Angry Planet - What North Korea wants

Episode Date: April 26, 2017

Pyongyang launches missile test after missile test. A carrier strike group moves through the Pacific with its sights set on the peninsula. U.S. President Donald Trump has called the entirety of the U.S. Congress to attend a briefing on the North Korean threat on April 26, 2017. And Seoul faces an election that could dramatically change the country’s relationship to both its neighbor to the north and its oldest ally. But what does North Korea want? This week on War College, B.R. Myers will help us figure that out. Myers is a professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea. He’s visited the north, speaks the language, and reads the literature and propaganda alike. He takes Pyongyang at its word when it says it wants to reunify the peninsula and he’s not hopeful for the future.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. First, a nuclear threat to U.S. territory, then an American failure of nerve, then a peace treaty, then withdrawal of U.S. troops. then Confederation, then unification. This is a long game that the North Koreans have been playing since the 1980s.

This week on War College, we tackle one simple question. What does North Korea really want? You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Gall. North Korea, the hermit kingdom. It's been in the headlines a lot lately as North Korean leader Kim Jong-un

threatens war and U.S. President Donald Trump inches an American carrier strike group closer to the country. Here in the U.S., the think pieces and hot takes fly, as some claim North Korea is a dictatorship bent on world domination, and others urge people to remember a history of American carpet bombing and broken treaties. Here to help us cut through some of the noise and get a glimpse inside the mind of Pyongyang is B.R. Myers. Myers is an analyst of North Korean ideology at Dongsaul University in Bousson, South Korea. B.R., thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much, Matthew. One of the things I want to start us off with, and I really want to give people, I think,

context for this conversation. And one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is that you're often described as a contrarian when it comes to the subject of North Korea. Why do people say that about you, do you think? Well, you know, I said the six-party talks would not amount to it. anything. I said the Sunshine policy would fail to build trust with North Korea. I said the spread of capitalism in the north would make it more likely to ratchet up tension with the outside world. And I said that whatever happened on the economic front, Kim Jong-un would stay on his father's

military first road. And I differed forcefully from an almost unanimous Western consensus on each of these points, thereby earning a reputation as somebody who discharges. for the sake of disagreeing. And I turned out to be right on all of those points, yet the polymacist label seems to stick with me regardless. Well, when you're right, you're right, right. I couldn't. Well, you know, I've been wrong as well, of course. You know, we're always wrong, but I think my biggest error was in believing that North Korea would at some stage cross a red line that would bring down upon it significant retaliation from South Korea and the United States. And that's why North Korea has lasted longer than I expected it, too.

I should add that actually the biggest area on which I disagree with the consensus is that I do not regard North Korea as a communist state. My background is actually Soviet studies. I came into North Korean studies when I was doing my PhD, having focused on Soviet culture up to then, And it was very clear to me from the start that this was actually not a communist state, but a far-right state, an ultra-nationalist military-first state by its own definition. And I'm still outside the consensus in that regard. And therefore, I'm also outside the consensus in regard to North Korea's motivation for the nuclear program.

But I guess we can get to that later. Well, let's dive into it now, actually. What do you think is their motivation? Because this is one of the questions on my list. So what do you think is their motivation for that nuclear program? I first need to talk about the consensus or the various forms of consensus that we've had over the past 20 years, all of which I've disagreed with. The first one was that Kim Jong-il was investing in the nuclear program in the hope of trading it in for a big economic aid package down the road. You know, that's what you get when an economy-first country tries to understand a military-first one. Then it became standard to say that George W. Bush's Axis of Evil remark in 2002 had traumatized Kim Jong-il, who was therefore developing nuclear weapons as bargaining chips

for security guarantees and the normalization of relations. And then, of course, Kim Jong-il stopped negotiating, and after Obama had been in power for a while, Pyongyang watchers realized they couldn't go on forever about the axis of evil remark. So they fastened on the bombing of Libya in 2010. And that seems to be the trendy line now. I've seen it quite a few times in the newspapers of the past few weeks, which is that North Koreans want nukes to avoid ending up like Gaddafi. So you see, the trend has always been to put the most reassuring construction possible on the nuclear program.

The takeaway has always been, these people don't. don't mean anyone any harm and they have no serious designs on South Korea. But, you know, those who treat the Axis of Evil remark and the bombing of Libya as watershed traumas in the North Korean psyche are really lampooning their own narrative. Because if a regime has spent 50, 60 years defying, humiliating, and threatening a trigger-happy superpower like the United States, and the greatest shocks it has been dealt in return have been a rude line in a speech and an attack on a completely different country. Its safety clearly does not depend on developing a new kind of weapon.

Its conventional artillery must have been protecting it very well indeed. The U.S. was never stronger, North Korea never weaker than in 1994, yet even then the fear of an artillery attack on Seoul prevented an air strike on Yongbian. You can put another way and say the very success of the nuclear program, the fact that it has gone this far proves that it was never necessary for North Korea's security in the first place. So the question we have to ask ourselves now in 2017 is, why does North Korea now risk its long-enjoyed security by developing long-range nukes? Why is it doing the one thing that might force America to attack,

to accept even the likelihood of South Korean civilian casualties. And the only goal, the only plausible goal, big enough to warrant the growing risk and expense, is the goal that North Korea has been pursuing from day one of its existence. And I can ask you, Matthew, what that goal is. I'm sure you know. It's the unification of the peninsula. But more concretely, North Korea wants to force Washington, into a grand bargain linking denuclearization to the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

South Korea would then be pressured into a North-South Confederation, which is a concept the South Korean Left has flirted with for years, and which the North has always seen as a transition to unification under its own control. All right. Speaking of the South Korean left, I think that's a really important component of this discussion. And there's an election coming up in May, right? And I think that really puts a lot of what's going on now in context. Exactly. How do you see that election changing the relationship with the United States? Well, first of all, it's necessary to make some criticism of American coverage of the election. You know, the other day I was reading an American newspaper that presented the presidential race in People magazine terms. You know, the former civil rights lawyer, Mungayeen, against, Anshal Su, the doctor-turned-turned-software tycoon.

And I see Moon's party described as liberal, thus evoking American associations with Hillary Clinton or whatever. And Anz party is described as centrist. Now, those labels are misleading. Moon and his party are on South Korea's nationalist left, and Anshal Su is the liberal figurehead of a nationalist left party that is barely distinguishable from moons. Now, each candidate, each of those two candidates,

has a team of North Korea experts, but those experts are almost all unrepentant former advocates of the Sunshine Policy of accommodation and appeasement of North Korea. There is no ideological difference between those two parties to speak of. Now, Anne is at present making more conservative noises, but he was saying very different things only a few years ago. So everyone knows he's just trying to get conservatives on board in order to beat Moon. Right now he's about 10% behind in the polls,

and he really needs to get conservatives on board if he wants to win the election. But if he were to win it, you would see much the same sort of things that Moon has been proposing. Now, Moon has been talking already about reversing the decision to station the American anti-missile system, the FAD system. Moon has talked about lifting restrictions on pro-North political agitation, in other words, on lifting the national security law. He has talked about reopening the Kessong Industrial Zone in North Korea, in other words, a zone where North and South Koreans were cooperating to make things. And he's also talked about resuming South Korean tourism to the Kessong Industrial Zone. Okay.

So right there, really, you can see what kind of problems are facing the alliance. North Korean nuclearization is going to force the alliance to enhance its capabilities, but China will oppose any such enhancement, as will the South Korean left, which will see it as a gratuitous provocation of Pyongyang. And I would say there's a 50% chance the next South Korean president insists on having the Americans handover operational wartime control to South Korea. I think Donald Trump has made many people here nervous, and I think support is gradually growing in South Korea for a takeover of that operational wartime control from the Americans. This is something the South Koreans were not all too eager to get in the past, but I think things are going to change. Now, that will automatically, I think, weaken Washington's commitment to the alliance, no matter what the Americans say to the contrary.

And when the next South Korean president restores even a small amount of inter-Korean economic cooperation, it's going to become impossible for the United States to continue pressuring China to implement UN sanctions. That would leave us with no leverage over the North at all. So the United States government, to make a long story short, is going to start wondering why it should protect an ally who is not only reluctant to defend itself properly, but is quite literally trading with the enemy. Now, George W. Bush put up with South Korean accommodationism in the vain hope that the sunshine policy would tame Pyongyang. We had a very bizarre situation there where we were fighting for sanctions in the UN. and at the same time, telling the South Koreans it was all right if they cooperated economically with North Korea. But a lot has changed since then. In the last year or two of George W. Bush's

term, he was really desperate for a deal with the North Koreans. But, of course, Donald Trump has different priorities. Finally, the U.S. may well conclude that it can do a better job of fighting the North outside of an alliance with the South. The U.S. could then conceivably strike the North without having to worry about the North bombarding Seoul. So this is why South Korean conservatives are so terrified of either a moon victory or an Anshul Su victory. I think some of their fears are perhaps a little exaggerated, but I think it would behoove us to take them seriously. And I think it's important for people to understand that the South Korean conservatives are out now

because of a giant scandal that they have just weathered, correct? Can you give us the Cliff Notes version of that? Yeah, the Cliff Notes version of that is that the South Korean president was allowing a close friend of hers to engage in influence peddling. That really is the long and the short of it. And quite to my surprise, actually, a very large number of conservatives have the attitude that basically, so what if she did that? The important thing is our security. and by forcing her out of power, we have basically put our security in the hands of the South Korean left, which is going to neglect it.

I think that's an extreme view. And in a way, it reflects the general problem here on the left and the right, which is that the rule of law is not considered all that important if your own side is breaking it. Before we kind of started having this conversation, I kind of felt that a lot of the The missile tests and things that have been threatened by North Korea lately have been bluster on the eve of this election to try to push it to the left. But, and that may be true, but listening to you talk and having this conversation, it makes it feel as if you take them at their word, right?

Yeah, I do take them at their word. I actually wrote an article with that title, Taking the North Koreans at Their Word a few years ago where I was pleading in vain for people to understand that North Koreans really were serious about their goals. I don't believe that we should take their propaganda at face value, but when their propaganda lines up with their behavior in the real world, it would be very foolhardy to ignore it. The North Koreans have pretty much laid down the whole sequence of the events that they plan in order to bring about their goal. First, a nuclear threat to U.S. U.S. territory, then an American failure of nerve, then a peace treaty, then withdrawal of U.S.

troops, then confederation, then unification. This can be pieced together and inferred from the leader's own speeches, from North Korean's inner track propaganda, in other words, everything from wall posters to political novels. We've heard this from captured North Korean operatives who've divulged their ideological training to South Korean intelligence. So we do. We do. We do need to take it very seriously, and we do need to understand that this is a long game that the North Koreans have been playing since the 1980s. What drives me crazy is the tendency of Western media to see all these linear stations in North Korea's nuclear program as inconsecutive publicity stunts or provocations or messages to Washington. The North Koreans are entering the last quarter of a game they've been playing since the 1980s. And they may move a test forward.

They may postpone it a bit due to current circumstances, but we need to focus on the big picture, instead of taking everything week by week. Now, I actually think, if anything, the North Koreans are probably going to be more inclined to behave themselves in the run-up to the election in May. they do not want to do anything that would help a conservative candidate. And a North Korean nuclear test would force either Moon or on or both those candidates to make some kind of hardline statement, which they could, of course, go back on and probably would go back on,

but it would at least delay the resumption of unilateral aid to North Korea. And Kim Jong-un can't possibly want that. So, you know, you have to be prepared for everything with the North Koreans, but they don't have an interest in ratcheting uptension right now. You are listening to War College on Reuters. I am your host, Matthew Galt. We are talking with B.R. Meyer about North Korea and what North Korea wants. We're back after a break.

Thank you for listening to Reuters War College. Welcome back. I am your host, Matthew Galt. We are on today with B.R. Meyer, and he's telling us about North Korean ideology and what exactly North Korea wants. So before the break, we were talking a little bit about this plan, and you make it sound as if this plan has been around since the 80s. And I'm wondering how much does Zhangun know about this plan has been involved since he was a child?

How does that work? Yes, no doubt. Of course, he spent his formative years in Switzerland, and we don't really know how much time he spent in North Korea. And I often get the impression that he's not really in tune with the political culture of his country. There were so many disastrous mistakes made by his propaganda. apparatus in his first two or three years in office, like those photo ops with Dennis Rodman,

for example, or the way he's been walking around with his wife or walking around with a cane and things, just things that seem to indicate he doesn't really understand the political culture of the country that he's leading. But he could not be unaware of the main goal, the whole focus of the North Korean state since 1945. I want to talk a little bit about kind of how their propaganda and ideology works, because I think that gives us, as you said, kind of a window into their thinking and what they want. You mentioned inner track. Yeah, inner track propaganda, right.

In one of the previous answers. And I wonder if you could explain the difference between inner and outer track to us. I should first say that foreigners often make the mistake of concentrating only on the things that North Koreans say in their English language press releases or on ad, libs and remarks that they make during negotiations. You know, a big deal has been made about an offhand remark that Kim Jong-il made to an American delegation that he wouldn't actually mind so much if the American troops stayed on the peninsula.

My whole point is that the track of propaganda, which we need to take most seriously, is the inner track. And by that I mean propaganda intended for North Koreans only. That is basically the stuff that the North Koreans are going. getting on the ground in their workplaces, in schools. And I always say that the test of whether something is inner track or outer track, if it's printed material, is the quality of the paper. The worse the quality of the paper is, the more seriously you should take the propaganda printed on it because that poor quality paper indicates it's being distributed on a large scale

inside the country, as opposed to the glossy white papered stuff that is printed either for the elite in Pyongyang or for the elite and whatever foreigners might be looking at it. And that's outer track propaganda. In other words, things like the Rodong Shinmun, the party organ, which you can't even get in many North Korean towns. And it's not all that easy to get a hold of a copy in Pyongyang. It certainly wasn't when I was there five years ago. In other words, that is propaganda written for domestic consumption in the constraining awareness that plenty of foreigners are reading and monitoring this stuff. And then you have the export track I already mentioned, which is propaganda written exclusively for outsiders.

And that means statements made in negotiations. And that can in turn be divided into export propaganda aimed at South Korea and export propaganda aimed at the rest of the world. Another thing I think is important and interesting to help us understand this country is the way that Kim Jong-un and his family are portrayed in this propaganda and the way they're talked about to the people. Can you tell us kind of what his image is and how it differs from that of his father and his grandfather? Well, first, I guess I need to talk a little bit about the ideological realities of North Korea. I need to say, first of all, that foreigners are wrong in regarding the DMZ as the last frontier of the Cold War, which is sort of separating a failed, anachronistic communist state from a proud, high-tech capitalist one.

In fact, as I said before, North Korea is a far-right ultra-nationalist state, and therefore its personality cult is very different from the personality cult that you, had in the Soviet Union or in China, the cult of Mao Zedong. Stalin and Mao were essentially teacher figures because the whole point of Marxism, Leninism, is to instill political consciousness into the spontaneous masses. As you may know, Marx believed that a revolution was pretty much preordained, that it was going to come about as a result of the contradictory. in capitalism. And Lenin came along and said, no, that's not really so easy. That's not how it

happens because when the proletariat starts to get angry, the capitalists fob them off with raises. And they strike and they get an increase in their wages and then they fall back into the capitalist trap. So the whole point of a communist party was to basically turn the childlike proletariat into thinking adults, politically conscious adults. So Stalin and Mao Zedong were both teacher figures. And Stalin was, of course, a smiling figure, but he wasn't a particularly approachable one. And the focus of his personality cult were his eyes, because his eyes were seen as the windows to his perfect grasp of this omnipotent science of dialectical materialism. Now, North Korea is simply an ultra-national state.

And that means that Kim Il-sung was and is seen as the perfect embodiment of racial virtues. In other words, he's the perfect embodiment of Korean purity and naivety and motherly solicitude. And that image really is not so different now. I don't believe that Kim Jong-un's image is that different from Kim Il-sung's. There are certain differences of emphasis, I think, Kim Jong-un is to a higher degree, a military first leader than Kim Il-sung was, and perhaps even than Kim Jong-il was. Can you explain to us a little bit then the form that teaching takes? Because like you were saying, you know, in a traditional communist state, it's about the proletariat rising up. They read, you know, they read the works of linen. They read Mao's little red book. But there's no real book to read. And the people of North Korea, and please forgive me if I'm wrong.

here, it's more, are kept in a more childlike state? Is that correct? I would say they're kept in a more spontaneous state. You know, to the communist, spontaneity was considered a retrograde force. It was considered something dangerous that would retard the revolution. And as far as the North Koreans are concerned, Koreans are basically born pure. They're born good. And therefore, they do not need to temper their instincts. Their instincts are inherently good. They inherently are inclined to want to share things. So they're basically born in a perfect state to implement socialism. That's the big difference, I would say. I don't particularly like referring to them as childlike, although I must say many people who go to North Korea and find it a wonderful place,

some of the apologists for the country come out saying how wonderfully childlike the people are there. And I can only say that having traveled in East Germany during the Cold War, you know, I was a university student in West Germany in the 80s, and I used to go by subway into East Berlin a lot, and I used to spend time in a town called Girlitz on the border to Poland. The difference between East Germans and North Koreans is day and night. not just in terms of, I would say, intellectual maturity, but also in terms of their happiness.

The East Germans were a pretty glum bunch who had given up on communism. Communism had quite obviously failed in all its major promises. Whereas because North Korea is not a communist country, but a nationalist one, and one that is doing very, very well on its own terms, that is setting, that is fulfilling all the goals that it has set for itself, the North Korean people seem to me much more satisfied with their state. I continue to believe that the support which Kim Jong-un enjoys is not a mere matter of coercion. I want to swing back to current events for my last question before I let you go.

Do you think that U.S. President Donald Trump is kind of playing into what they want then? with this with this carrier strike group and his you know his stern talk his strident talk is he helping along their goal i think i think he is first the threat of sending the vinson flotilla close to the peninsula played into the north's export propaganda pose as a state traumatized by american bullying now i have to emphasize that is only the export propaganda message the inner track propaganda message is that the Yankees are paper tigers who talk big and never actually do anything. We really need to understand that the North Koreans are not as traumatized by things like the acts of evil remark or things like this Vincent Flotilla, as some people in the Pyongyang

watching community seem to think. But then by not carrying through on the threat, Trump seemed to be chickening out, which was, of course, confirming the inner track propaganda. So it was counterproductive really on two counts. It annoyed both the left and the right here in South Korea. The left feels Trump is a loose cannon, and the right wing is starting to wonder if Trump is really committed to South Korea's security. I think, you know, because people often ask me, well, what should the United States do. And I think we need to keep in mind that it's not primarily the United States problem. It is South Korea's problem first and foremost. As I said, the North Koreans are arming out of the conviction that the U.S. South Korean alliance and not the South Korean popular will

is the main obstacle in the way of a North-dominated unification. They believe that if the Americans pull those troops out, North Korea can intimidate the South Koreans into, including incremental sacrifices of their sovereignty. And I think many South Koreans share this gloomy assessment of their state's lack of resolve. That's why the South Koreans are now so worried about either Moon or on taking over. And this means really that it's up to the South Koreans to step up and take control of their destiny by disabusing Pyongyang of the expectation that they will simply roll over when push comes to shove. And the United States can encourage a shift in attitude in South Korea by making the continuation of the alliance dependent on it.

In other words, the South needs to retire the conventional civic religion here, which is anti-Japanese pan-Korean nationalism, in favor of a collective identification with constitutional principles. That doesn't mean they have to resort to the bad old days of vilifying North Korea. I think West Germany showed how it was done. They projected a quiet support for constitutional principles and firm opposition to dictatorship, while at the same time conveying a readiness to engage in dialogue. Now, the Americans should make the alliance dependent on this shift in ideology. I wince whenever I hear an American president deliver one of those,

we've got your back forever speeches because they send the wrong message to the South Korean left. Just the other day I read a newspaper report saying, well, we can renege on the anti-missile defense stationing because the Americans will just sulk for a bit and then they'll accept it. I think the Trump administration has to make clear that it will not sit by and watch the South Koreans send conflicting signals to Pyongyang and subvert UN sanctions that were primarily imposed for South Korea's sake in the first place. I think it's better to make that clear right now than to argue later. Are you hopeful for the future?

I'm not particularly hopeful, I have to say. I think we're entering the most dangerous phase in the region in decades. I'm really not all that hope. B.R. Myers, thank you so much for joining. joining us on War College. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Heedick. It's hosted by Matthew Galt, who also wrangles our guests.

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