top ten list on the UN World Food and Agriculture Organization’s metric, the “Prevalence of Undernourishment in the Total Population.” North Korea’s most recent record of 40.8 percent of the population is significantly higher than the average figures for Eastern Africa (32.0%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (21.5%), which consist of immiserated, illiterate, pre-industrial, agriculture-based economies. For an industrialized, urbanized, literate country, North Korea’s man-made and man-enforced food insecurity situation has world-historical moral and legal implications.[1]
Such is the unique image of North Korea’s contradictions and outright weirdness—a belligerent, well-nourished dictator presiding over a backward nation of hungry people—that when Pyongyang launches missiles or threatens the U.S. and its allies with nuclear annihilation in spite of U.S. signals for bilateral talks or even apparent progress in such talks, American responses have ranged from bewilderment and indignation, to even a tendency to write North Korea off as a child throwing a temper tantrum.[2] In the meantime, North Korea has drastically advanced its own nuclear posture review and ballistic missile programs while reaping billions of dollars in cash, food, fuel, and other blandishments from South Korea, the United States, Japan, and China. The U.S. alone gave North Korea concessionary aid in excess of $1.3 from 1995 to 2008.[3]
What accounts for Pyongyang’s unconventional behavior and policies? Moral turpitude is a factor, but more relevant considerations are the systemic constraints on the Korean peninsula. If the dictum “all politics is local” is more or less true, then perhaps “all international politics is local” may at least be partially valid. Yet, seldom have U.S. policymaker seriously considered the internal dynamic of the Korean peninsula, but rather choosing to believe that North Korea merely reacts to stimuli, both hostile and conciliatory, coming out of the White House. But from the North’s point of view, the systemic rivalry with the South is an ominous reality that cannot be ignored. In the contest for pan-Korean legitimacy, the only way for the gloomily inferior Democratic People’s Republic of Korea one day to prevail over the vastly superior Republic of Korea (ROK) is do all it can to maximize its nuclear threat capability and extort the democratic, risk-averse South. For the Kim regime, nuclear-armed missiles are much less a “bargaining chip” or “deterrent,” but the sole means to its long-term regime preservation and ultimately emerging victorious over the incomparably richer, freer South. President Donald Trump captured this dynamic well when he, in an address to the ROK National Assembly in November 2017, remarked, “[T]he very existence of a thriving South Korean republic threatens the very survival of the North Korean dictatorship.”[4]
- ↑ Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2017,” 79, 78, and 77, respectively. http://www.fao.org/3/a-I7695e.pdf
- ↑ “Clinton Likens North Korea to Unruly Children,” Reuters, July 20, 2009. https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-koreanorth-clinton/clinton-likens-north-korea-to-unruly-children-idUSTRE56J2FV20090720
- ↑ Mark E. Manyin and Mary Beth D. Nikitin, “Foreign Assistance to North Korea,” Congressional Research Service, April 2, 2014. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R40095.pdf
- ↑ “Remarks by President Trump to the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea, November 7, 2017, Seoul, Republic of Korea,” The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-presidenttrump-national-assembly-republic-korea-seoul-republic-korea/
