West can beat North Korea with information

By Joel Brinkley

President Obama has named a special envoy for the Middle East and another for South Asia. The administration has made rhetorical overtures to Iran, which seems to be working on nuclear weapons.

But what about North Korea — which already has half-a-dozen nuclear weapons? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is planning a trip to the region in a few days, but of course she has no plan to visit Pyongyang. The trip’s advance literature doesn’t even mention North Korea.

The State Department’s point man for the region, Christopher Hill, is now off the case. He is being nominated to be ambassador to Iraq.

So what is Obama’s North Korea policy? The administration is only a few weeks old, and Obama can’t do everything at once. But North Korea does not like to be ignored. Think about what it did the last time the United Nations made a decision that seemed antithetical to its interest — nominating Ban Ki-moon, the South Korean foreign minister, to be secretary-general. On that very day, Oct. 9, 2006, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon.

North Korea is a desperate, unpredictable, renegade nation that barely survives by using bluster, blackmail and criminality. Its people are locked in the technology of the 1950s, surviving on a per-capita income of about $100 a month. Its government relies on intermittent foreign aid to provide its people even the bare essentials.

Obama came into office without a ready-made policy probably because he realized that everything has been tried, and nothing has worked.

The Clinton administration alternately threatened and cajoled Pyongyang. Near the end of his second term, Bill Clinton ordered a broad easing of economic sanctions to persuade the North to abandon its nuclear program. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said that decision started Washington and Pyongyang down “a road that holds out the possibility of long-term stability and even eventual reconciliation on the Korean peninsula.” That did not happen.

Opposite approach

When Clinton left office, President Bush tried the opposite approach: Don’t talk to North Korea, don’t listen to them. Let the nation whither and die, and then perhaps one day President Kim Jong-Il’s government will collapse.

That didn’t work either. Soon enough, Bush learned that North Korea had been hard at work on nuclear weapons for several years — even during the final years of the Clinton administration. What’s a president to do? North Korea seems irrational, but there’s an organizing thesis behind its behavior. When it is threatened or ignored, it blusters — tests a ballistic missile, threatens South Korea, announces it is stepping up nuclear research to regain attention.

“It is raising the ante,” said Andrei Lankov, a respected expert on North Korea who teaches at a university in Seoul, South Korea. “They are showing that they are dangerous if they are not fed enough.” In other words, North Korea’s frequent threatening outbursts are tactical — intended to warn Washington, Seoul and Beijing that the nation can be dangerous if deprived of money, aid and assistance.

Now we are at it again. South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, cut off unconditional aid, reversing a 10-year policy of friendly engagement. In recent days, North Korea has begun planning a new ballistic missile test while throwing insults and every manner of threat and invective at the south.

As I said, every strategy has been tried. Nothing works.

Lankov has another idea. North Korea’s biggest enemy, he notes, is information. Citizens are not allowed to have radios. Foreigners are not allowed to visit. Computers are largely unavailable. Kim Jong-Il’s all-encompassing strategy is to keep his people wholly ignorant of their place in the world — at the bottom by almost every conceivable measure.

Exchange programs

So Lankov suggests setting up exchange programs with Western universities and cultural exchanges like the New York Philharmonic’s performance there in December. Further, he said during a talk at Stanford University last week, even though radios are illegal they are increasingly common. Western nations should broadcast public affairs programs into the country. DVD players are legal, and popular. So smuggle in DVDs that give North Koreans a picture of Western life.

“If the population learns about the country’s actual poverty,” Lankov said, “it will generate pressure for change that may ultimately” bring down the regime.

Or, Obama could continue as previous presidents have. For months, he has signaled an interest in improving relations. But just before Obama’s inauguration, North Korea announced that it had turned its entire plutonium stockpile into weapons and was determined to keep its bombs until Washington abandoned its “hostile policy.” Sound familiar?

X Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.