end its long and self-imposed isolation, a long-standing authoritarian regime must contrast the benefits of opening up against the risk to the regime’s survival. In weighing the benefits and risks to the regime, the Burmese military junta decided that opening up was better than staying the course.

But for the North Korean regime the potentially enormous benefits associated with opening up do not offset the risk to the regime’s survival. Regardless of the extent of the gains that reforms could bring about, those gains are meaningless if they lead to the demise of the regime. How can the regime reform if by doing so it prompts its own destruction?

Such is the excruciating choice faced by the North Korean regime. The only way North Korea can lift itself out of the systemic crisis that affects the country is to carry out economic reform and open itself up to the outside world. Yet opening up will undermine the legitimacy of the totalitarian system that the regime has created in order to consolidate and maintain its absolute power.

One of the key features of the North Korean totalitarian system is its strict control over people’s access to information. By controlling information, the regime can unilaterally dictate and shape the people’s views of reality, thus ensuring their complete loyalty and obedience. This control has been obtained by isolating the North Korean people from the outside world.

By opening up, the regime will lose the ability to control public access to information, thereby losing its ability to impose the regime’s own self-serving view of reality. The people will have alternative sources of information with which to shape their own views of reality. This, in turn, will inevitably lead them to question and eventually challenge the legitimacy of the regime.

The prospect of unfettered access to information that is most threatening to the regime’s survival relates to people in the North becoming fully informed about the South. They will realise that they had been deceived into believing in the superiority of the North over the South. The North Korean regime has long resorted to propaganda to denigrate South Korea so as to enhance its own legitimacy. If the truth about South Korea is known, the regime will be shaken to its very core: the potential knowledge of the existence of a peaceful, prosperous and democratic South Korea poses an existential threat to North Korea.

So, the North Korean regime cannot make a decision to open up by weighing the benefits versus the risks to the regime, as the Burmese junta did.  If the end of the regime is preordained by opening up to the outside world, the choice is illusory. Any North Korean opening up would certainly lead to the end of the regime and its totalitarian system. The system of restricting information that has hitherto allowed the North Korean regime to stay in power has now become the regime’s own worst enemy. The North Korean regime is locked in a cage of its own making and any attempts to break from this cage will lead to their destruction. As long as the Kim family continues to hold onto power, the prospects for change are bleak. This regime has no choice but to continue to muddle through.

Steven Kim is Professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of APCSS, the U.S. Pacific Command, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government