communist than nationalist, and less nationalist than Korean.* It draws deeply from the well of modern and pre-modern Korean political culture.* Its nationalism traces back 75 years, to a never resolved conflict with Japan.* Its legitimacy is entirely wrapped up with this anti-Japanese struggle.* It is a garrison state the likes of which the world has never seen.* Its military leaders take pride in having faced up to the U.S. military for six decades.* If it probably can't defeat anyone, it is still militarily impregnable.3* No foreign troops have been stationed in the DPRK since 1958.* It has always had close backing from China.* It also got backing from Moscow, but never had close relations with it.* It is run by a gerontocracy of solipsists who care nothing for what the outside world thinks.* This elite proved itself capable of starving hundreds of thousands to death while retaining power.* This elite has proved for more than 60 years that it knows how to hold onto power.Collapse or Overthrow?The leading Washington pundit on North Korea is Nicholas Eberstadt, who has been with the American Enterprise Institute for about twenty years, and initially distinguished himself by using demographic data to pinpoint the wretched health care system and dramatic declines in life expectancy of the Soviet Union, several years before it fizzled. Since at least June 1990 he has been predicting the impending collapse of North Korea,4 but his views are best sampled in his 1999 book, The End of North Korea. (When a New York Times reporter asked John Bolton what the Bush administration's policy was on the DPRK, he strode to his bookshelf and handed him Eberstadt's book: that's our policy, he said.)The flaws in Eberstadt's "end-of-North-Korea" theme can help us understand the DPRK's post-cold war endurance. He enjoys arguing throughout the book that North Korea has been wrong-wrong-wrong in all of its strategies from the word go, but he does not tell the reader that he brings purely liberal and capitalist assumptions to bear on a society that constituted for most of its existence the highly selfconscious anti-capitalist, somewhat as if Milton Friedman were to describe how stupid the Ayatollahs have been for not charging interest on loans. …