• published: 22 Feb 2017
• views: 109

What Does North Korea Want? A missile. An assassination. B.R. Myers on the logic behind a regime’s provocative month. The North Korean regime has had a busy month. The country began by launching a new ballistic missile, in response to which its chief patron, China, suspended coal imports. Then, last week, Kim Jong-nam—the son of North Korea’s former ruler and the half-brother of its current leader, Kim Jong-un—was killed by two women in a bizarre assassination at a Malaysian airport. Meanwhile, the United States and South Korea were each in a state of relative chaos, thanks respectively to Trump’s hectic foreign policy (he had previously stated that he would negotiate with Kim), and the South Korean president’s conservative, scandal-ridden government. (She has just been impeached for corruption.) To discuss these events, I corresponded with B.R. Myers, an analyst of North Korean propaganda and ideology at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea, and the author of The Cleanest Race and North Korea’s Juche Myth. During the course of our correspondence, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed Kim Jong-un’s political calculations, America’s naïveté about North Korea, and what Trump’s election has—and has not—changed on the Korean Peninsula. Isaac Chotiner: What is the importance of the assassination in Malaysia? Is it merely a sign of Kim’s paranoia? B.R. Myers: There’s more to it than that, considering that Kim Jong-nam was able to visit North Korea without incident in 2014. One group of prominent defectors had evidently been hoping to make him the head of an exile government, in the hope of undermining Kim Jong-un’s standing with the ruling elite. When you understand that North Korea is effectively a monarchy and that the bloodline is the current dictator’s main source of legitimacy, the plan starts to make more sense; Kim Jong-nam’s lack of interest in political life is beside the point. The defectors were not seriously trying to put him in power in Pyongyang, but to divide and topple the state. Apparently Kim Jong-nam was stupid or extroverted enough to have met with these people, if only for the purpose of turning them down, whereupon Kim Jong-un urged him to return to North Korea for good. He refused. It seems the dictator concluded either that his half-brother was up to something, or that the mere fact of his existence might undermine his rule. Obama apparently told Trump that North Korea would be his biggest foreign-policy headache. The American approach to North Korea has not yielded much. Does Trump’s apparent willingness to consider negotiating make any more sense? No. The goal of [North Korean] nuclear armament is not mere security from U.S. attack, which conventional weaponry trained on Seoul has preserved since 1953—and through far greater crises than George W. Bush’s little “axis of evil” remark in 2002. As every North Korean knows, the whole point of the military-first policy is “final victory,” or the unification of the peninsula under North Korean rule. Many foreign observers refuse to believe this, on the grounds that Kim Jong-un could not possibly want a nuclear war. They’re missing the whole point. North Korea needs the capability to strike the U.S. with nuclear weapons in order to pressure both adversaries into signing peace treaties. This is the only grand bargain it has ever wanted. It has already made clear that a treaty with the South would require ending its ban on pro-North political agitation. The treaty with Washington would require the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the peninsula. The next step, as Pyongyang has often explained, would be some form of the North–South confederation it has advocated since 1960. One would have to be very naïve not to know what would happen next. As Kim Il-Sung told his Bulgarian counterpart Todor Zhivkov in 1973, “If they listen to us, and a confederation is established, South Korea will be done with.” Western soft-liners keep saying the U.S. must finally negotiate a peace treaty with Pyongyang. That’s where their op-eds conveniently end. These people show no awareness of what such a treaty would have to entail. Are they in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops? If so they should come right out and say so, instead of pretending North Korea will content itself with the security guarantees it has rejected for decades. Many observers believe that the stronger the North Koreans get, the more reasonable they will become. Whenever I think I’ve seen the height of American wishful thinking, I find out it can get even sillier. Do you have a sense of how Trump is making the government of either Korea think differently about its foreign policy?