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January 28, 2005

Christian Science Monitor looks at North Korea's grim security calculus. Following economic reforms in 2002 that were modeled on China's (except for the crucial step of allowing significant private foreign investment), North Korea's economic performance has failed its poorest citizens. The World Food Programme estimates that two-thirds of North Korea's population of 24m are subsisting on diets equal to less than half of their nutritional requirements. Famines in the modern world are never the result of shortages of food, but instead are caused by politics, and just as the consequences of Kim Jong-Il's refusal to open the DPRK to foreign trade and investment killed at least 2m Koreans in the late 1990s, so are his policies today endangering hundreds of thousands of his people's lives.

Kim is isolated from his countrymen, but not completely so, and the Monitor presents expert and official estimates that the increase in food prices and the rise in unemployment are encouraging the Stalinist government to in essence trade its nuclear weapons and projects to the West for food. After all, North Korea has no civilian goods the West wants. Why not threaten the West and back off when Japan and other countries come through with shipments of rice and wheat?

The West has played this game now since the beginning of President Clinton's term. It is an unstable equilibrium, and one that postpones real reforms in favor of paying off a dictator every now and again in order to save the lives of millions of innocents--lives, of course, endangered by the dictator in the first place. War is not an option; such an action would kill hundreds of thousands, wreck the economy of South Korea (North Korea's is wrecked already), endanger Japan and possibly Hawaii and Alaska, and hardly allay the fears of the rest of the world about the sources of American conduct. And anyway, where would we get the troops to simultaneously engage Kim, continue our "peacekeeping" in Iraq, hunt for al-Qaeda, transform our military, and meet our committments to countries like Taiwan?

In other words, this is another one of those cases where "moral clarity" does not clarify the issue at hand.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at January 28, 2005 08:43 AM

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