BE WARY. WE’VE BEEN DOWN THIS PATH BEFORE.
Auseful rule about events in the two Koreas — one which everyone ought to have learned from experience, really — is that bad news is never as bad as it seems and good news is never as good as it seems. Over the past couple of years the post-Cold War generation has been suffering a continual freakout over successful North Korean testing of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Which definitely isn’t good news.
But today we arrive at the inevitable result: a brief summit meeting between the political leaders of the Koreas, with some hopeful accompanying talk about denuclearization of the peninsula and a formal end to the Korean War, is greeted with disproportionate relief.
The meeting definitely is good news. In a setting like divided Korea, establishing the mere semblance or possibility of a high-level, cross-border political relationship is important. Face time and chit-chat between leaders will help guard against the small risk of conflict escalation through sheer misunderstanding, and on the Korean Peninsula that’s a risk with millions of lives in the balance. Summits are like a vaccine. Or perhaps that NASA program that looks out for stray asteroid fragments that could wham into Earth.
This is the third inter-Korean summit of its kind, with the new wrinkle that a North Korean leader has physically crossed over to the South. The other two encounters featured precisely the same optimistic talk and precisely the same explicit commitment to “ending the Korean War.” If you have lived long enough to notice this much, and to observe that Western diplomacy is still carefully honouring the “one China” fiction that has lasted as long as the formal “Korean War,” you are not likely to get too enthusiastic.
As a bonus, you are less predisposed to start raving about a contrarian triumph of bellicose American diplomacy. But vaccines need to be updated, and NASA needs to keep looking out for wild rocks. If surprised people choose to point out that President Trump’s stamping and shouting does not seem to have prevented the Korean leaders from showing up and dutifully receiving their metaphorical shots, well, that’s probably OK.
What you probably should not do is expect North Korea to really abandon nuclear deterrence, or sign a treaty technically ending the war. These are bargaining chips that Kim Jong Un could conceivably trade for economic benefits, but they are chips he can only use in earnest once apiece. Fake “denuclearization” promises have already been used to buy time, and since Kim holds the people of North Korea as well as the citizens of Seoul as hostages, they might be allowed to work again.
The true strategic circumstances of Korea remain what they were. Earlier this week, before Kim successfully demonstrated to an amazed world that he can walk a few metres and speak Korean, the Seoulbased journal DailyNK, a human-rights monitoring site that raises money for refugees from the North, reported that six North Koreans were executed late last year for “distributing” a Pyongyang telephone book to foreigners. Not some kind of special phone book that lets you call orders to the field artillery, mind you: just a regular phone book full of numbers for offices and individuals.
You have to have your skepticism radar turned to high when reading the Korean press, but DailyNK cites a North Korean documentary source for this story, and it is otherwise believable. And if you want a sign of how elusive the pathway to actual Korean peace is, it’s a strong indicator. North Korea is a country with ubiquitous land lines and cellphones; a large underground economy keeping people alive by illegal means needs these things even more than an official one does. But the phone book is a state secret whose careless circulation is treason — because if someone in South Korea or Japan or even China had a North Korean phone book, who knows who they’d call?
The best hope for North Korea is probably that it can be persuaded to sinify — to adopt Deng Xiaoping-style economic reforms that would make the country a participant in the world without unacceptable risks to the ruling elite. Kim is thought to have lived in Switzerland for nearly a decade: it is hard to imagine he believes all of the propaganda that North Korea issues in his name.
But North Korea, unlike China, cannot just redefine scientific socialism and count on the love of money to do the rest. This state’s ideology features an additional layer of disabling mysticism and fairy tales, now thickened by generations, that would take time to degrade in a non-revolutionary, non-catastrophic way. China is authoritarian, but it definitely isn’t afraid of telephone numbers.
If Kim had the intention of Deng-izing, he could find ways of communicating that to the West and to South Korea. Sadly, what we have gotten in recent years is mostly a contemporary reiteration of traditional North Korean theatrics and shenanigans. Kim’s approach to unofficial economic activity remains a mixture of tolerance and abuse, not encouragement. Maybe different signals will emerge from this week’s summit, but just showing up isn’t enough.