The danger of misdiagnosing Kim Jong-un
Throughout history, political observers have found decision-makers who are deemed “crazy” the most difficult to assess. In fact, the problem is rarely one of psychopathology. Usually, the label merely indicates behaviour that is different from what conventional analysts were expecting.
This was surely true of the twelfth-century Syrian religious leader Rashid al-Din Sinan. During the Third Crusade, the supposedly mad “Old Man of the Mountain”, as he was known, succeeded in disrupting a Crusader advance on Jerusalem by directing his followers to carry out targeted assassinations. After carrying out their orders, the assassins often stayed put and awaited capture in full view of the local populace, to ensure that their leader received proper credit for the act.
At the time, such actions were incomprehensible to the Western mind. Westerners took to calling the Old Man’s followers hashashin, or users of hashish, because they regarded intoxication as the only possible explanation for such “senseless” disregard for one’s own physical wellbeing.
But the hashashin were not drug users on the whole. And, more to the point, they were successful: their eventual assassination of Conrad of Montferrat led directly to the political collapse of the Crusader coalition and the defeat of Richard the Lionheart of England. As Polonius says of Hamlet, there was method to the Old Man’s madness.
Today, the problem of analysing supposedly lunatic leaders has reappeared with the North Korean nuclear crisis. Whether dictator Kim Jong-un is mad is not merely an academic question; it is the heart of the matter.
US President Donald Trump’s administration has stated unequivocally that it will not tolerate a North Korean capability to threaten the mainland United States with nuclear weapons. According to Trump’s national security adviser, HR McMaster, the administration’s position reflects its belief that Kim is crazy, and that classical deterrence theory thus does not apply.
During the Cold War, US President Dwight Eisenhower reasoned that even if Joseph Stalin (and later Mao Zedong) was homicidal, he was also rational, and did not wish to perish in a US counter-strike. The logic of “mutually assured destruction” that underpinned nuclear deterrence worked.
If, however, the leader of a nuclear-armed state is a lunatic who is indifferent to his physical safety and that of those around him, the entire deterrence strategy falls apart. If Kim is insane, the only option is to take him out before his suicidal regime can kill millions of people.
But is Kim truly crazy, or does he simply have a worldview that discomfits Western
analysts? His dramatic overture to hold a summit with Trump hardly seems to fit the “madman” narrative. In fact, it looks like the act of someone who knows exactly what he is doing.
Consider three strategic considerations that Kim could be weighing. First, his regime might be planning to offer concessions that it has no intention of fulfilling. After all, an earlier nuclear deal that the
US brokered with his father, Kim Jong-il, was derailed by duplicity. In 2002, the US discovered that the regime was secretly enriching weapons-grade uranium in direct violation of its earlier pledge.
In fact, North Korea has demonstrated time and again that it doesn’t play by the rules. It enters into negotiations to extract concessions such as food aid, and then returns to its objectionable activities, thus
starting the entire Sisyphean cycle again. There is no reason to think that this time will be different. But the regime’s deviousness should not be mistaken for irrationality or madness. Simply by expressing his openness to talks, Kim has already won some of the political legitimacy he craves.
Second, rather than being a lunatic, Kim seems mindful of recent history. Whereas Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gadhafi in Libya paid the ultimate price for giving up their nuclear programmes, Kim has advanced his regime’s nuclear capabilities and is now publicly treated as a nearequal by the most powerful man on the planet. The Kim regime has always sought such vindication above everything else.
A third and final consideration is that North Korea is playing for time. Though it has agreed to halt tests in the run-up to the summit, it could be using the intervening months to develop related technologies. For example, it still needs to perfect an atmospheric re-entry mechanism to make its intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking the US mainland reliably and accurately. Moreover, as long as the summit is in play, North Korea need not fear a US military strike. That is a perfectly rational and sensible prize for Kim to pursue.
All told, North Korea’s “opening” will most likely amount to much less than meets the eye. But one can still glean valuable strategic insights from Kim’s diplomatic gambit. North Korean thinking reflects cunning, to be sure; but it also betrays the regime’s will to survive, and its desire to master the current situation. This suggests that Kim is not “crazy” after all, and that conventional deterrence will still work, as it has since 1945.
That is good news for everyone, but particularly for the Trump administration, given that it will almost certainly fail to secure any meaningful concessions from North Korea in the upcoming talks.
John C Hulsman is the president and cofounder of John C Hulsman Enterprises (www.john-hulsman.com), a global political-risk consulting firm. His most recent book is To Dare More Boldly: The Audacious Story of Political Risk. ©
Project Syndicate, 2018, www.projectsyndicate.org
North Korea has demonstrated time and again that it doesn’t play by the rules. ... But deviousness should not be mistaken for irrationality or madness. Simply by expressing his openness to talks, Kim has already won some of the political legitimacy he craves