Not so long ago, when we wanted to learn why hostile leaders were hostile, we studied their ideologies. Nowadays, having learned that ideology is either dead or an arbitrary system of signs, we analyze leaders by “putting ourselves in their shoes” — in other words, by assuming that everyone thinks the way we do.
So it is that North Korea watchers who speak no Korean can confidently tell the rest of us what motivates Kim Jong-il. His country is poor, so he wants aid. We bombed his country flat in the Korean War, so he’s afraid of us. That missile launching Pyongyang has said it will carry out next week? Mr. Kim wants to get President Obama’s attention, so he can squeeze more money and security guarantees out of the next round of talks.
If, however, we assume the perspective expressed in the North Koreans’ own official writings, things look very different. The first step is to regard not the devastation of the Korean War but the victories of the late 1960s as having defined the country’s relationship with Washington. That was when the North detained the crew of the American spy ship Pueblo for almost a year and shot down an American reconnaissance plane, killing all 31 people aboard. Every North Korean schoolchild knows that the United States did a lot of saber-rattling but ended up doing nothing.
Over the past decade North Korea’s string of nuclear provocations has reinforced the public conviction that Washington’s bark is worse than its bite. Kim Jong-il has so far shown little indication that he does not share this conviction.
As for economic matters, the leadership in the North has always considered them secondary to domestic security. If the masses lived well, fine, but Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Il-sung, once told the East German dictator Erich Honecker that they behaved better when they didn’t. In the mid-1990s, when Kim Jong-il was forced to choose between opening his country to the outside world and letting perhaps a million citizens starve to death, he did just what his father would have done.
North Koreans now know that they are much poorer than their brethren in the South. They know this not just because the information cordon that once sealed off the country is in tatters, but also because the Kim Jong-il regime openly, even proudly, admits the gross economic disparity. The propaganda apparatus assures the masses that their heroic sacrifices are helping to nuclearize the North and keep America down. They are also told that the South Korean masses, for all their material comfort, are ashamed of being under the thumb of the Yankees and yearn to live under Kim Jong-il.
This message worked well enough when left-wing South Korean administrations were paying tributary visits to Pyongyang, and making sure that their news media referred to Kim Jong-il as “the National Defense Council chairman.” But since he became president of South Korea last year, the conservative Lee Myung-bak has attached conditions to aid for the North and sharply criticized its nuclear program. The message to the North Korean people is clear: their Dear Leader is not as feared and respected as they have been led to believe. This challenge has thrown the Kim regime into a crisis of which the outside world remains largely unaware.
Thus, with the announcement of the imminent missile launching, the dictator is not trying to get Mr. Obama’s attention so much as his own people’s. It is not merely a question of carrying out the threats of the anti-Lee rhetoric, rich in allusions to a pending comeuppance, that have filled the party newspapers since last fall. The now-familiar cycle of North Korean provocation, American warnings, North Korean follow-through and American calls for more peace talks — calls that are always mocked as an abject surrender — must turn every few years if the “military first” regime is to justify its existence and give heroic meaning to the people’s hardship.
Were the North to exchange its nuclear program for an aid package and an American Embassy it would quite literally become a poor man’s version of South Korea. Mr. Kim is realistic enough to know how long such a state would last.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has been wise to reject the idea of shooting down the Taepodong-2 missile. It is safer to allow Pyongyang another hollow victory than to humiliate it before the world. Punitive sanctions after the fact would most likely make no difference, because North Korea will return to negotiations in any case. But next time we go into talks, we must do so with an awareness of the domestic political realities that force the North Koreans to do the things they do.
This means demanding changes where they matter most, and can be immediately verified — on the propaganda front — before putting our faith in some grandiose timetable of disarmament. If Kim Jong-il will not cease referring to himself as a “military first leader,” or stressing that America and North Korea “can never share the same sky,” we can be certain, without letting yet another deadline elapse, that he is negotiating in bad faith. For far too long, American diplomats have treated Kim Jong-il’s political culture as his business. It is ours as well.
B. R. Myers, a researcher of North Korean ideology and propaganda at Dongseo University.