Not your dad’s N. Koreans (II)

North Koreans of the “arduous march” generation — those who starved to death in mid-1990s in quiet desperation while waiting in their homes for the public distribution system to deliver rations that never came — are forever gone. Today’s North Koreans are market-savvy burgeoning capitalists.

There is now a moneyed class — consisting mostly of party and military officials who have profited from the trade between North Korea and China. There is conspicuous wealth, from new high-rises and department stores filled with modern electronics to pricey restaurants and amusement parks. North Koreans have found a taste for money and are not happy that the current sanctions are cramping their style. More importantly, the sanctions are cramping the style of Kim’s core power base, the Pyongyang-living, inner-circle bureaucracy that Kim depends on to keep his regime afloat.

The bitter rhetoric in recent pronouncements allows us to glimpse into the economic pain that the COVID-19 pandemic and the attendant shutdown of North Korea’s border with China has had, and Kim’s real concern over his ability to deliver the goods again. Kim sold them the inter-Korean rapprochement and the Hanoi summit only to come home empty-handed, and things have progressively gotten worse.

Kim’s legitimacy depends on presenting the Kim dynasty as a patriotic house who kept Korea’s people intact and pure from foreign invaders and is transitioning the country to prosperity after heroically securing the nation through nukes. But nukes were just half the bargain. The other half was prosperity.

This was the “white rice and beef soup” promise that was made originally by Kim Il-sung at the founding of the country and echoed endlessly by his son and, now, his grandson. If the grandfather liberated them from the Japanese and the father developed nukes for self-defense, then today’s Kim is expected to deliver the economic goods. The North Korean people feel entitled to some prosperity after decades of sacrifice. Another exhortation to tighten their belts and prepare for a second arduous march won’t go over too well. Kim’s heavenly mandate will be seriously questioned by those in a position to do something about it.

Sanctions relief and economic development are not just nice-tohave anymore; they are a must-have. Once people have tasted money, there is no going back. Democratization might not be too outlandish a price to pay for not ending up like Libya’s Gaddafi or, more similarly, Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu. They were loved by their people, too, once.

But it’s not just democratization. It’s unification that really speaks to legitimacy. To understand how important unification is to all Koreans, you have to realize modern Korea’s rebirth as a reaction against the brutal occupation in early 20th century by Imperial Japan that sought to eradicate Korean culture outright — this conversely ignited an ethnocentric form of nationalism that continues to drive Korean people’s — both North and South — self-identity to a large extent.

In North Korea, Kim Il-sung skillfully transformed this national narrative into the Juche principle in which the Korean people will no longer be dependent on outside forces and be fully autonomous in all things, especially national security and people’s welfare. It’s essentially the Korean version of, “We will never be slaves again!” Kim created both a social identity based on the Korean ethnicity and the associated purpose of independence and autonomy, rising out of self-mastery of their own wellbeing.

Unification is the live wire of Korean ethnicity. It is the foundational story that calls all Koreans to a higher purpose and meaning as a people — gives them a provenance along which they can trace backwards to a glorious and righteous past that could be reimagined for a brighter future. Being elected the inaugural president of a unified Korea would be the ultimate good that the Kim dynasty can deliver to cement its place in Korean history and guarantee itself a lasting legitimacy. This would also feed naturally into Kim Jong-un’s inevitable sense of personal grandiosity and legacy. His manifest destiny.

All this probably seems like pie in the sky and even a dangerous distraction from the difficult work of finding the right sequencing formula that both North Korea and the U.S. can live with. But doing the same thing and expecting different results is outright insane.

Perhaps it’s worth a try to go into a different kind of crazy, one that attempts to resonate with the pathos of the enemy you are dealing with, not just his logos. After all, it’s the emotions that ultimately drive our decisions. It just might be crazy enough to work.

What do we have to lose? Throw the offer over the fence and see how Kim reacts. Let it sink in and work itself into the North Korea’s thought space.