School of War - Ep 156: Nicholas Eberstadt on North Koreans in Russia

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Nicholas Eberstadt, Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, joins the show to discuss the North Korean regime and the geopolitical impact of its decision to send troops to support Russia in Ukraine. ▪️ Times      •      01:36 Introduction      •      01:49 Finding North Korea     •      04:00 The Sung dynasty     •     09:24 Beijing and Moscow     •      14:43 Kim Jong Il     •      22:14 Mackinder’s World-Island     •      26:29 Interconnected      •      33:18 Why commit to Russia?      •      36:55 Limited imaginations       •      39:03 New differences Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Reports indicate that thousands of North Korean troops have moved into Russia in support of Putin's war in Ukraine, an unsettling development, to say the least. To understand what it all means, in ideological or geopolitical or military terms, we've got the great Nick Eberstadt joining us today. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infantry. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in France. We'll fight on the beaches. We should fight on the landing ground.

We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thank you for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show. Nicholas Iberstadt, he is the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, author of numerous books, monographs, articles on a wide range of issues, economics, demographics, which I actually hope we can get in today. Most recently of a piece in the Washington Post about the deployment of North Korean troops in support of Russia's effort in Ukraine, though not at least as a of the time of recording, it seems, in Ukraine. Mr. Eberstadt, thank you so much for joining the show.

Thank you for inviting me. How is it that you have followed North Korea for so long? What originally brought North Korea to your professional attention, and how has it been intertangled with your career? Well, like so many other things, in at least my life, it was kind of a complete accident or unexpected happenstance. I was kind of hard left in college

in the 70s, and then I dismissed that infantile disorder. And as an anti-communist in the early 80s, I wanted to do a dissertation on progress against poverty of a communist and non-communist country. And the lab experiment, the natural experiment is obviously the Korean Peninsula for that, because you have exactly the same people, divided arbitrarily under radically different governments for decades and decades. I said, see what happens. And so it was not the ideal dissertation topic, but I'm sort of a stubborn person, so I sort

of stuck with it. To get the dissertation done in the event, I wrote a unpublished book based on North Korean bootleg data sent to the United Nations. I did a detailed demographic study. I had to go to North Korea to meet North Korean statisticians, which no American had done up until then, and get their permission to use the unpublished figures so that I could publish the book that I could eventually quote for my dissertation. So, you know, don't try that at home, kids. And so for, you know, for four decades or maybe a little bit more, I've tried to follow North Korean affairs,

and that's obviously easier said than done for a lot of obvious reasons. And for some reasons which are maybe a little bit less obvious, including the abiding effort that the North Korean government puts into strategic deception, just Mascarovka, the Soviets would have called up to misinforming the outside world about their weaknesses and strengths and objectives and strategies. Talk for a bit, if you would, about the North Korean regime, the Kim family regime, which ultimately has its very own distinct flavor of communism or totalitarianism or exactly how you want to describe it. I read a book, which influenced my thinking on it greatly a while ago now, maybe 10, 15 years called the cleanest race by B.R. Myers. And if I remember the thesis there was that there was as much fascism as anything else going on here, which, but talk about that, if you would.

B. R. Myers, Brian Myers, I think is the absolutely most incisive English language writer about North Korean ideology. So you picked well between that book and the follow-up book, the Juchet myth. Westerners have an accessible introduction to North Korea's otherwise impenetrable ideology. Kim Il-sung was Stalin's man in Pyongyang. He was the officer from the Red Army, among other places where he served, that the Soviet forces decided they were going to in place in Northern Korea after the provisional demarcation between North and South, which was for processing the surrendering Japanese troops at the very end of World War II. After that, presumably, ostensibly temporary partition hardened into two separate states. And after Stalin died, after the ceasefire in the Korean War in the early 50s, the Kim Il-Sung group started to develop their own special ideology. It was distinct from Marxism. Leninism, Mao Zedong fought Stalin talk, and which emphasized nationality, which emphasized increasingly the unique importance and destiny of, let's call it race, nationality, ethnicity.

I think race is probably the best word for it, Minchok. And as this nationalist racialist socialism evolved in North Korea, the trappings of an imperial dynasty also became more apparent. At first, it was Kim Il-sung and his brother. So it was kind of like a Fidel and Raul thing. But then his oldest son, Kim Jong-il, and then clearly it had become a dynastic arrangement by the 1970s. His son, and my estimate, was not just a monstrous human. He's a very, very bad emperor because he didn't do much training of the next generation. In the event, after his stroke, he hastily picked.

one of his sons or younger son, Kim Jong-un, as the next monarch and living God. But the North Korean ideology diverged sufficiently from Marxist-Leninist thought that they got rid of all of the Marxist-Leninist icons. They got rid of pictures of Marx, of Angles, of Lennon, or Stalin from their liturgy. And it became a, well, Aaron, the term national socialism has already been dibs, so we can't use that one, but let's call it racial socialism. And you have to give them credit where it's due. This appeal to race and this appeal to racial destiny seems to have had more success

in helping to maintain. the survival of the state, then the other ideologies that we've seen do not so well in the former Soviet Empire. So, of course, in China, you've got a kind of a hybrid now. It's still got some Marxism-Leninism, it's Marxism, Leninism for millionaires. But the North Korean ideology began, of course, with the formative, deformative fingers and Stalin, but it went on in a very different direction from there. And to sort of sticking with broad historical questions for a moment before we zoom in on

the crisis of the day, which is these thousands of North Korean troops in Russia for reasons that seem to be connected to the war in Ukraine, you know, you raise the question of how you can compare Chinese reception of Marxism and Leninism to the Korean reception. Speak more, if you would, about Sino-North Korean relations. and also North Korean-Russian-Russia relations, triangle that exists there. Ideologically, in terms of power calculations, what are the basic factors over the long run, essentially since the formation of the North Korean state that have been at play as these three countries deal with one another, such that we can better understand the present?

Well, Aaron, I think we have to give credit where it is due for a state with such remarkably poor cards to play. Kim Il-sung managed to correlate his abject dependence to Beijing and the Kremlin in a remarkably savvy way. From the end of the actual fighting in the Korean War, the ceasefire in 53, until the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Kimmel Song was a maestro at a cab-changery. aid out of both powers and playing them off against each other, while never, ever once offering fealty or allegiance to either of them. He'd tilt one way, then he'd tilt another way. His gaming of the two big powers next to him was somewhat compromised in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s by the rise of Leon and Brezhnev. Because as sometimes happens in history, Brezhnev harbored a personal disgust for and hatred of the North Korean system in general and Kim Il-sung in particular.

Got to have some standards. Yeah. A viewpoint which was, I think, burnished by his having been assigned in 56 as the Soviet representative to the 19-19. 56 Workers Party Congress in Korea. So he saw it close up. And if you read what he said about that in 56, I mean, you don't really need to be a Kremlinologist. I didn't see what he thought of what he thought of his good allies in Pyongyang at that point. But what this meant was that there was never a, there was never a lips to teeth relationship with China after the, after the ceasefire in the war. I mean, the war.

itself was largely conducted by Chinese troops on Korean territory rather than North Korean troops. Kim Il-Sung was in a bunker most of the time, and his Pung-Dawai and so forth, who were actually doing the strategizing and the commanding, the fighting. When the Soviet Union collapsed, China had to step in, I think rather unwillingly as the sort of the stingy uncle to provide wherewithal so that North Korea would not completely go into a tailspin and be a hot mess on their border. Looking at the trade record, I infer that the Chinese government was quite unhappy about this and was trying to reduce their subsidies as quickly as they could. As I look at the record, they reduced it a little bit too quickly. They cut the food supply that they were sending to

DPRK in 1994, and I believe that was the proximate trigger for the catastrophic famine that occurred during the following years. Now, ultimately, the famine is the responsibility for the Kim family regime because they could have done any number of things in terms of more pragmatic policies that would have allowed for them to purchase the food grains that would have been needed to avoid the death of those hundreds of thousands of people. But this is also part of the background in the PRC, DPRK diplomacy. I think it's fair to say that there's not much love lost on either side in this relationship.

But from the Chinese side nowadays, it's a little bit like having Joey Gallo in the apartment next to you, but this time with nuclear weapons. So they have to be very careful about, I suppose, the usual word that's used, this unpredictable state that is by dint of geography inseparable from them. And the North Korean memory plastic is playing China against another great power to get aid and subsidies. They tried, the North Korean side tried to. do this for about a decade after the Soviet collapse. They were inviting us to take the role of the Kremlin. Being Americans, we were too stupid to understand the invitation, but we were supposed to be bidding against China to help subsidize and support the DPRK state. Now the Kremlin is back

in the game again. And North Korea is playing that game rather differently from the way that grandpa did. Well, that's exactly or wanted to go. I was going to ask you, how do you think Kim Jong-un understands this history? How does he assess his family's successes and failures over the course of the pattern you just outlined?

And has he been a good student? Well, to begin with the credit where it is due for the grandson, he inherited a terrible hand from his feckless father. And as best I can tell, whereas, you see all the stuff through the lens of, you know, propaganda that would make Lainey von Riefenstahl look like a, you know, novice and a piker. But when you look at this, at this earth, people go into hysterics when they see the great leader, the founder of the state, the kind and benevolent father of the nation. But some of that may actually have been genuine.

It's hard for me to tell. There wasn't any of that for his son. And as far as it's possible to determine for a closed society, it looks like his son was pretty well despised by people who were in a position to be safe enough to despise him. There's even a fascinating throwaway wine that Kim Jong-on, that his son gave in an address on the anniversary of his birth or death. I can't remember which, I think his birth, where he said, and this is on the public record, he said, the comrades, the comrades do not appreciate nearly enough the great contributions

of Kim Jong-il. Now, what does that mean? It means he was reviled, you know, right? Okay, that's how you put it. And if you've got your Google translate for North Korean propaganda, that's how it translates, right? Sure. He has taken, he Kim Jong-un, has taken his, you know, granddaddy's physique. He's taken his granddaddy's hairdo.

He's taken his granddaddy's manner of speechifying. His dad was afraid of public speaking. Never did it. So wanting to be in that part of the family tradition is obviously very, very, very much. important to him. He rebuilt the state apparatus that his father ruined in my telling of the story. He rebuilt the party apparatus, which his father had also ruined. He restored the economy from a admittedly very low base, so I don't know how much credit you got for that. As a dynastic dictator, I think you'd give them points for all of

those things. Where we may start to go off the rails is after the sanctions, the nuclear sanctions, COVID, and where we are now in this kind of what I think we could call it post-Cold War period since until the end of the Cold War. So people might date it differently, but pretty much invasion of Ukraine. It's kind of hard to say that we're still in the post-Cold War period. So it's very difficult to imagine his grandfather committing large numbers of North Korean troops to an adventure thousands of miles away. Since eyes on the prize is the gathering of the Korean peoples in the Korean Peninsula under the unconditional love of the Kim family of Pyongyang. It is true that over the decades, limited numbers of North Korean forces did serve in Africa and in the Middle East.

In Africa, kind of as Pretorian guards for various presidents for life. In the Middle East, either as helpers in building, teaching Hamas and Hezbollah how to make the sorts of tunnels of North Korea makes, or even very maybe limited. combat for in support of Hafez al-Assad in the ongoing Syrian civil war. But those are very small operations, really very small, limited, you know, kind of outsource mercenary operations. This is a, this looks to be a very different sort of commitment. And with this very different sort of commitment, two things have been, been attached.

One is that Kim Jong-un seems to have gone all in with Russia in a way that neither his father nor his grandfather did ever in there playing the powers, the big powers, off against each other. Just recently referred to Putin as his dearest comrade. He, oh, kind of, I would have said, unsequiously, if not slavishly. had his minions at the United Nations vote against criticizing the annexation of Danyazk and Lakhansk, you know, with the Ukrainian invasion. His grandfather had actually denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, so this looks like a little kind of different. He just had his foreign minister say that we're with Russia all the way until their eventual victory in the war against Ukraine. So this is pretty clearly taking sides. The other thing,

the thing that we don't know about is what the quid pro quo is here. It's pretty clear that instrumentally the North Korean defense industries are expecting Russian help in reviving their munitions effort, because the Russians need all that, you know, they need that ammunition. What we don't know about is what else is part of the deal, whether it's nuclear technology, missile technology, economic support, or whatever else. But this is clearly leaning very strongly into Moscow. And maybe the calculation is, and I can't guess about this, really, but maybe the calculation is that China will have to pay to play to buy North Korea's.

loyalty back towards a kind of like a middle ground or not. It's a very risky, it's a very risky departure from the previous very well-known game that his family has played with Moscow and Beijing. So that's a risk to the North Korean regime that you identify. Your piece in the Post, the headline for which was North Korean troops in Russia bring a, quote, World Island conflict a step closer, talks about the risk. of this gambits to the world and to us. And we'll talk about Eurasia for a bit.

And then I want to come back to the Korean Peninsula and tensions on the peninsula here before we're done talking. But help us understand the conceptualization that you are pointing to in the piece by invoking Halford McKinder in the term the World Island. This is a subject that's been discussed on the show a few times, but maybe remind people what it is to speak of Eurasia as the world island, what it implies, and what does the movement of North Korean troops Korean troops across Russia potentially to fight in Ukraine suggest for the future of Eurasian

affairs? Well, so McKinder's thesis, it's not a new thesis. He proposed this at the very beginning of the 20th century. It's basically informed by 19th century power politics. We're not in 19th century power politics anymore. And there's a big footnote to his world island thesis. which is called the United States of America, but we can get to that later on.

The observation is that, I guess, what would have gone to want a land back in, you know, the kind of like the early movements of the continents that geologists have looked at, we've got a great big clump of people and territory in the landmass that we kind of arbitrarily demarcate into Asia, Europe, and Africa.

They're all connected to each other. And McKinder was saying that the pivot, the, you know, the mastery of this landmass depends upon what happens in what he described as Eastern Europe. And it was kind of like, almost like a domino theory sort of idea. So if you get, if you master Eastern Europe, you get to master Eurasia. If you get to master Eurasia, you've got to master World Island. If you get to master World Island, but then you've got the whole game. You master the world.

And as an aside on this, we have seen a qualification to his thesis since 1945. It's called Pax Americana. We have the most powerful country in the world. It's not even on World Island. It's, you know, kind of safely or arguably, you know, with a kind of strategic depth, moved from World Island and is the richest, most powerful, most technologically advanced of the contending powers. And also, by the way, seems to be best at putting together like-minded allies to work together for balancing with World Island. I mentioned that so that we put the whole

world island, the fate of World Island, in a little bit of perspective that McKinder was just not You know, it's not in a position to do. I mean, he's Friday wrote in 1905 about this. And USA was kind of different from the way it is now. But what we're in his exegesis, kind of like the ground zero, the focal point, would more or less have been, you know, what we now call Ukraine. And that would be the pivot in his assessment on which everything else in this kind of geopolitical game gets kind of spous. Right. And as you as you point out, American grand strategy after 1945 focuses on this sort of littoral control presence in what Nicholas Spikeman, McKinder's great intellectual error,

calls the Rimland. And, you know, I think a consensus that held at least for some time was that it sort of worked out reasonably well through the Cold War and even a bit afterwards. Today, in particular on the right, you hear if if the up, if the up. of what you're describing and what your piece is pointing out is the interconnectedness of things and the kind of inseparability of thinking about North Korea on the one hand versus thinking about Ukraine on the other. Or you could make other divisions. Sure.

Sure. Your piece is to the end of pointing out that it's pretty hard to pull these things apart, that there's a level of connection here. On the right, there's an argument I'm sure you're familiar with, which is actually it's necessary for us to pull these things apart that because of, you know, resource considerations, perhaps other considerations, we don't have a choice. We have to focus on the problems that we can bear the resources to manage and other things are going to kind of have to handle themselves. I take your piece to be an explicit challenge to that view. Why is it all connected? Why can't

we, if what we're really concerned about, for example, is security in the Western Pacific, why can't we just wash our hands of Ukraine? I would say there are two main reasons, although others might reduce additional. One is because the, of the deliberate interoperability that's developing between the four important dictatorships and call it the heartland, but Eurasia, whatever you want to call it, on this New World Island. There's a deliberate, an increasingly sophisticated interoperation, structural interoperation, between Iran and Russia and China and North Korea, with aid and weaponry, now, soldiers being circulated from one from one state to another for kind of joint projects,

let's call them that. So this is a practical matter, they don't want it separated. They're more integrated economically and militarily today than the Axis powers were at the height of World War II. So I mean, it's just their call on that one. The second reason has to do with ideology. I mean, if we were just dealing with Italian principalities or small German states in Europe, or if we were dealing with a lot of the drama that AJP Taylor gets at in the struggle for a mastery of Europe,

then we'd be talking about something more like classical power politics, where you'd expect relationships to be somewhat fluid and opportunistic and for power vacuons to be filled and all of that nice stuff that the realists love. The problem is that from the standpoint of realist theory, revisionist states are just a bitch. You know, they don't act the way that realists are supposed to act on the world state. Because they can't be satisfied because they've got insatiable objections to reality, the aspects of reality. And so if you have four revisionist states that are working in concert to some degree, I don't

want to overstate this, but because some of their objectives, their ideologies, their doctrines are inconsistent with one another, hostile with one another. But they do have shared big objectives. They've got a number of shared big objectives, including pushing back, overturning, breaking the constraints that Pots Americana put on that. And if you are an insatiable revisionist state with regards to your own grievances,

it gets to be pretty hard to, separate them if they're working together, because we don't get the choice then to say, we're going to ignore this one, but pay more attention to that one. That may not be the way that they want to play the game. My favorite example of this sort of realist myopia in the face of revisionist powers comes from, and there are many examples to choose among, but John Mearsheimer wrote this really embarrassing, in my view, a book. just last year, I think, is when it came out with a co-author named Sebastian Rosado called How States Think,

which, I mean, the problems begin in the title, of course. But, you know, there's a version of his argument, which I actually think is kind of valuable. He doesn't make it in the valuable way. But the version of his argument is that liberals wrap themselves in the comforting cloak of the belief that when bad states do bad things, that they're acting, quote, unquote, irrationally, and they should stop doing that. That actually, state behavior, to include aggressive, warlike state behavior, is more rational than you might think, and here's how to understand it. And there's a version of that

argument that I actually think is more or less true and valuable and liberals should take it on board. But then, you know, he goes much further and into much sillier terrain where he proceeds to argue that, you know, it's state behavior is just generally rational. It's almost all rational. It's very hard to find examples where it's not rational, rational understood according to sort of realist terms of maximizing state interest. The one problem, one problem he identifies, you know, Nazi Germany in the last couple years, 43, 44, 45 in its behavior and its sort of suicidal behavior, can't account for that. It doesn't really make any sense. And like, that's literally the paragraph in the book that deals that more or less says just that. They said, well, you know,

can't quite figure this one out. We'll have to, we'll have to adjust the theory later when we figure it out. And it's always just struck me as like the most stunning in stride confession that actually this can't all be true. If you have a counter example like Hitler's Germany, it just doesn't work. And you can argue that something like it was Germany is sort of an edge case or it's not something to come along commonly in international politics, but like, all right, it seems like when that sort of thing does come along, it might end up

being quite significant, and that's something you need to account for in your theory. Well, I mean, I do note that although the borders of Germany have not changed all that much over the last century, it seems that a number of successive German governments have behaved somewhat differently. But I guess they must have been behaving rationally. It's a more different incarnations. Indeed, indeed. So look, you cautioned me before we started recording that you're not a defense analyst, you're not a military analyst. So we think,

we need to go only as deep as you're comfortable doing here. But we have what seems to be roughly a brigade, you know, 3,000 or so troops from North Korea in Russia, their ultimate destination, again, as of time of recording unknown, but everyone suspects it's got, sorry, in Russia. So ultimate destination unknown, but everyone suspects it has something to do with Ukraine. There seems to be more, you know, potentially more troops following them, maybe several brigades. And then you raise this very interesting possibility, and it's, it's very much in line with the discussion we were just having about how do you understand regime behavior. You know, what is all this for?

You go through a kind of list of, you know, could it be constabulary duty in other parts of Russia? could it be for limited battlefield use, all the sort of rational, limited options that you might reasonably consider looking at the circumstances if we were making decisions. Then you cite an author or an analyst. I've actually not had the pleasure of reading or talking to a guy named Bruce Bechtol who suggests, well, look, actually, if you take your liberal democratic glasses off and you stop quote-unquote mirror imaging, there's a wider range of possibilities for what this might mean. Talk about that a bit. What could this mean? Well, sure. I mean, the question. The question is why commit North Korean ground troops to an assignment thousands and thousands

of miles from the DMC. Why? And Bruce Bechtel, who I think is what... His work I admire immensely, I think he's one of the foremost authorities on the North Korean military writing in the English language. language to that. These will be my words, not Bruce's, but I think that I don't know that he disinherit me for describing things this way. But maybe instead of doing the sorts of things that our guys would do if our forces were placed somewhere in the heartland of Eurasia, maybe the North Koreans and the Russians want to do something like really wild, like wind

in the war that they started, not just bleed out. And if you wanted to win in what seems to be kind of a meat grinder sort of war of attrition, and I know zero about military affairs, so I'm just describing something as a newspaper reader, maybe you'd want to commit a whole lot of manpower, not just a brigade or two or three or fours from what we've heard so far. St. Google tells us, if you look, that North Korea's got about 200,000 special forces in their Korea people's army. I have no security clearances, so I can't vouch for that, but I've read that for years. Let's say it's true.

What if the North Korean state were to commit a significant proportion of its special forces to this engagement in Eastern Europe? What if they were to commit a large enough proportion that they turned the tide in this seemingly inconclusive conflict and pushed back Ukrainian ground forces and allowed Russia to take more territory up to the point where Putin, when he's sufficiently satisfied, says, okay, it's time to have. of our ceasefire discussions. What if North Korea, North Korea's commitment to the invasion of Ukraine turned out to be the indispensable element which could provide for effective Russian victory in that contest? What that? It's obviously only a hypothesis, and is it likely, I can't say

whether it's likely. Is it plausible? I think, yeah, I think it's plausible. Is it something that could be accomplished if Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin worked together on it? I guess we might see or we might not. But it seems like something that people outside of Russia and North Korea might wish to give more than passing consideration to. And then in return for supplying, well, first of all, a lot of bombs and rockets, which they've already supplied and now bodies. The North Koreans get technological assistance, assistance with their strategic arsenal. I guess there's a laundry list of capabilities that Russia has that the Koreans could use.

And maybe our imaginations are limited. Very often in thinking about political orders that are not the same as ours, our imaginations tend to be wrong-footed. Maybe there are additional, maybe there are additional, maybe there are. are additional benefits that would be open to the North Korean state as a sign of gratitude in helping to win. It's probably now a life and death struggle for Putin's crime. It's all speculation, but it's like supporting back in for a reunification scenario,

just to be explicit. Sure. That's certainly helping the unconditional unification of the Korean Peninsula. That's an obvious thing to think about. Yeah. So what does Kim Jong-un want to get at Christmas from Father Frost over in Moscow? I suppose just sticking with this theme of trying to avoid mirror imaging, the one thing that gives me hope that none of this might be about to come to pass, again, trying to see it from the Kim family perspective, is, you know, being Kim Jong-un, I expect comes with a, fair degree of paranoia and a fair degree of a sense that not only are your own people out to get you

should the circumstances align for certain aspects of your own or certain elements in your own elite but that the South Koreans and the Americans actually genuinely are out to get you and you have to contemplate invasion scenarios of your own to be clear sitting where I sit in Washington today the notion that the South Koreans or the United States would initiate large-scale military action against North Korea absent, you know, North Korea, direct North Korean provocation, is effectively zero. But I would expect it doesn't look like zero to Kim Jong-un. And so when you start moving tens, hundreds of thousands of troops west, that's got to affect

your sense of security at home. No doubt. Two things to mention, I guess, in conclusion, we don't, we don't automatically have to assume that any big action taken by Kim Jong-un is devilishly clever. He may be a living God, but he can miscalculate, just like the rest of us. He's made two big departures from family tradition over just the last year. One was to declare that South Korea is a different race from North Korea. This is a U-turn on his father and his grandfather's generations of unification doctrine,

but that now North Korea is proximate to a hostile enemy country, which is not of the same flesh and blood. The other, of course, is this expedition to Eastern Europe that he's engaged in. Now, there are clearly reasons and calculations for both of them, but it doesn't mean that there's smart reasons and calculations for both of them. And it doesn't mean that there aren't unintended consequences and blowback that could come from either or both of these. I mean, one of the obvious unintended consequences of combat in Eastern Europe, whether it's in Kursk Oblast or in Ukraine, would be exposing North Korea's elite forces as a paper tiger.

The North Korean government believes that they're elite troops. And, you know, when they're kind of shooting at unarmed civilians, they're pretty good. But in Africa or in the Middle East. But the initial reports from Kourst are that the first number of units of North Korean troops have been absolutely annihilated. Maybe this is, and you can take a look on Twitter at the first reports, there's fog of war, there's no doubt propaganda. I'm not the person to parse war propaganda out. Others can do that much better than I. But if it should turn out that the vaunted North Korean troops beclown themselves on this adventure to Ukraine,

Kyrgyzko Blas and presumably to Ukraine, there are, there's all sorts of ramifications for the dictatorship. One would be, in this hypothesis, but let's just play with it for a moment, revealing that the North Korean conventional army is very much less impressive than South Korean and American forces have feared for decades. Another would be the heartbreaking but also potentially destabilizing stories from the front should they get back home and go violent. Spending, expending precious lives abroad in an expedition is not a good way to win the hearts and minds of any population, no matter what your quality has. So that is one potential miscalculation that could have big reverberations for the Kim family regime. The other, of course, is insisting that North and South are no longer the same people. That raises a kind of an obvious question, even to an outsider. If you're not trying to unify the race, what have these 70 years of heartbreaking sacrifices

been for? What is the basis for the authority and the legitimacy of your regime? If it's not for this heroic goal that we were all told we were kind of, you know, kind of sacrificing for. So there are some bills that may come due in the next year or two for the Kim regime because of these big departures that the third generation Kim has decided he's confident enough to wager on. Nick Iberstant, the Henry Wendt chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute. We didn't even get to talk about demography, but maybe you'll come back sometime and...

another time. Force me. We'll talk to the national security implications. Thank you so much. Thank you for much. It was a delight. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.