Does Kim Jong-un want a war because he thinks he could win,
Or does he want a war because he knows he will lose?
Bellicose, belligerent, high-pitched and shrill are among the increasingly exhausted list of superlatives used by exasperated observers to describe the warmongering rhetoric emerging from the “Democratic” People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) over the last few weeks.
The same old excuses are being trotted out by way of explanation. It’s just the usual ham-fisted Big Brother guff played primarily for the domestic market and to bolster the regime’s hold over its people in the run up to celebration of founding father, Kim Il-sung’s birthday. Cue footage of the top-brass nodding approvingly as they inspect their “missile” and reports of increased agricultural production and other glorious national achievements straight out of the pages of 1984. Or it’s the immature, grumpy-toddler-like posturing we’re all so used to, resulting from the fresh round of sanctions and condemnations following their recent missile testing and rocket launch.
Of course the world has repeatedly underestimated both of these, and the old excuses may well hold good again. But I can’t help wondering if Kim Jr. Jr. has something else in mind this time around.
Perhaps we’re underestimating North Korea’s podgy, pugilistic premier.
Pimp my dictatorship
For just a moment, put yourself in Kim Jong-un’s shoes. A thirty-year-old, basketball loving guy, educated in Switzerland who has seen a bit of the world and who has seen North Korea from the outside in, for the basket case of a country it is.
Perhaps you respect the achievements of open, developed societies. You admire and envy the prosperity of the South.
Perhaps you too see your country’s administration for the global laughing stock that it is, and you know your father was a whack-job pilloried throughout the world. Perhaps you don’t fancy history remembering you the same way.
Maybe you’d like some of those achievements and comforts of open, developed societies for your own people.
And, as a child of the MTV generation, you’d like them rather quickly.
Conveniently you now find yourself – amongst a plethora of other titles – the Supreme Leader of your country, the perfect position from which to bring that change about.
Perfect that is, until you starting working out how you’re going to do it…
The Myanmar solution
Following the death of Kim Jong-il, many a doveish wonk hoped the new man at the helm would lead the country down the path of reform and openness, that Kim Jong-un would follow in the footsteps of Thein Sein, Myanmar’s former military leader and now president in a slow and steady liberation and liberalisation of his country and his people.
But Kim is no Thein Sein. Myanmar’s president is a time-served 68-year-old man well used to leading his country and with the power, the sway, the soft-skills and the connections to negotiate a process of change with the nest-feathering, self-interested old guard around him. By contrast Kim is merely a boy amongst men, wet behind the ears and with no political capital to spend. His name is his only skin in the game.
The Tunisia solution
How about a North Korean blossoming of the Arab Spring? Could the downtrodden masses be motivated to rise-up against the regime and demand reforms, with Kim their stool pigeon helping them from within?
Fat chance. North Korea isn’t Tunisia, or Libya, or Egypt. The people are too docile, too downtrodden and too indoctrinated. And while those countries show what the people can achieve against a withering regime, events in Syria show how badly it can turn out against an entrenched one; tens of thousands dying while the rest of the world stands by like onlookers at a auto-wreck; shuffling uneasily and avoiding eye contact with each other.
The Iraq solution
If you can’t reform your regime and your people can’t reform your regime, you only have one option left.
Get someone else to do it.
Instead of blowing against the North Korean wind, blow with it. Ratchet up the warmongering until you finally cross the line with the outside world and they invade your ass. In one fell swoop the old hierarchy are swept away and a new country can be built.
Okay, externally imposed regime changes have a miserable track record. Iraq and Afghanistan are hardly models of reinvigorated development after all. But the North Koreans aren’t the Iraqis nor the Afghans, their country is not a hot-bed of religious fervour or jihadist activism. An Iraq solution doesn’t mean an Iraq result. Something more like the unified Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall seems rather more likely.
What Kim wants
It may sound far-fetched to you, hey it does to me too, but the sad and simple truth is that there are no painless routes to liberation for North Korea right now, and you can’t rule out the possibility that Kim wants liberation and knows he hasn’t got many options to get it.
Joining the likes of Saddam Hussein in the history books probably isn’t what the young Kim dreamt of when he was at school in Switzerland, but is it that much worse than joining the likes of his Dad? And at least finally there’d be a Kim who was a true liberator of his people.