North Korea’s regime has long defied naysayers by persevering through famines, floods and global opprobrium. But what would happen if the upcoming power transition marks the beginning of the end?
In the view of one US military strategist, a collapse of North Korea could result in the greatest world crisis in modern times.
Colonel David Maxwell, who heads the Strategic Initiatives Group at the Army’s Special Operations Command, said that the US needed to invest more time planning for the most dire scenario, even if it does not transpire.
US troops have been stationed in South Korea since the Korean War to guard against attack. A North Korean advance could easily hit densely populated Seoul, just an hour’s drive from the frontier, and would send shockwaves through economic powers Japan, China and South Korea.
“I believe a conventional attack by the North would be the worst crisis that the international community has faced since the end of World War II,” Maxwell said in a presentation at the Marines Corps University in Quantico, Virginia.
“But I think the real worst case would be regime collapse,” said Maxwell, who stressed he was speaking in a private capacity.
Questions have been rising about North Korea’s stability since Kim Jong-il apparently suffered a stroke in 2008. Last year, the government faced unusual public resistance after a currency revaluation sent prices skyrocketing.
If the regime collapsed, foreign forces would likely face a major threat from insurgents whose belief in the Kim family’s philosophy of juche — or self-reliance — resembles religious fanaticism, Maxwell said.
“The North Korean people will not welcome the South Korean military, international forces or anybody outside of North Korea,” Maxwell said.
“We made that assumption recently that we would be welcomed as liberators and we know how that turned out,” he said, referring to the US-led invasion of Iraq.
An insurgency in North Korea would be “far more sophisticated than what exists in Iraq or Afghanistan now,” Maxwell said.
He said an insurgency could tap into Pyonyang’s military might. North Korea has more than one million standing troops along with nuclear weapons.
Maxwell recommended that the US develop a plan to quickly engage and reassure North Koreans in the event of a regime collapse.
He also urged a close eye on overseas businesses by North Korean officers, who have developed networks trafficking everything from weapons to knock-off Viagra that could eventually go to fund an insurgency.
Not all Korea experts are convinced by Maxwell’s views.
L. Gordon Flake, who heads the Mansfield Foundation think tank, questioned whether average North Koreans had a “guerrilla ethos” that would survive the fall of the top leadership.
“North Korea is a society that is specifically designed to avoid initiative at the local level,” Flake said.
Pointing to the resistance to the currency revaluation, Flake said: “To assume that guerrilla ethos continues, you almost have to assume that there’s been no impact over the last two decades from famine, economic collapse, government graft and a tremendous increase in information flows.”
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
Civil society leaders and members of a left-wing coalition yesterday filed impeachment complaints against Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, restarting a process sidelined by the Supreme Court last year. Both cases accuse Duterte of misusing public funds during her term as education secretary, while one revives allegations that she threatened to assassinate former ally Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The filings come on the same day that a committee in the House of Representatives was to begin hearings into impeachment complaints against Marcos, accused of corruption tied to a spiraling scandal over bogus flood control projects. Under the constitution, an impeachment by the
Exiled Tibetans began a unique global election yesterday for a government representing a homeland many have never seen, as part of a democratic exercise voters say carries great weight. From red-robed Buddhist monks in the snowy Himalayas, to political exiles in megacities across South Asia, to refugees in Australia, Europe and North America, voting takes place in 27 countries — but not China. “Elections ... show that the struggle for Tibet’s freedom and independence continues from generation to generation,” said candidate Gyaltsen Chokye, 33, who is based in the Indian hill-town of Dharamsala, headquarters of the government-in-exile, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA). It
RSS