Anyone who tries to foretell North Korean policy laments that the country's notorious secretiveness and unpredictability crack and cloud even the most high-powered crystal ball.
But even though it may be difficult to anticipate Pyongyang's actions, Nicholas Eberstadt has put forward a revisionist argument that challenges the conventional wisdom about the desirability of gradual unification. It is a bold - and flawed -- premise which argues that North Korea will remain as menacing, or become worse, the longer the West stalls on promoting unification. Despite the cogent, incisive manner of his theory, it has been proven wrong by recent events.
Eberstadt begins by reminding us of the unpopular truth that when Kim Il-sung invaded the South in 1950 to unify the peninsula, it was "not a madman's dream, but rather a careful, calculating" decision. He is correct. An earlier strategy based on mass insurrection had failed. In addition, America cut off the arms supply to the mercurial southern leader Rhee Syng-man, who threatened to "march North", and Washington declared Seoul to be outside its security perimeter. Completing the ideal circumstances was the swelling of the North's military with Korean veterans returning home from the Chinese civil war. The correlation of events indicated not a red light, but strong potential for a Red victory.
Having established that he is one to question conventional wisdom, Eberstadt presents his main case that the longer the West waits to back unification, the more dangerous the North becomes. This is because for the North, "credible military menace" is now the regime's strategy for survival. This is true. As the author cogently asserts, the failure of the famine-wracked North Korea is so pervasive that we may now "speak of ... the end of the North Korean project": the system is incapable of addressing its many demerits, feeding itself, winning friends or unifying the two Koreas on its terms.
Eberstadt's analysis of the North's economic decline is most interesting, for he makes intelligent comparisons, not often seen, between the North and other Communist states. It is true, he admits, that Communist Russia, Mongolia, China and Vietnam all suffered from famine. But the fact that North Korea has gone from being a breadbasket to being a basket case stands out.
While others experienced famine as agrarian states, Pyongyang is hungry after decades of industrialization. The North's rice bowl emptied, however, not because of an early policy error, but due to the very logic of a protracted, wrong-headed development strategy.
While Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiao Ping had the vision to reform their faltering Communist states, the North Korean leadership -- Eberstadt helpfully provides blunt quotes -- repudiates their example. Pragmatic reform, it fears, is the bitter medicine that will kill the socialist patient.
Eberstadt then examines the political implications. He argues that economic collapse can precipitate political collapse, and offers the examples of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan at the end of World War II. One can argue, however, that neither Berlin nor Tokyo actually imploded. Both were conquered, with their regimes replaced. Therefore, one can doubt the author when he implies that the North could just as easily fall due to its economic failure.
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