Despotism's furthest shore

National Review, Nov 29, 2004 by John Derbyshire

By sheer relentless accumulation of detail Martin succeeds here in giving us a full portrait of the Kims and their filthy little tyranny. This makes the book, with all its faults, valuable and noteworthy. If your entire knowledge of North Korea is taken from occasional newspaper pieces and hearsay, this is an excellent book with which to fill in the gaps and attain a more rounded understanding of that country, and of our options in dealing with it.

Those options are few, and mostly unappealing. Forceful action would certainly destroy the regime, but it would destroy a great deal else besides: a good swathe of South Korea, for sure, and possibly the odd Japanese or American city. Martin quotes Kim Jong Il as saying, of the possible outbreak of war: "If we lose, I will destroy the world." Admittedly, this is N. K. army scuttlebutt from a military defector; but if Martin's portrait of Kim is anything close to true, the remark is not out of character. We have all become very cautious about reports of dictators' stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps we should bear in mind the old adage that a nation generally learns the wrong lesson from the previous war.

Furthermore, any preemptive action by the U.S. would be hotly opposed by the South Koreans, who are largely in denial about North Korean realities, have a sentimental--though uncharitable--attitude toward their ethnic kin in the North, and imagine that the present situation, the one they have gotten comfortably used to, can continue indefinitely.

Anything less than brute force, on the other hand, is unlikely to bring down the regime, given the survival skills Kim Jr. has already displayed, and would in any case require the cooperation of Beijing, where Kim is viewed with amused condescension but no real alarm. The Chinese Communist party has no interest in ending Kim's rule and uniting Korea under a rational, constitutional form of government. In fact, as Martin says, none of the nations most concerned with Korean affairs--not China, Japan, the U.S., nor Russia--really wants Korean unification. Even the South Koreans desire it only in the way that the young St. Augustine prayed for continence and chastity: "but not yet." If the status quo could continue for another hundred years, everyone--except, of course, the poor devils who actually live in North Korea--would be happy. Unfortunately, it can't.

Bradley Martin's final suggestion for dealing with Kim Jong Il by easing him toward constitutional monarchy is original and interesting. In my opinion it is also naive; but in a situation where the U.S. has no good options, perhaps anything is worth trying. What is certain is that nobody in the U.S. State Department has the wit or initiative to attempt anything so unconventional, or probably anything at all outside the well-trodden tracks of appeasement. Certainly we are not likely to try a military option--even though, and with all the fearsome dangers, a well-judged attack might, simply from the point of view of U.S. national interest, be justifiable. The Iraq war has exhausted the enthusiasm of the American public for preemptive strikes. We shall, therefore, probably just stumble on trying to hold the status quo together until something horrible happens and we lose control of the situation.