North Korea survived once against all the odds – the death of Kim Il Sung coinciding with a fall in financial support from the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War and a series of natural disasters – and the rest of the world learnt an important lesson: This is a country whose continued existence needs to be taken seriously.
The secretive manner in which North Korea conducts its international affairs leads to intense speculation about the country’s domestic conditions, motives and goals. The most recent provocations have been no exception, and they raise the question: how best to understand them?
As is so often the case, the strikes on Yeongpyeong Island, the most recent in a series of provocative acts by the North Koreans, were aimed at two separate audiences, domestic and international.
Domestically, it seems likely that the strikes fitted partly into a campaign to bolster the military credentials of the leader-in-waiting, Kim Jong Eun. Such a show of strength has been expected by North Korea watchers since he was promoted to a four-star general in September
But this domestic factor, much discussed in the international media, should not be overstated. These provocations have a very important international element, one that South Korea and the United States, as well as China, have taken seriously.
Under both the Obama administration and South Korea’s Lee Myung Bak government, the policy of withholding shipments of aid — conditional on compliance to non-proliferation and other forms of cooperation — has been strictly followed. In Washington, this is known as a policy of ‘strategic patience.’ In Seoul, it is an attempt to move away from the ‘engagement policy’ of the previous progressive governments. It leaves North Korea almost entirely reliant on Chinese aid.
North Korea’s desire to avoid a situation where its survival is dependent on Chinese benevolence is largely rational and strategic. On the one hand, China has many reasons to go out of its way to perpetuate the existence of the North Korean state, including the desire to avoid an American presence all the way up to the Yalu river and the fear of a flood of refugees into China’s already impoverished north-eastern regions if North Korea collapsed or experienced significant internal instability. On the other hand, China is a big and powerful player in Northeast Asia, continually growing, and may eventually consider its strategic interests best met by the dissolution of its unpredictable and at times bellicose neighbour.
While strategic calculation plays a large part in North Korea’s rationale, the desire to avoid almost total dependence on China can also be understood from the perspective of the country’s guiding philosophy, Juche, which is taught in kindergartens and schools and referred to proudly on propaganda posters. This aspect of the country is often understated (and poorly understood) by policy analysts, but it has played a large part in the evolution of the North Korean mindset and includes within it some powerful and potentially useful clues to why the regime behaves as it does.
At the centre of the Juche philosophy is the idea of national independence (Jajuseong). Juche philosophers argue that the Korean people have exhibited a historical tendency towards ‘flunkyism’ or servility. Considering bigger and more developed states as superior to their own, they have made the mistake of imitating them mechanically — a particularly dangerous tendency given the location of the Korean Peninsula in the heart of Northeast Asia, surrounded by big and powerful countries. This willingness to lean toward their more powerful neighbours has historically left Korea open to colonisation by feudal leaders.
Relying on China is dangerous in a strategic and rational sense, and it is also antithetical to the Juche philosophy. In this regard, Juche is not defined in the way we may expect — as self-reliance in one’s own affairs — but rather translates into the avoidance of an over-reliance on any single outside influence. North Korea doesn’t want to rely too heavily on China. It is also in a strategic position to negotiate with both United States and South Korea, and extract concessions from them — and this, in the simplest terms, is what we have seen take place over the past year.
Some analysts argue that the main driver of North Korea’s foreign policy is not Juche, but a more identifiable, realist set of interests; according to this perspective, Juche is simply a convenient excuse employed by a regime interested only in its own survival. While this argument is difficult to counter, it overlooks the possibility that, even if North Korea does make foreign policy decisions based primarily on a rational calculation of its interests, these decisions might still be made within the Juche framework. This framework might well be malleable – changing in accordance with regional and international political and strategic realities – but it is nonetheless important from the perspective of the DPRK’s internal propaganda machine.
The prevention of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is at the top of President Obama’s nuclear agenda, which strongly affirms the central importance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The decision by North Korean officials to give Stanford University’s Professor Siegfried Hecker an insight into the regime’s potential proliferation activity — – and specifically the existence of a uranium enrichment program, including at least 1000 centrifuges —– was thus a strong act of defiance. The diplomatic message is clear: the current American approach has not impeded North Korea’s progress on proliferation.
The conservative South Korean government, which came into power in early 2008, has taken an increasingly hard line on inter-Korean relations. In return, North Korea has sent it a clear message, first with the attack on the ROK Navy corvette Cheonan and then with the most recent artillery attacks on Yeongpyeong Island. What South Korea fears most is its strategic vulnerability to North Korea. A large proportion of the South’s population resides in Seoul, just 55 kilometres from the demilitarised zone. While South Korea has the capacity to win any military tussle, the price it would pay is one that the government is not willing to contemplate. The North Koreans hope that, with these attacks, they will rattle the resolve of the South Korean population.
Policymakers in Seoul are surely hoping that the North Koreans are rational and strategic actors. If they are right in this assumption, and if cool heads prevail, this most recent deadly provocation will soon die down — at least until the next attempt by North Korea to test the patience of the governments in Seoul and Washington.
The question everyone is asking now is: how do you manage a problem like North Korea? Doing nothing — the approach taken by the United States and South Korea up until the most recent attacks — seems dangerous: while North Korea may simply be engaging in a sort of ‘blackmail diplomacy’ with its provocations, the chances of strategic miscalculation (on either side of the demilitarised zone) are high, and the consequences too severe. Despite its dire economic situation, the North Koreans have shown themselves willing to divert all available resources to improving their strategic position rather than to improving their economy. As the most recent display of nuclear capacity has shown, this has paid dividends.
Ensuring that relations between the two Koreas remain on a steady footing (calm if not warm) and moving towards a reduction of the nuclear capacity of North Korea are now top priorities. How this should be pursued — whether through dialogue or a more limited form of diplomacy — is the challenge currently facing US and South Korean policymakers.
Danielle Chubb is based in the School of International, Political and Strategic Studies at ANU. Her work focuses on inter-Korean relations and she spent three weeks in Pyongyang in 2007 at the (North) Korean Academy of Social Sciences.
This article was first published here on Inside Story.