Is North Korea run by a cast of cartoonish lunatics? Ordinary Westerners might be excused for thinking so. Consider the events of just the past week.
On New Year’s Day, “Dear Respected Leader” Kim Jong Un delivered his televised annual address—in a huge and apparently empty conference room, with canned applause repeatedly interrupting his somewhat turgid half-hour oration.
Then, days later, Pyongyang’s official media announced the successful detonation of a H-bomb (right on time for Kim Jong Un’s upcoming birthday). The delighted newscasters even produced a handwritten directive purportedly from Kim Jong Un himself: “Let’s start 2016 with the thrilling sound of a first hydrogen bomb blast!”
People watch a huge screen broadcasting a government announcement in Pyongyang, North Korea, in this photo released by Kyodo January 6, 2016. REUTERS/Kyodo.
International commentators often mock “diplomacy with North Korean characteristics.” But it would also be most unwise to dismiss such Pyongyang pageantry as merely sound and fury.
Remember: North Korea could hardly have lasted this long — could not still be standing fully a generation after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism — if its leadership were remotely as clownish, or as mad, as globalized bien-pensants take it to be.
Freakish as North Korea’s public face may appear to those of us more accustomed to “Davos-world,” the fact of the matter is that the DPRK remains a highly formidable adversary for all who must contend with it on the international chessboard.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is a logic to the North Korean state, a deep and deadly serious logic. It is incumbent on those of us who wish to see a smaller, not larger, North Korean threat to attempt to understand that logic. But exploring this logic necessarily takes us far outside our own comfort zone.
In the 1970s, the great French intellectual Alain Besançon remarked that understanding the Soviet system was terribly difficult for Westerners because it required us to “remain mentally in a universe whose coordinates bear no correspondence to our own.”
The task is still more arduous when it comes to the North Korean system: a political construct whose lineage includes both Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism and dynastic Asian rule, and whose animating myths are redolent with a peculiar utopian racialism from prewar Korean nationalism. Needless to say, the DPRK’s pedigree makes for a very different sort of politics from the styles we are more accustomed to.
But political decisions in North Korea are not sudden, irrational eruptions. Quite the contrary, they are conditioned by careful calculation and methodical preparation. These decisions are, furthermore, shaped by strategic and tactical considerations. And Pyongyang’s strategic objectives do not change with the weather: the most crucial of these, such as the quest for unconditional reunification of the peninsula on Kim-family terms, or the not entirely unrelated quest to amass a nuclear arsenal and develop the delivery vehicles for targeting such weapons on the regime’s international enemies, have been patiently and abidingly pursued — not only over the course of mere decades, but from one Supreme Leader to the next.
None of this is to suggest North Korean leadership does not make miscalculations from time to time. We know it does. One of these miscalculations started the Korean War, for example. But official North Korean words and deeds are never meaningless.
We should bear all of this in mind as we reflect upon the DPRK’s thrilling lead-off to this new year. Big plans are evidently afoot. None of them are meant to bode well for the US or her allies. The DPRK is a dangerous state — dangerous, not lunatic — and fully intent upon becoming more dangerous still.
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