Questions Linger over North Korea
Book launch author Hazel Smith proposes a less confrontational approach
April/May 2006
North Korea remains an enigma, but research over the past decade suggests that a less adversarial posture toward it may bring greater dividends, according to Hazel Smith, a former senior fellow at the Institute. Smith presented her findings at a book launch for her USIP Press-published Hungry for Peace: International Security, Humanitarian Assistance, and Social Change in North Korea.
Richard Solomon, president of the Institute, opened the launch by enumerating four questions policymakers face in their dealings with North Korea: Can the so-called Six-Party Talks help resolve the crisis involving North Korea’s nuclear weapons program? Why, after initially allowing humanitarian organizations into the country to help feed the hungry, did North Korea recently ask them to leave? What are the unresolved issues affecting
U.S. relations with South Korea, and how do these relate to the conflict with the north? Finally, what is the state of the North Korean leadership? How stable is it, and what might replace it?
Recently, said Solomon, there has been a loosening of U.S. policies for dealing with North Korea. Can this space lead to the prospect of greater cooperation?
Mutual Doubt, Fear and Assumptions
Smith began by acknowledging how much still remains unknown about North Korea. “Leadership issues are still extremely opaque,” she said. But compared to a decade ago, there is vastly more knowledge available. Because of the North Korean famine of the mid-1990s and the influx of foreign humanitarian organizations, “today we can check our sources and develop knowledge,” she said.
North Korea’s leadership believes that U.S. foreign policy is focused on the “axis of evil”—North Korea, Iraq, and Iran—and worries that the United States may launch a preemptive strike against it. Since the mid-1990s, the population has disengaged somewhat from the state, and a spontaneous “marketization” has occurred. Political status is no longer as rigid as it once was, and cross-cutting inequalities have become more prevalent.
The reasons for North Korea’s recent ejection of international humanitarian organizations are unclear. Tension between the government and the humanitarians arose out of the government’s face-saving insistence that North Korea was not confronting a humanitarian emergency, and the donors insistence that they were not engaged in “development assistance.” But those tensions appear to have faded somewhat as the World Food Programme and others began to implement what they called a “protracted relief and recovery program.”
Smith argued that U.S. preoccupation with the “menace” of Kim Jong Il and the threat of a nuclear standoff steers U.S. policymakers to adopt a “worst-case” approach to North Korea. This “demonization” results in bad policy, because it assumes that North Korea’s leadership is either irredeemable or wholly unpredictable. A better approach would be to assume that North Korea is a rational actor influenced by its own historical perspective. She concluded that change through rapprochement rather than confrontation ultimately may yield a better outcome.
