What to do with a problem called Kim?

Here we go again.

On September 11th news outlets around the world broke the news that satellite photos showed steam rising from the towers at Yongbyon, one of North Korea’s nuclear research facilities. On the 17th, the country failed to answer the report of a special UN panel accusing it of “unspeakable atrocities” or provide evidence to the contrary. On the 21st Kim Jong Un cancelled plans to  allow hundreds of individuals who had been split between North and South by the heavily-militarised DMZ since the Korean War be reunited at the Diamond Mountain resort in the North. Quite the active ten days for the Kim regime. These are just the latest steps in a long history of bellicosity and blatant disregard for international law.

This confrontational attitude is made more interesting by the contrast provided by recent news about Pyongyang’s “charm offensive”; the country had been seen as warming to its neighbours and increasingly willing to engage in open dialogue. There was noise about being willing to restart the 6 party talks and to de-nuclearise, while there had also been high hopes for the family reunification program. On 2 September South Korea promised an additional $8.4 million worth of aid as a conciliatory gesture as a result of improving relations, and on 16 September the joint industrial park at Kaesong was finally reopened following a 4 month hiatus. All of these positive steps have been wiped out in one fell swoop following the recent shift in tone.

So, what gives? Why restart a globally condemned nuclear research program, further enrage human rights activists, and stonewall efforts to thaw relations at the exact time that the international community is beginning to respond positively to your overtures?

It turns out, in fact, that this is a trend. The North Korean leadership isn’t stupid, it isn’t naive, and it certainly isn’t irrational. For decades ambassadors and senior officials in Pyongyang have been walking a diplomatic tightrope as they try to squeeze maximum aid out of the international community. The strategy is this: provoke for a period, but make sure not to step too far. After all, provocation is a useful tool only if it doesn’t land you in a war you are certain to lose with the world’s only remaining superpower and its allies. After the international community has gotten itself worked up over these actions — the sorts of things that gets North Korea lumped in with other notorious regimes in the so-called “axis of evil” — offer to come to the bargaining table in return for no-strings-attached foreign assistance. Rinse, wash, and repeat.

Aid is absolutely necessary for the regime to survive. The North Korean economy long ago ceased to be capable of supporting its own population, so now the receipt of aid is critical to not only stop vast swathes of ordinary citizens from starving, but also to consolidate control. In gaining access to vast quantities of food, fuel, and industrial equipment free of conditions, the North Korean regime is able to distribute goods as it sees fit. Kim Jong-un strengthens his control by rewarding those who are loyal with aid, and withholding it from those who are not.

Up until the collapse of the USSR it was easy to ensure there was enough aid to go around. Pyongyang skilfully played China and the Soviet Union off of each other; despite their common affinity for Marxist ideology, differing strategic interests and personal acrimony meant that the two countries were never really allies, and came close to war several times. Like two jealous parents competing to earn the loyalty of an only child, North Korea exploited this animosity to secure aid from each of the countries in ever-increasing amounts. As a result, many ordinary North Koreans actually look back with fondness on the 1980s under the rule of the “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung; the Public Distribution System that handed out rations had plentiful supplies of rice and grain, and people would go hungry only because of failure to show loyalty to the regime, not because the it couldn’t afford to feed them. With the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the early 90’s, however, also came the collapse of aid to North Korea. Russia was in disarray, and while China would still help to some extent, their interests had shifted as they initiated their own market reforms. Within a few years the country was destitute, and a period horrific famine endured for the rest of the decade. The only way for the country to survive was to do its best to extract as much aid from China and others, but without the leverage of its rivalry with the Soviet Union. Ironically, the countries that are traditionally on the receiving end of the harshest North Korean propaganda, Japan, South Korea, and America, were in fact the countries whose aid prevented the death of even more North Koreans during this time.

With this background in mind, we return to the original question; what should the United States and its allies do from a strategic perspective to best improve the lives of ordinary North Koreans and promote stability in a rapidly growing region of the world?

According to Andrei Lankov, a professor of Kookmin University in Seoul, the best strategy is to expose ordinary North Koreans to as much of the outside world as possible, and then to simply wait. In his view, and in the view of most Korean strategists, regime collapse is inevitable. The only question is how long Kim Jong-un or his successor can hold on. As more and more information seeps into the country by way of illicit radios, DVDs of South Korean soap operas, and cell phones running on Chinese networks, repressed North Koreans are increasingly aware of the outside world and its accompanying prosperity and freedoms. Nowadays even state-sanctioned activities expose thousands of citizens to the outside world.

The Kaesong Industrial Complex, which provides 123 South Korean companies access to the cheap labor of 53,000 North Korean workers 6 miles north of the DMZ, illustrates the pressures currently facing Mr. Kim and his advisors. Kaesong has been both a great blessing and curse to the North Korean government. It provides a source of much-needed hard currency to Pyongyang, but also exposes workers and their families in the Kaesong region, around 200,000 in total, to South Korean culture and products. Strict regulations are of course in place that carefully regulate what can and cannot be said or shown to those individuals, but even the advanced factory buildings themselves speak volumes about just how much more advanced the South is these days.

The generation of hard capital through enterprises like the Kaesong complex is absolutely necessary to keep whatever’s left of the DPRK’s economy alive. Aid from China and Russia used to provide the country with the raw and manufactured goods that weren’t produced domestically, but now Pyongyang is forced to purchase them at market prices and in foreign currency. The $90 million a year that the government receives from Kaesong is one of the few ways that it can afford to import fuel, food, and military equipment.

While both desirable and necessary, exposure to foreign people and goods works against the leadership in multiple ways — it will inevitably make ordinary North Koreans more aware of the deficiencies that they have been enduring for decades, and at the same time increase their standard of living. When people don’t have to fight for survival every minute of every day they are able to think, to talk, and to organise. This is the stuff of nightmares for the Kim family; a population that is aware of the outside world and is able to rally itself means almost certain downfall for the regime at one time or another.

Already there are signs that the ordinary North Korean citizen is both more aware of the outside world than at any time, and more importantly increasingly willing to speak out about it. The current generation of youth will be the first in the country’s history that grows up with the universal knowledge that they are being fed a lie by their government. Smuggled movies and music showing life in South Korea, cell phones with which they can call relatives in China, increasing numbers of computers that can be used to read and hide classic works of Western literature and news articles from the outside world; these are all increasingly common ways in which the government is losing control over its population. There have been several instances of protest in the past decade. In 2009 hundreds of middle-aged women clashed with police after the government attempted to initiate a clamp-down on the local markets which now form the backbone of economic life in the country. The government couldn’t make the restrictions stick. In 2011 news reports trickled out announcing that for the first time ever, citizens in several major cities joined together in organised protests against the government, demanding food and electricity. They were immediately repressed, but when the state authorities tried to identify the organisers, they were met with silence. In only the late 90’s, the combination of a huge network of paid informants and the social pressure to oust disloyal neighbours would have surely led authorities to the guilty parties. People are no longer beholden to the state in the way they once were.

The government’s control over its people in North Korea is rapidly diminishing as it fails to effectively cope with its need for foreign investment, the personal greed of the country’s elite, and the ease with which modern technology disseminates information. Perhaps the modern world makes it simply impossible to maintain control to the same extent as it was in the past. Either way, it is in nobody’s best interest to react with aggression to North Korea’s latest desperate attempts to grab the attention of the international community and squeeze much-need aid out of interested parties. Repeated provocations are hard to ignore, especially for those on the receiving end, like the South Koreans, but everyone stands to gain from such a strategy. In fact, encouraging cooperation despite such provocation will help to accelerate the downfall of the regime, and lead to a better life for the true victims of the current situation — the tens of millions of ordinary North Koreans who scratch out a meagre existence day to day, hoping that their future will be better than their past.