The North Korean dictatorship may have learned nothing about feeding its own people let alone creating an economy even a fraction as successful as that of South Korea, but the regime has proved itself the absolute master of international blackmail, which is the closest this isolated and paranoid state comes to diplomacy.
Pyongyang-style diplomacy is once again under way as the Seoul government tries one more time to convince the North Koreans to return to the six-party talks on its nuclear weapons program. Representatives of the two governments yesterday began their first face-to-face meetings for ten months. The talks are due to finish this evening.
The South Koreans have kept their quiet about their precise negotiating position but have said that they are prepared to improve significantly upon the economic aid and security guarantees offered when the talks last broke down in Beijing last June. It is hard however to see what North Korea would really want in exchange for abandoning its nuclear weaponry. Kim Jong Il, who succeeded his late father Kim Il Sung as the country’s absolutist dictator, knows perfectly well that the only reason the rest of the world is taking him at all seriously is that he has a nuclear weapon.
The Pyongyang regime has every reason to believe that its own nuclear weapons program, long suspected and now finally confirmed, is the reason that its highly regimented and militarized country of some 23 million people has escaped outside interference. The rest of the world may believe that for this paranoid and secretive state to possess nuclear weapons is both terrifying and lunatic but there can be no doubt that in the mind of Kim Jong Il and his henchmen, the real lunacy would be abandoning the one thing which is now protecting them. Iraq’s example is before them.
Everything would depend on China, which though it has done its best to broker a settlement, may well value the usefulness of an unstable North Korean regime, which though a threat to China, is far more of a threat to America and its allies.
Meanwhile, it is widely believed that harvests have failed and the population is once again on the verge of starvation. That Pyongyang is demanding food aid and fertilizer reinforces this belief.
But could this also be a bluff? If North Korea’s enemies believe the country is on the brink of economic collapse, will they not also seek to string out the talks in the hope that famine will cause social collapse and unrest which will bring the regime toppling down? As long as the talks reach no final conclusion, as long as only partial tranches of aid are given to Pyongyang as “humanitarian gestures”, North Korea will be able to maintain its nuclear weaponry and the Americans, the Japanese and the Chinese will be obliged to leave it alone.
