Debating Myself

North Korea has baffled American diplomats and politicians consistently for at least the last twenty years. Now a nuclear state, the question of Korea is even more important for the next President to provide some real solutions on. Hawks want to topple the regime and see a reunification of North and South Korea as the best solution for stability and security in East Asia. Doves want to use international pressure (particularly the 6-party talks) to coerce (convince, persuade?) North Korea into giving up its nuclear program and perhaps even opening a meaningful dialog with the West. Unfortunately, these competing tensions in US foreign policy have led to a 3 steps forward, 2 steps back development in US relations with Korea.

A little less lonely these days?

A few major events have taken place on the peninsula in the past month that indicate a need for Korea to be put on the national radar again. First, the issue that doesn’t involve Gershwin, classical music, or a cultural exchange—a perceived liberalization in Korean economic policy (which may in fact be music to the sound of capitalist reformers outside of Korea, and those hiding themselves within). North Korea, long known to hold major reserves of coal and precious metals, has begun selling its reserves to other countries—drastically increasing its meager foreign trade in a response to looming economic crisis. First let me throw some numbers at you from this excellent Washington Post article on the subject (incidentally, buried on page A19):

• $1.4 billion—total North Korean exports in 2006
• $11 billion—value of recent trade projects undertaken jointly between North and South Korea
• $2 trillion—estimated value of North Korean mineral reserves

Why are these figures significant? Well, not only is North Korea exporting goods and engaging in foreign trade, but also this:

They say that Kim’s government is increasingly willing to lease mines to outside companies and to negotiate joint ventures with foreign governments.

If talking is the first step toward warmer relations between two countries (or a single country and the entire world… and it is) then here is that big first step. The fact that Kim Jong Il’s brutal dictatorship (and make no mistake it is brutal—starving millions of its own people in the early 1990s) is increasingly engaging in trade dialog with neighbor states and allowing foreign countries to lease mines means that slowly the Western, or perhaps just capitalist, culture and way of doing business are going to creep in. A brutal dictatorship may be able to control every aspect of the daily lives of its people, but even Kim Jong Il’s regime can’t force its citizens to unlearn what they have already learned. The trickle of information exchange that these economic efforts bring with them is a start toward an irreversible path of liberalization.

Or is it? In the same article Andrei Lankov, an expert on the North and occasional visitor, states:

More important are Kim’s conflicted feelings about mining, said Lankov… “He sees the money now,” Lankov said. “But he believes that by reforming, he would be committing suicide. So he wants mining done under strict control of North Korean managers.”

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