Sanity Check: Fifty Years After it Started the War, North Korea Remains a Dangerous, ‘Rogue’ State

(Washington, D.C.): Amidst the hoopla surrounding the summit meeting earlier
this month
between the leaders of North and South Korea, the impression has taken hold that the United
States, its allies and interests are no longer threatened by the Communist regime in Pyongyang.
South Korean businessmen are besotted with the idea of exploiting slave labor conditions in the
North and Seoul has decided not to acquire medium-range ballistic missile capabilities that
would ensure that the North’s capital is at least a fraction as vulnerable to attack as is that of the
South.

The Clinton-Gore Administration has acted no less hastily and irresponsibly. In the wake of
the
summit, the President has lifted most economic and trade sanctions against Kim Jong Il’s
government. Opponents of U.S. missile defenses are urging him to go farther by delaying a
deployment decision on the start of construction of the controversial, ground-based anti-missile
system Alaska. It now appears that he is inclined to do just that.

Fortunately, two highly relevant articles have appeared over the past few days on the op.ed.
page
of the Washington Post — the latest evidence of a significant improvement in the
quality of that
important vehicle for opinion and commentary since Fred Hiatt was made its editor. The
following, excellent essays by former Under Secretary of Defense Fred Iklé and Robert
Kagan
constitute helpful correctives to such foolish notions as: one meeting has fundamentally (to say
nothing of irreversibly) changed the character of the North Korean government; the United States
and other Western powers can safely do business with and otherwise equip “rogue states” like
North Korea, as though there is no danger of the proceeds simply making them more formidable
adversaries; and the ultimate triumph of the democratic world is assured.

Washington Post, 23 June 2000

Evil Without End?

By Fred Iklé

A half-century ago Sunday–on June
25, 1950, a date that should live in infamy–North Korea
started a war that killed millions of people, greatly aggravated East-West tensions and burdened
U.S. relations with China and Russia with problems that remain to this day.

Before the attack on South Korea, NATO was largely a paper alliance. Afterward it built up
its
conventional forces, while America’s deterrent grew from barely 300 atomic bombs to 30,000
nuclear weapons in 10 years. The Soviet Union, in turn, built up its own nuclear forces
massively. And what has North Korea done to China? In January 1950,
President Truman
declared the United States had no territorial designs on Taiwan, sought no bases there and would
provide no further military aid. Soon after North Korea’s attack, the United
States moved to
protect Taiwan with its Seventh Fleet, and after China intervened in North
Korea’s war to save it
from defeat, the United States decided to give military aid to Taiwan.

As clearly as Adolf Hitler is to be blamed for starting World War II, North
Korea’s dictator Kim
II Sung must be blamed for attacking South Korea, coercing a reluctant Stalin to back his
aggression, and thus implanting the Cold War all over Asia. But unlike Nazi Germany, now
safely a thing of the past, Kim II Sung’s regime of cruelty and terror still rules
North Korea and
keeps denying every aspect of the holocaust it caused.

Amazingly, though, the victims of North Korea’s policies–the United
States, South Korea, Japan,
China and Europe–have been donating more and more aid to this source of evil.

It would be too ulcerating to our self-esteem to trace this story to its beginning a half-century
ago. Even in our more recent dealings with North Korea we have been had
more often than most
American diplomats would care to admit. In 1991, for example, the United States tried to
improve relations with North Korea by scaling back U.S. military exercises in
South Korea and
withdrawing all nuclear weapons there. In return, North Korea promised to
accept nuclear
inspections, not to seek nuclear weapons and not to extract plutonium from its “peaceful” reactor.

Each one of these commitments North Korea has violated. The Clinton
administration turned the
other cheek and agreed to give North Korea two “peaceful” reactors to replace
an old one, plus a
continuing supply of fuel oil and food aid. In return, North Korea promised
again to accept
nuclear inspections, not to seek nuclear weapons and not to extract plutonium.

Congress, which keeps paying for these warmed-over promises, evidently does not think it
can
count on them; for if it could, North Korea would have no nuclear weapons
and hence no nuclear
missiles. Instead, Congress seems willing both to pay for promises that preclude North Korean
nuclear missiles, and to pay for a costly radar in Alaska to defend against these very missiles.

Ten days ago, Kim Jong II, the junior tyrant of North
Korea, beguiled world opinion at his
meeting with South Korea’s president by acting almost normal. The jovial appearance of Kim
Jong II has convinced otherwise sober governments, business leaders and charities that they must
rush new aid and “investments” to the world’s worst tyranny.

The Clinton administration showed the way by hastily lifting many economic sanctions.
South
Korean businesses are following close behind by establishing plants in the North. Samsung, for
example, may build a large electronics plant in North
Korea, thereby transferring not just money
to the North but technology as well. Several other South Korean business conglomerates have
been frank about their intent to exploit the disciplined labor in the North, and some have already
started their slave labor factories.

Japan, meanwhile, is debating whether it should consent to pay North
Korea billions of dollars as
“reparations” for the time when Korea was a Japanese colony. (Never mind that the Koreans in
the North were much better off under Japanese rule than today.) And since Russia’s President
Vladimir Putin will visit Kim Jong Il next month, Western money donations to
North Korea will
come in handy to buy those advanced weapons that the Russians love to sell for cash.

After the Korean summit, scarcely anyone noticed that the human rights catastrophe in the
North
was not on the agenda, but the future of the U.S. forces in the South was. Since South Koreans
are now so awestruck by the smiling North Korean “leader,” many will be receptive to the
North’s propaganda that the American forces must leave. Demonstrations against U.S. bases have
already started. It is to be feared that the U.S. military presence in the South will be diminished,
slice by slice.

Meanwhile, as South Korea’s president announced, railroads, power grids and industries in
the
North will be strengthened with South Korean help. Add to this the Japanese cash donations and
the allegedly peaceful nuclear establishment that the United States is promoting with its reactors,
and it becomes plausible that the world will make the North Korean dictatorship stronger again.

How can such a small, backward tyranny inflict so much evil on the world–repeatedly,
through
half a century and now beyond–while receiving ever more generous gifts from its victims?

The writer was undersecretary of defense in the Reagan administration.

Washington Post, 25 June 2000

Springtime for Dictators

By Robert Kagan

Something called the Community of Democracies Conference opened in Warsaw today. It
seems
a bit anachronistic, though. These days it is the dictators who are in vogue, not the democrats. In
life and in death, the Kim Jong Ils and Hafez Assads get more respectful, even celebratory press
than the world’s elected leaders.

Not so long ago, being a tyrant was hazardous to your health. The fall of the Soviet empire in
1991 capped a decade and a half during which more than a dozen dictatorships collapsed under
various forms of American and West European pressure–from Marcos, Pinochet, Duvalier,
Somoza and Noriega on the right to Ortega, Jaruzelski, Honecker, Ceaucescu and Gorbachev on
the left.

In the intermediate aftermath of the Cold War it was commonly assumed that the world’s
remaining dictators would soon be swept away, too. But since the early 1990s only a handful
have lost their jobs. Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman, Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, and now Assad
conveniently died. Indonesia’s Suharto fell victim to the impersonal forces of the international
economy–the United States didn’t even lift a finger to ease him out the door. Only Haiti’s Raoul
Cedras managed to get himself ousted by the Americans. Cedras must feel like an idiot, because
the rest of the world’s dictators have sailed through the storm and see brighter skies ahead. Even
the embattled and despised Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are about to survive their
second American president.

The truth is, the democratic world has become a bit flaccid and is in a more forgiving mood
than
it was a decade ago. This week’s democracy conference has the worthy goal of fostering
cooperation to consolidate the many democracies born in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s–in the
so-called Third Wave of democratization. But promoting democracy where it doesn’t exist?
Setting off a Fourth Wave? That’s not part of the agenda.

Indeed, the conference organizers were hesitant to make clear distinctions between real and
phony democracies. Attendees include such notable democracies as Algeria, Egypt, Kenya and
Yemen. Meanwhile, Jiang Zemin is the toast of the corporate world and of the governments that
do its bidding. Alberto Fujimori is deemed too valuable to be lost to a mere election, and so his
recent electoral theft is winked at by his Latin neighbors. Fidel Castro is the great reuniter of
broken families. Presidents-for-Life Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Aliyev of Azerbaijan are
accorded the respect appropriate to 21st-century sultans. And as Vladimir Putin clamps down on
the Russian press, after stomping on Chechen throats, his chief punishment is to be slobbered
over by Gerhard Schroeder and Tony Blair.

Even pariahs are getting a chance at redemption. Kim Jong Il’s smile has the American press
swooning and the State Department dropping the word “rogue” from its vocabulary. Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright has learned that Kim is “jovial and forthcoming and interested and
knowledgeable.” And who imparted this insight to her? The famously jovial and forthcoming
party bosses in Beijing.

The new, softer approach to dictators is buttressed by grand theories about life in the
post-Cold
War world. The idea of forcing dictators to open their political systems now seems so 1980s.
American conservatives fret about “cultural imperialism”; the left, such as it is, cares more about
punishing the old Pinochet than about stopping a new Pinochet from emerging in Peru. In
respectable circles the “inevitability thesis” reigns. The forces of globalization and the modern
international economic system must spell doom for all dictatorships, regardless of what the
United States and its allies do. So why do anything? Liberals who once demanded that the United
States topple right-wing dictators, and conservatives who once toiled to undo communist
governments, now worship at the same shrine of economic determinism, insisting that commerce
and trade are the great solvent of international tyranny.

Republicans and Democrats alike put their faith in an imagined “iron law,” according to
which
democracy must follow inexorably in the wake of economic development. Focus less on
elections, they say, and more on building the “institutions” of democracy–as if the institutions of
democracy in, say, Peru could be of much use when the elections are rigged or stolen.

Whether anyone actually believes all this is an open question. These are comfortable
doctrines of
passivity, well suited to these comfortable and complacent times. How nice to imagine that
merely by enriching ourselves we can spread the blessings of democracy to everyone else. How
much easier to provide endless democracy assistance to oppressed peoples than to confront their
oppressors.

Someday we may pay a price for our present lassitude. The community of dictators works
together at least as effectively as the community of democracies. Chinese hard-liner Li Peng just
paid a friendly visit to Belgrade bearing millions of dollars in credits for Milosevic’s starving
economy. Milosevic, meanwhile, may be contemplating a sale of uranium to Iraq. Russia and
China routinely defend both Iraq and Serbia in the U.N. Security Council.
North Korea shares its
missile technology with Iran. Iran buys cruise missiles from China. It’s all very chummy.

And who says you can successfully consolidate existing democracies while giving a pass to
the
dictatorships in their midst? Would-be autocrats around the world won’t abide by democratic
norms if there is no penalty for flouting them. We may already be seeing a “Fujimori effect” in
Venezuela.

Even in this globalized age of economic and technological miracles, the international club of
dictators may well get bigger and more firmly entrenched. According to the Chinese press, Jiang
Zemin recently offered Kim Jong Il some sage advice on how to evade the West’s iron law:
“Snuff out all [political] challenges when they are still at the embryonic stage.” The son of Kim Il
Sung probably doesn’t need any lessons in snuffing. Nor does any other dictator canny and
ruthless enough to have survived the 1980s intact. As the democracies consolidate, so do the
dictators.

Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, writes a
monthly column for The Post.