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.”

Lankov has been in hot demand as interest in the North has sparked again. In an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Lankov points out that Kim’s recent turns toward liberalization (which, it should be noted are minor) should not be over exaggerated. After all, notes Lankov, he is really just adjusting policy to fit the conditions that already exist in North Korea. Kim Jong Il’s revoking of these modest economic reforms in 2006, argues Lankov,

… may seem to be driven by paranoia. But this is not the case. Considering the peculiarities of Pyongyang’s situation, its current policies are perfectly rational. The North Korean elites know that the greatest threats they face are internal, not external, and that resisting reform is the most effective way to control the population.

And that’s really the barrier to real reform in North Korea. The North knows that the legitimacy of the regime depends on the control of information and the ability to keep the people in North Korea convinced that people in the outside world have it much worse. It is hard to imagine the regime could convince a nation of starving people relying on South Korea and other nations for food support that the outside world has it worse, but Kim’s regime has been wildly successful in maintaining this view in North Korea and thus maintaining control of the country. To appreciate the immensity of this task, consider another great insight from Lankov:

Consider an important — and frequently overlooked — difference between North Korea today and China or Vietnam in the 1990s: North Korea borders a rich and free country that speaks the same language and shares the same culture; South Korea is, in other words, a real-life vision of what North Korea could and perhaps should be.

If North Koreans start realizing that their country could be more like South Korea, the country would have a crisis on its hands. Kim, for his part, has long been able to keep this from happening, and it doesn’t seem as if even the modest economic liberalization occurring above is going to change that.

Yet somehow one gets the feeling that the regime is interested in opening up to the outside world, if only on its own terms. A rousing and historic orchestra concert by the New York Philharmonic in Pyongyang this past week left open the hope for new dialog with the regime. The concert was broadcast on North Korean radio and television, and briefly covered in news reports on television and in print as well. What’s more, future exchanges are in order it seems, as the North Korean State Orchestra, which played very well in a performance guest conducted by Lorin Maazel the music director for the New York Phillharmonic, has received invitations and made plans to play in Britain in the fall, and is tentatively considering playing dates in the US as well.

Perhaps it is the small soft spot in me that still remains a bit in favor of flowers, peace and love that hopes somehow this small dialog over music will pave the way to deeper negotiations on more meaningful issues.

That should be met, just as the concert was, with a raucous and appreciative standing ovation.

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