The Dispatch Podcast - Is North Korea Preparing for War? | Interview: Nicholas Eberstadt

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

Jamie is joined by Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute, to explain the recent fear that North Korea is preparing for war. The Agenda: —The ideological shift in North Korea —Shifting American policy —China's power over North Korea —Giving Kim Jong-un credit —North Korea's prognosis —Where will we be in 25 years? Show Notes: —38 North: Is Kim Jong Un Preparing for War? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is Nicholas Eberstadt. He is the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and an expert on North Korea, which is why I have them on today to discuss a recent and alarming article that appeared in January by two scholars and practitioners, let's say, of diplomacy in North Korea, that they believe North Korea has made a decision to go to war. So I brought Dr. Eberstadt on to talk through this and whether he has the same interpretation of recent events in North Korea as the two writers of that piece do. And we get into other issues surrounding North Korea, what they think about the upcoming 2024 election or what they might be concerned about, and what the future of this conflict will be, if he doesn't

buy the idea that we are on the brink of war. I think you'll find this episode informative and necessary. Without further ado, I give you, Dr. Eberstadt. Thanks for inviting me. I wanted to have you on because of what was a somewhat alarming article that came out in January. And as a North Korean expert, an expert who's been following the situation in North Korea versus South Korea for a long time, I hope you could provide some insight into what your thoughts on this article was. And I just want to begin by reading two

graphs of it. This was an article written by Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker in 38north.com. You may know them. I don't. They are North Korean watchers, experts, what have you. And the article starts with a question mark, has North Korea made a decision to go to war? And the opening graph says, the situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950. That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war. They go on at the very end of the article, and they write, North Korea has a larger nuclear arsenal by our estimate, of potentially 50 or 60 warheads deliverable on missiles that can reach all of South Korea, virtually all of Japan, including Okinawa, and Guam.

If, as we suspect, Kim has convinced himself that after decades of trying, there is no way to engage the United States. His recent words and actions paint towards the prospects of a military solution using that arsenal. Dr. Eberstadt, what do you make of this article? Is there something new that has gone on here? and should we be as alarmed as this article suggests we should be? I would say something new has gone on, and I'd say we don't need to be as alarmed as this

article seems to be. The authors of the article, Bob Carlin and Sig Hecker, are very well-regarded experts in their area. Bob Carlin, who's a intelligence community analyst following North Korean Affairs for decades, following very carefully. Sig Hecker, the nuclear expert, former head of Los Alamos. The two of them had been involved in Stanford University's programs on North Korea for many, many years. They've visited North Korea under that eGIS, under the aegis of Bill Perry's work there. They ironically have been known in the past for being optimists or maybe even does. on North Korean questions, seeing reforms that other people would say happen and didn't happen, seeing prospects for getting to yes with North Korea that some of the rest of us didn't think were

there. Now they've swung much in a more alarmed way towards seeing war just around the corner. Maybe they will turn out to be right and to be the geniuses in the strategic equivalent of the big short. But I would say that there are things that they are pointing to that are real, but that may not be proof that the red balloon is going up. What they talk about in their essay is an interesting and I think important change in North Korea's ideological doctrine for decades, for generations, in fact, the North Korea's ideological doctrine. for decades, for generations, in fact, the North Korean regime has insisted that the South was part of their Korean realm, that their founding documents talk about one Korea and about the need for a revolution in the South for full unification to come to fruition, and full reunification being, of course, the absorption of South Korea unconditionally into the DPRK run by that lovely

Kim family in Pyongyang. What's unfolded in the last month or so is a very public renunciation of this long-standing doctrine on unification. Kim Jong-on very publicly said, it is now as a practical matter impossible to imagine unification with the South. We in the North and those in the South are too different to think that anything like this could really be practicable. But if these puppets and these despicable people in the South should ever threaten us, we will conquer them, we will fight them, we will beat them, we will conquer them, we will annex them. You might say in a way we now have a sort of a distinction without a difference, whereas Grandpa had Kim Kim Il-sung had a doctrine of unification, which was kind of unification.

unconditional unification under North Korean Kim family rule. Grandson is talking about absorption by conquest and annexation. The question that came up in this article is whether this was a sign that something big was about to happen. It may turn out that Bob and Sig end up looking like prophetic geniuses. in the future because of a tragedy, a tragic miscalculation that Kim Jong-un initiates. But so far, despite everything, Kim Jong-un has shown quite a good knack for survival. Is it possible to read what you just said as less bellicose?

And let me explain, just listening to your explanation, if they no longer believe that the Peninsula needs to be united because they are the same, and then the Kim Jung family, the Kim family needs to rule all Koreans north and south, and that they're too different for this to occur. Doesn't that allow them to exist in their, you know, oppressive state without leading to the need to reunify the South and thus cause a great calamity, a great war? Jamie, you've asked a terribly important question, and there's a lot of prognostication about this in South Korea in particular. South Korea is a very polarized society, just as the U.S. is polarized.

If you can imagine it, it's even more polarized than the U.S. is. And people on the South Korean left the so-called sunshine contingents who've been hoping it would be possible to have a rapprochement or a detente with Pyongyang for a generation and more, they've been looking at that change in language and hoping that it means that the North is recognizing the possibility for a condominium of the two states, that not just that the states cannot unify, but that they can coexist in peace. That's the hope. What seems to be a little bit awkward for that interpretation is the sort of,

of 1944 or 1944 level of total war mobilization in the North with all of those forces forward deployed towards the South and the ongoing development of the weapons of mass destruction by the North Korean state. It was one thing when the North Korean state was working on what President Trump called their little rocket man projects, looking to knock on the door of President Trump or his successors with a ballistic missile tipped with a nuclear warhead. But in the years since then, The North Korean government has been working on perfecting short-term, shorter range, nuclear weaponry. The sorts of things that you would be using if you wanted to fight and win a limited nuclear war in the Korean peninsula or in the Korean peninsula in the surrounding areas. by all of the allocations of government resources and the race towards technology that the

North Korean government has been engaged in at the same time, this doesn't look as if they're getting ready for a porcupine strategy. One more question about the article, kind of one of the assumptions that underpins it, seems to be that the North was genuinely trying to come to some sort of agreement, with the United States and the West, and the West failed to provide what North Korea needed, and therefore now Kim Jong-un has been rebuffed, and he is now angry and is turning more bellicose.

What do you make, I mean, do you read that assumption into this piece, and what do you make if you do of that assumption? I have very high regard for Bob Carlin, the North Korean Affairs analyst. SIG is more of a scientist and nuclear person, and I'm always interested by what he has to write. I don't think I will be revealing state secrets to say that Bob and I are almost always in a friendly disagreement about interpretations.

The images that come to mind when I hear that are previous interpretations that other people had in the past, not Bob. these are different people, about how Fidel Castro had wanted to be a friend of the United States, but then we were just like a little bit rude, so he had to become a Soviet satellite. Ho Chi Minh was really just, it was a patriot, and if only we had understood his inherent nationalism, we never would have had the problems with Viet Minh and then the Viet Cong that distracted us for a little while. Now, North Korean objectives for, you know, for three full Kims have been pretty well concentrated upon the argument that Pyongyang is the one and only legitimate power in the Korean Peninsula and that the monstrosity that's developed in the South, which by some happenstance has become a very prosperous democracy. is an illegitimate cancer on the face of the earth.

And we may be beyond the sort of the poles of pre-modern history in such a way that these kind of calls that were a little bit, we're a little bit deaf to them. But the idea which has been central to North Korean propaganda, that it is imperative to protect and gather the race which is being preyed upon by other enemy races in the neighborhood, and that the Kim family is going to be the vehicle for bringing the Korean race to a safe harbor and to future glory and also a little bit of revenge against those bad races.

That falls a little clunky on our ears. There are other places where that hum in the blood may be a little bit stronger. The argument that unification is worth even the horrible impoverishment, which the subjects of the Kim family regime have suffered, that this is a sacrifice which we are making for a glorious future. This seems bizarre to us, but it may not be bizarre to some other people. and I think that if you made a version of it back in Homeric Greece, it wouldn't have been bizarre to a lot of people back then. Let me ask you questions outside of the piece about North Korea. It seems every time there is some type of negotiation, a new administration comes in to handle North Korea. The strategy seemingly always involves trying to get China to help make the situation better by preventing China, trying to using their leverage. in power to stop Kim Jong-un from being as bellicose as he is. How much control does China have

over North Korea, even if they wanted to cooperate with us? Do they have that amount of control? Could they remove Kim Jong-un if they wanted to without much difficulty? What is their precise power over North Korea? Well, this is obviously a matter of uncertainty. If people in the United States understood this a little bit better, we probably wouldn't be having the endless speculation about this question that we've been engaged in for the last 30-plus years for this entire period of a long North Korean nuclear drama. I'll give you an interpretation because I don't know, I don't know the answer myself. My impression is that the Chinese government's approach to North Korea is kind of like what your approach or my approach would be if we lived in the apartment next to Joey Gallo and he had

nuclear weapons. I think you'd probably be a little bit scared of him and you certainly wouldn't want to have trouble with him. If Joey Gallo could be trained on some of your enemies, then you might even be okay with him doing some bad things to you as long as he was doing, hurting your enemies more. And as best I can make out, that's the sort of the peculiar calculus that the CCP is engaging in in its dealings with North Korea. It does not want, this is my interpretation, I cannot prove this. My interpretation is, the CCP is fine with having strategic depth in the form of a divided

Korean peninsula and this buffer, so to speak, of DPRK. They had a little kind of like unpleasant experience with people from Japan kind of trudging across the Korean Peninsula into Manchuria a while ago, and I don't think they liked it too much. and they're willing to subsidize that strategic depth to some degree. As long as the North Korean state is causing more heartache and trouble to the U.S. and the U.S. alliance than to the CCP, that seems to be an acceptable state of affairs. How people in Washington became so sophisticated that they came to the conclusion, that the Chinese government would want to help the United States in dealing with the North

Korean problem is really kind of hard for me to answer. Because I think you just have to be really sophisticated to come to a crazy conclusion like that. Well, here's another question, which I'm sure there's not a precise answer, because a lot of what we know about North Korea is sometimes difficult to actually know. Do you believe Kim Jong-un is rational? It's possible to act in perfectly rational ways and to be a rather unpleasant person and to have rather unpleasant objectives, I think. The greatest evidence that he is rational to me would be the fact that so far as I know, he's not in a pine box today. And he came into power, into supreme power maybe, but into power in North Korea 12, 13 years ago, inheriting not a terribly good legacy from his awful father, Kim Jong-il, who was not only a

a terribly wicked man, but also a very bad emperor who had destroyed the North Korean economy, largely as far as we can tell, destroyed the party apparatus, run down the state administration, all of the sorts of things you're not supposed to do if you're kind of like in the dynastic succession business. Against very long odds, Kim Jong-un restored the North Korean economy a bit, albeit from a very low base. He rebuilt the party apparatus. He got the state administrative function more back towards the sort of capabilities a dictator would like to have. And then, of course, things have gone in a kind of a peculiar direction since the nuclear drama of 2017 and COVID, and now this new quadrangle of Tehran and Beijing and Moscow and

Pyongyang, considering what he inherited, I'd say that the little fellow has played his hand pretty well, not that I like that, much like what he does, as he may appreciate. But you'd have to give him credit for what he has accomplished, given his lights. And, I mean, he's running the most effective outdoor prison camp in the world. He is maintaining an absolutely outsized global threat, put a global influence compared to his level of national economic capability. And nobody's put a, you know, nobody's put a bulletin his hat. So I would say all things considered, he looks like a pretty rational guy.

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Are you surprised that it's lasted, that we're talking about it almost, I think, 25 years after the book was published, that North Korea is still in place? I'm completely surprised. And I think, among other things, I have been educated by what I see as the tragic continuation of the world's most oppressive dictatorship these past decades. Part of what I think I didn't understand when I wrote that analysis, some of the aspects of resilience in the North Korean totalitarian apparatus. You have to remember that the people in North Korea are Koreans. We have contact with Koreans, and not North Koreans. The Koreans we know in our own lives are pretty smart, pretty entrepreneurial, pretty hardworking, often very creative. Take those same talents and put it to developing a survivable, totalitarian, dynastic dictatorship.

And I think you can understand, as I should have, some of the ways that creative dictators could take a Stalin-style system and customize it to kind of Korean specifications to make it more survivable. That's one part. The other part, and I didn't have enough imagination to think of such a thing because it would have seemed to me like going out into deep science fiction land. I didn't have enough imagination to conceive of a world in which the South Korean state, which is being threatened for its very life by the North Korean neighbors, would want to rescue financially the North Korean state from its deep economic crisis. And so in the late 1990s, we saw first the South Korean state and then the U.S. state and then the U.S. state and then the state of Japan banned together to provide the economic lifeline to North Korea,

to allow it to avoid complete economic collapse, complete breakdown of its division of labor domestically. I don't think we will know until we got our hands on the archives in Pyongyang, as I assume we will eventually do just how close North Korea came to complete close. collapsed before the West rescued the place financially, but I think that would be interesting to learn. Well, I guess my final question on North Korea would just be, where will we be 25 years? How does this game end in a certain way? Obviously, war is so horrible to, you know, hopefully we never see it.

I mean, it's, you know, maybe the much worse case than all the scenarios and every other conflict that we're discussing right now, it seems to me. millions potentially dead. But the stability of North Korea still, as you said, maybe stronger now than it was 25 years ago. How do you foresee the end of North Korea? Jamie, to you and to me and to anybody who listens to us and to a lot of people who won't listen to us, the idea that you'd put two cats in a bag and one of them be called North Korea and one of them be called South Korea. At the end of the, you know, I'm skittering in the bag, the one that comes out alive is North Korea. That'd sound absolutely preposterous to us. North Korea's got a tiny

population compared to South Korea. It's got a negligible economy compared to South Korea. It doesn't have anything like South Korea's technological prowess. It certainly doesn't have anything like the attractiveness of the South Korean system, at least to my sense of. the notion that a country like that would be able to attack a larger, more affluent, more technologically advanced country and win sounds absolutely preposterous. It doesn't seem to sound preposterous to North Korean leadership if you read what they say. And sometimes it's good to read what people say because sometimes they mean what they say. If you read North Korean pronouncements, They say that the South is corrupt and pampered and ruined and deracinated.

And they clearly seem to believe that the people in the South are gutless and have no will to fight even to save their society. And they may not be wrong. I think they are wrong, but they may not be wrong. It looks to me as if the end of U.S. military alliance with South Korea is regarded as a sort of a precondition for North Korea's game plan of unconditional absorption or annexation of the South. If that's the case, then we have to wonder what it would mean to have an American president who has no interest in the U.S. U.S. are okay alliance. I can imagine a scenario that might work out like that, or alternatively, a South Korean leader who is sufficiently radical or anti-American, that he wasn't interested in connections with the U.S. So that's one way that you could get towards what I'm talking about.

The other is that there are all sorts of different ways that one can imagine that South Korea might be able to collapse under its own, North Korea, excuse me, DPRK might be able to collapse under its own weight. We don't know what's going on inside North Korea very well at all. We don't know why the grandson suddenly came out with a doctrine implicitly saying grandpa was wrong about this unification thing all along. There are many internal potential fissure lines that we can only see in the rear view mirror if they are ever exposed to us, that may also give us some sort of eventual insight into the frailties and the weaknesses of an unsustainable regime. I think we have to believe that the gap between North and South

is going to continue to widen as long as the North Korean dictatorship has a grip on the subject population of the North. And I hope that the people in South Korea don't give up the dream, the ambition of bringing the two Korean populations back together under a free democratic, open market society, I hope, with an alliance with the West. I think it's doable. Dr. Just because you raised it, I think, there. And correct me if I'm wrong, what you were alluding to, is that Donald Trump, during his first administration, did threaten to remove American troops from South Korea unless there was a greater payment from South Korea. Were you alluding to the fear in a second Trump administration that he might actually do that?

and that undermining of the defense alliance might give Kim Jong-moon at least the belief that this alliance is not as strong and therefore a chance to attack. If a second Trump administration involved a fraying or a substantial weakening or an ending of the U.S. R.K. military line. an awful lot of things could change in Asia. One of the most obvious things which could change in Asia, the immediate calculations of the North Korean state with regard to it's no longer similar people in the South. Yes, with a more isolationist or mercantile approach to our international relations, I think we can almost invite recalculation by the North Korean dictatorship.

But it's not just a President Trump. If we have other populist voices having more say, if we have more isolationist tendencies with greater influence in U.S. policymaking, power politics, kind of of abhor as a vacuum. And, you know, you don't have to be a H. Carr to see what might happen in that sort of a prolonged crisis. Sorry, this is the real final question, because I want to follow up on one point there. How much is this discussed in South Korean politics and media? Are they discussing what a future Trump administration may or may not do and what that could lead to? Oh, of course. Of course. I mean, one can argue that the United States has too much influence is too great and overarching shadow in South Korean political discussions. Maybe South Korea

should have more defensive capabilities of its own. Most of the South Korean public is in favor of nuclear weapons in South Korea run by South Koreans right now. So there, and that isn't exactly a new flavor in South Korean politics. But you have to, you have to be aware, not just in South Korea and in Europe, all around the world, one of the big wild cards. in trying to assess international political risk is what the United States is going to be doing in the next years. Is the United States even going to be protecting Pax Americana? And that may not only be a question about Trump.

That may be a question about whoever is elected as a Republican candidate or for that matter as the Democratic candidate. because it's not clear that the Democrats are all in on Pax Americana these days either. With that, Dr. Eberstadt, thank you for joining the Dispatch Podcast. It was a pleasure, Jamie. Thank you for inviting me. You know,