The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future

Dedication

For my mother, Soon Ock, and my wife, Hyun Jung

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

A Note on the Korean Text

Preface

One: Contradictions

Two: The Best Days

Three: All in the Family

Four: Five Bad Decisions

Five: The Worst Place on Earth

Six: The Logic of Deterrence

Seven: Complete, Verifiable, and Irreversible Dismantlement (CVID)

Eight: Neighbors

Nine: Approaching Unification

Ten: The End Is Near

Eleven: Unpredictable

Epilogue: Whiplash

Acknowledgments

Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Photo Section

About the Author

Praise

Also by Victor Cha

Copyright

About the Publisher

A Note on the Korean Text

Romanization of the Korean language has long suffered from a lack of a single, agreed-upon standard for spelling, which is why you will variously see Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong-Il, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Chŏng-il in the press and academic publications. The book at hand uses something of a mishmash of different standardized Romanization techniques. For names and places that will be familiar to many readers, such as Kim Il-sung, Kim Dae-jung, and Pyongyang, Revised Romanization is used. For names of people and places less familiar to the casual observer, McCune-Reischauer Romanization is used. And for those who aren’t acquainted with Korean, Chinese, or Japanese names, it bears pointing out that in nearly all cases (with the exception of a few, whose names are widely known and/or used in the reverse order, such as Syngman Rhee), Korean, Chinese, and Japanese names are written in their traditional order, with the surname first and the given name last.

Preface

THE IMPOSSIBLE STATE WAS THE FIRST BOOK PUBLISHED AFTER THE DEATH OF NORTH Korea’s second leader, Kim Jong-il, and the sudden ascension to the leadership of his twentysomething-year-old son, Kim Jong-un. At the time, the future for this small isolated regime appeared uncertain at best, and that of its young leader far from bright. Since publication of that first edition, however, so much has happened, most of it worrisome. The world saw North Korea conduct seventy-two ballistic missile tests and four nuclear detonations that demonstrated not only rapid advancements in their capabilities, but also progress toward threatening the U.S. homeland with a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile.

The United States did little to address this threat during the eight years of Barack Obama’s administration. Pursuing a policy of strategic patience—defined as not wasting political capital or diplomatic energy on a negotiation without some (unlikely) sign of North Korean interest—Obama preferred to focus on opening relations with Burma and Cuba, and investing politically in a nuclear agreement with Iran rather than North Korea.

In South Korea, we saw the impeachment of the conservative government led by President Park Geun-hye, and the election of the first progressive government in the country in a decade, devoted to improving relations with North Korea through diplomatic and economic engagement policies. The period since publication of The Impossible State also saw an extraordinary deterioration in China’s relations with both Koreas. In the case of the North, China’s leader Xi Jinping’s distaste for the young Kim’s belligerence resulted in an extraordinary period of non-dialogue that came to a close only in 2018. With South Korea, China embarked on a draconian economic sanctions campaign against it for acceding to the emplacement of an American missile defense battery in the country.

But most important, the intervening years saw Kim Jong-un declare at the end of 2017 that after one half century of development, North Korea had achieved the status of a nuclear weapons state. As I discuss in The Impossible State, the regime devoted an inordinate percentage of its national resources to this project. It started, based on newly obtained archival CIA satellite imagery, in 1962, two years before China exploded its first nuclear bomb.¹ This was indeed a watershed moment for the country, and it is appropriate that the second edition of my book picks up from this development. In 2018, we saw a flurry of diplomacy unprecedented in history. The North Korean leader, normally isolated from the entire world, held three summits with Xi Jinping, two summits with South Korean president Moon Jae-in, and a historic meeting with the American president Donald Trump in Singapore. Is this diplomacy an effort at peacemaking with de facto acceptance by the international community of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state? Or is this diplomatic outreach a new effort by Kim to shed his isolation and seek reconciliation with longtime adversaries?

At the end of the first edition of The Impossible State, I wrote that there would be some major political discontinuity involving North Korea during the term of the forty-fifth president of the United States. I did not specify whether that discontinuity would be negative or positive, but believed that the status quo could simply not hold. I still support that prediction and would argue that some of the things we have seen so far have already validated that claim. But what I did not expect was that the source of this change might come from an unpredictable and impulsive U.S. president. Donald Trump is unlike any U.S. president who has dealt with North Korea. And so I think it is appropriate that the epilogue focus as much on him as on the North Korean leader because this president’s unconventionality could take the Korean peninsula in the direction of a peace treaty—or in the direction of a horrible war.

2018

Chapter One

Contradictions

WE PASSED OVER BARREN AND GRAY FIELDS AS THE GULFSTREAM VI TOUCHED DOWN on the empty runway of the airport. As the plane taxied on the tarmac, there was no flight traffic to be seen. No baggage carts or fuel trucks shuttling about. It looked as though we were the only arrival or departure of the day. We cruised past two passenger planes with propeller engines, the kind you would see in a 1940s Humphrey Bogart movie. Then the plane turned right and the main terminal came into view, a small 1960s-era building about one-tenth the size of today’s international air terminals. Scrawled across the top of the edifice with large, red block letters was PYONGYANG, written in English and in Han’gŭl (Korean characters). Hanging atop the center of the Sunan international air terminal’s façade was an oversize portrait of the first leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea), Kim Il-sung.

We prepared to deplane into the cool spring air, after the long flight from Elmendorf Air Base in Alaska. It was dusk with an orange glow to the sky, and it was eerily silent: no street sounds, no car horns, no birds. We disembarked one by one, following established security protocol, while two security officers, known as ravens, checked each of our names off the passenger manifest. The ravens then escorted us to a receiving party of North Korean airport staff and foreign ministry officials, who were standing on the tarmac in front of the Kim Il-sung portrait. It was at that point that our security detail turned around and headed back to the plane. I blurted out, Hey, aren’t you guys coming with us? The agent, looking puzzled at my naive question through his dark sunglasses, responded, No sir, we stay with the plane. Too much sensitive comms equipment aboard to stay overnight in enemy territory. We will transport southbound to Osan [air base in South Korea]. See you on the other side in a few days, sir. The Gulfstream VI was a military plane that the White House provided at the request of New Mexico’s then-governor Bill Richardson who had pressed the George W. Bush administration to allow him to visit North Korea. The plane was capable of confidential communications (and probably a whole host of other things I was unaware of). I then remembered that the ravens, who were fully armed, always checked us on and off the plane at our various stops along the way, but the only time they ever separated from the plane was when we overnighted at Elmendorf Air Force Base, a secure facility. I thought to myself, U.S. military plane, invaluable; U.S. government officials, expendable.

My job on this trip as National Security Council (NSC) staff was to accompany the governor and make sure he did not make any nuclear deals outside of the ones we were then trying to negotiate through the Six-Party Talks. Our specific mission was to negotiate the successful return of a set of POW/MIA (Prisoners of War/Missing in Action) remains from the Korean War that was held by the Korean People’s Army (KPA). Two experts from the Defense Department were detailed for the trip. One was a forensics expert. The other was a Central Asia policy expert, who also was a Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown University, and on whose dissertation committee I later served. Richardson, then about to announce his candidacy for president on the Democratic ticket, was the media highlight of the trip (he had brought with him Andrea Mitchell of NBC News and an Associated Press correspondent, to ensure adequate publicity), but this was the first time U.S. officials from the second term of the Bush administration had entered North Korea. The last time had been in 2002, when the United States confronted North Korea about a clandestine second nuclear program that was in violation of standing agreements. This sparked a major crisis that led to ballistic missile tests and, ultimately, a nuclear test by Pyongyang. So no one knew exactly what to expect.

As we walked up a small set of steps to meet the receiving party in front of the VIP entrance, the only recognizable face was that of Mats Foyer, the Swedish ambassador to Pyongyang, who I later found out had insisted on being at the airport to greet us, since Sweden was the protecting power for American interests in North Korea. This arrangement with Sweden exists because the United States has no embassy in Pyongyang, as it remains technically at war with the country. A cease-fire, not a peace treaty, ended hostilities in 1953. I looked over my shoulder to see our plane departing down the runway, and mumbled to the two Pentagon officials standing next to me, The three of us should stay together, and not get separated during this trip. Once inside the terminal, we were offered some refreshments and exchanged some diplomatic pleasantries. We were asked to pay an entry fee in cash. (Credit cards don’t work in North Korea.) We were given our schedules by the hosts, which under normal circumstances would be something handled by our embassy and for which every detail would have been painstakingly ironed out in advance of the trip. In this case, however, the North Koreans provided no details in advance, preferring to maintain total control of the itinerary; hence, we were literally flying blind into the country, unclear of what we would do.

As we headed out to the transportation vehicles, I looked at the departure board for flights. The long, black board had only one entry for the day, a flight to Beijing. The Sunan Airport parking lot was empty except for our awaiting convoy. The North Koreans directed Governor Richardson to one car, an old 1970s Cadillac sedan, and indicated for me to get into a separate car, a brand-new Volkswagen Passat. They told everyone else to get into the vans. The two Defense Department personnel immediately tried to rectify the situation, claiming that I needed to travel with the other members of the official detail, but we really did not have much choice in the matter unless we wanted to create a scene. I made eye contact with them saying that it was okay. I sat in the backseat of the car and watched as the rest of the traveling party filed onto the van. I peered over at the odometer and noticed that the car had less than one hundred kilometers (60 mi) on it. I induced that the Chinese must have provided a fleet of these new Passats in contravention of standing U.N. sanctions against the North. At that moment, the thought crossed my mind that I was alone in an enemy country with White House security clearances of the highest order, no diplomatic or security protection, and sitting in the back of a sedan with no idea where the driver and his companion in the front seat might be instructed to take me. I sat back and closed my eyes. Normally, one would use the car ride on official trips to work on the BlackBerry or field calls from Washington. But there was no BlackBerry service and no global cell service. I had no U.S. embassy control officer passing me cables and intelligence traffic to review. I could not even ask the driver what the score of the previous evening’s Yankees–Red Sox game was. (I was born in New York City.)

I dozed off and awoke thirty minutes later to see our convoy speeding down wide and empty thoroughfares as I got my first look at Pyongyang. As an academic, I had studied the country for decades, and as a U.S. official, I had negotiated with their diplomats, but I had never set foot in the country until this trip. We sped past what appeared to be a work unit of hundreds of school-age children walking twelve-wide and thirty-deep with the first student carrying a numbered placard. We whizzed past the gates of Kim Il-sung University, where book-toting college students were pouring onto the sidewalks after their day’s study. The car then slowed as we passed a large, white, gated structure on my right side. This used to be the official residence of Kim Il-sung, but after his death in 1994, it was turned into a mausoleum, an $8.9 billion, 115,000-square-foot structure surrounded by moats and complete with marble floors, kilometer-long (0.6 mi) halls, moving walkways, escalators, air-purification systems, and automatic shoe-cleaners, where the Great Leader’s embalmed body is housed in a clear sarcophagus.¹ Our car then turned right down a secluded dirt road with barbed-wire fencing. I could see farmers in the distance tilling the land with an ox. (I saw only one tractor on the whole trip despite passing hundreds of acres of farmland.) We drove past a guarded checkpost and entered the Paekhwawŏn State Guesthouse, a lush green compound with a private lake and many pheasants wandering about. The manager greeted us and escorted us to our rooms.

The high-ceilinged, tastefully appointed European-style rooms had an inner door and an outer door with traditional keyholes, but no keys. I flipped on the television to see what service was available. A black screen came to life momentarily with the BBC logo in the bottom right corner, but then a graphic appeared, saying SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE. I turned to another channel, with the CNN logo at the bottom, but after a few seconds the same notice showed up. I flipped through all the channels to find only two that came through. One was a broadcast of the Supreme People’s Assembly—DPRK rubber-stamp legislature—hearing in progress. The other was a documentary about the exploits of Great Leader Kim Il-sung as an anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter. The only phone service available in the room was two white phones sitting atop the writing desk. Written on a thin strip of white paper underneath one of them was LOCAL CALLS, and the other INTERNATIONAL CALLS. I thought about dialing a random number on the local phone to see whom I would get, but then picked up the international phone, dialed 9 to get an outside line, and then called the White House Situation Room, knowing full well that there were probably about ten people listening in on the call from a room somewhere in the guesthouse. The Sit Room patched me through to Steve Hadley, the national security adviser. I said, Mr. Hadley, I just wanted to let you know that the party has safely arrived in Pyongyang. Good, he responded. I then said, Mr. Hadley, we are staying at the Paekhwawŏn Guesthouse, where I am calling you from a phone designated for international calls in my room. There was a brief pause on the other end of the line, after which Hadley, fully aware of the lack of any secure communications, responded, Okay, got it. Every call after that was a one-way conversation in which I would report on the day’s events, but the White House would be in receive mode only, not giving the North the benefit of any insights into our position.

I could not sleep very well that night, a combination of jet lag and restlessness at what the trip might have in store. As I stared at the ceiling in my room, I was thinking that I had never imagined myself to be in this position. As a professor of international relations at Georgetown University, I had written about U.S. policy in Asia, and was interested in studying policy, but did not intend to practice it. Friends in the Bush administration, such as Dr. Michael Green, had liked some of what I had written, and during two postdoctoral stints at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution (where I was the Edward Teller National Security Fellow) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, I had gotten to know Dr. Condoleezza Rice, then a professor of political science and university provost. When they asked if I would be willing to serve on the NSC, it was hard to say no—both out of a sense of public duty and because of my substantive interests in the area. Three years later, another sleepless night was not unusual except that it was without the incessant humming of a BlackBerry, which was now basically an overpriced paperweight in service-absent North Korea.

At dawn, I walked downstairs and onto the grounds. There were no birds chirping, as the country suffered deforestation because of floods and energy shortages that forced the people to cut down trees for firewood. Distant military marching-band music could be heard piped from loudspeakers in the center of the city. Small pheasants ran about, making shrieking sounds I had never heard before. (I think they may have been served at dinner that night.) On the contained compound, there were no ubiquitous North Korean guides normally accompanying foreigners every minute, so I wandered around the grounds by a pond. I caught glimpses of armed soldiers quietly standing guard every two hundred yards or so on the other side of the fence. The contrast between this blissfully peaceful moment and the larger strategic context of the trip was stark. Here we were in the midst of a nuclear crisis with North Korea—the worst since 1994, when the United States contemplated a preemptive strike on the Yongbyon nuclear complex. The Kim regime had only months earlier carried out an unprecedented nuclear test, which led to the severest U.N. Security Council (UNSC) sanctions since the Korean War. Additional financial sanctions were targeting the leadership’s personal assets held in overseas bank accounts. Pyongyang threatened to turn the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) into a sea of fire, and declared that it was unafraid of war with the United States. I returned to the guesthouse to see the manager standing outside the entrance puffing on a cigarette. He was a middle-age man with a friendly smile, wearing a gray overcoat, dark glasses, slippers, and the ubiquitous Kim Il-sung lapel badge. He asked if there was enough heat and hot water last night. I told him that there was more than enough. We chatted about the weather in Washington and Pyongyang, and I complimented him on the beauty of the Paekhwawŏn grounds. He then said quietly to me in Korean that I was the first White House official to stay in the guesthouse since former president Jimmy Carter in 1994. I laughed uncomfortably, since this fellow did not know that I was just a lowly NSC staff director of Asian affairs. Then, as he extinguished his cigarette and exhaled his last puff, he murmured quietly that he wished us well in trying to bring peace between our two countries. It was the last thing I had expected to hear, given the poor state of our relations.

NORTH KOREA IS the Impossible State. The regime, created in 1948 out of the division of the Korean Peninsula by U.S. and Soviet occupation forces at the beginning of the Cold War, has outlasted anyone’s expectations. Even after the mighty Soviet Union and other communist regimes collapsed some two decades ago, this enigmatic Asian nation continues to hang on. Today, we witness an Arab Spring, where dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya, ensconced in power much longer than North Korea’s leadership, have been ousted, and yet the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il (as he is referred to within the DPRK), until his death in late 2011, and his son, Kim Jong-un (the so-called Great Successor), sit happily in Pyongyang declaring 2012 as the year of a powerful and prosperous nation (kangsŏng tae’guk). The regime remains intact despite famine, global economic sanctions, a collapsed economy, and almost complete isolation from the rest of the world. By any metric, this poor, backward, and isolated place should have been relegated to history’s graveyard. It is a hermetically sealed Cold War anachronism.

North Korea is a land of contradictions. North Korean schoolchildren learn grammatical conjugations of past, present, and future by reciting We killed Americans, We are killing Americans, We will kill Americans. They learn elementary school math with word problems that subtract or divide the number of dead American soldiers to get the solution. Yet, at the same time, since 1994 the school curriculum has made English, not Russian, the mandatory foreign language of study. In terms of economics, the facts are even more bewildering. North Korea sits at the heart of the most vibrant economic region of the world. It has the globe’s second largest economy on its border (China), the third largest economy across the sea (Japan), and the fifteenth largest economy contiguous to it, with which it shares a common language (South Korea). It has a young, literate, and inexpensive labor force. The U.S. Geological Survey assesses North Korea to have some of the world’s largest untapped reserves of coal, iron ore, limestone, magnesite, and other minerals akin to rare earth reserves (tungsten, molybdenum, and niobium-tantalum). A Goldman Sachs report estimated the value of North Korea’s mineral deposits at 140 times the country’s GDP.² Yet the economy has been in freefall for the past two decades. Per capita gross national income has contracted from $1,160 in 1990 to $960 in 2009. Life expectancy rates are 67.4 years, down from 70.2 years in 1990. Rather than engage in commerce with the world, the North Korean regime engages in self-sustaining illicit activities. It is one of the world’s biggest counterfeiters of U.S. currency. North Korea’s fake $100 bill is so authentic-looking that U.S. law enforcement agencies refer to it as the supernote, because it is based on printing technology and a specialized ink that is better than the original bills produced by the U.S. government. North Korea is also one of the world’s biggest producers of counterfeit cigarettes and medications, including Viagra.

Along with this colossal economic mismanagement, the people of North Korea endure some of the worst human rights abuses in the world. North Korea ranks seventh out of seven (lowest possible) on Freedom House’s Freedom in the World index, and is therefore one of just nine countries to be given the ignominious title the Worst of the Worst.³ It is in the 0th percentile for the World Bank’s Voice and Accountability index and ranks dead-last in the Freedom of the Press index. In North Korea, you can get thrown into a gulag for six months of hard labor for watching a DVD of Jackie Chan’s Twin Dragons⁴ or for humming South Korean pop songs. If the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il in your home or office are not properly dusted or are hung off-center, you could be sent to jail. Even if you do everything right, one evening the secret police can knock on your door, strip you and your entire family of your worldly possessions, and throw you into a gulag because it was discovered that someone in your family from a previous generation was a collaborator with Japanese colonial authorities.

A recent CNN report with Wolf Blitzer and Alina Cho showed North Koreans in Pyongyang using cell phones and enjoying themselves at amusement parks. The impression given was that the world knows very little about what happens behind Kim’s iron curtain (this is true) but that when we peer behind it, things are not all that bad (this is false). A few neatly dressed elites playing games on their cell phones, which do not have cell service outside the country, does not represent North Korea. Public executions more than tripled in the past year. The numbers of prisoners in North Korea’s infamous kwalliso (prison camps)—a system as bad as Stalin’s gulags—is reportedly on the rise. Shoot-to-kill orders are in effect for North Korean refugees seeking to cross the Yalu or Tumen Rivers into China. When international news reporters broadcast that cell phones are a sign of the North’s willingness to reform, they must have missed the public bulletin boards in Korean, which forbid the use of Chinese-made mobile phones (which, with a prepaid SIM card, can dial outside of the country) and the use of foreign currency as a crime punishable by death. Three North Koreans in ninety thousand today own their own car. About ten out of a hundred own a refrigerator in their apartments. The DPRK is one of the few industrialized societies in the history of the modern nation-state system to have suffered a famine that killed as much as 10 percent of the population. Most everyone is a vegetarian, but not by choice. The average meal is a small bowl of boiled corn with a sprinkling of pickles. Beef is so scarce that for the average North Korean, it is a delicacy eaten only once per year. NGO groups that visited rural areas in February 2011 had a question on their nutritional surveys that asked, When was the last time you had protein? Virtually every respondent could remember the exact date when they last had an egg or a piece of meat, revealing the state of undernourishment. The government’s public distribution system (PDS) provides about 1,500 calories per day, which is less than the U.N. requirement for minimum need. The effects of this systemic malnourishment will be evident for generations: the average seven-year-old boy in North Korea is twenty centimeters (8 in) shorter and ten kilograms (22 lb) lighter than in South Korea. In spite of all this, when the world tries to help the people of North Korea with food, the regime blatantly violates the four basic norms of humanitarian aid: access, transparency, nondiscrimination, and a focus on the most vulnerable.

Yet the North Korean people, despite all of their hardship, believe that they are the chosen people. They consider themselves fortunate to have been born of the purest race, and in the most innocent, virginal, and virtuous society in the world. They followed the direction of their Dear Leader Kim Jong-il until his death because they believe that they need a strong leader to protect them from the evils of the world. Even those who defect from the country do so not out of political dissension but because of economic hardship. Nearly nine out of ten defectors today, many of whom settle in South Korea, where there are now over 21,000,⁵ still self-identify as North Korean rather than as a Korean or South Korean. And 75 percent of them say that they still retain affection for the Great Leader Kim Il-sung, Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, and the Great Successor Kim Jong-un.⁶

For decades, North Korea has demanded face-to-face negotiations with the United States over Pyongyang’s nuclear programs. It has called for the United States to treat it with respect and to declare nonhostile intent if it wants the North to sit down for serious denuclearization negotiations. Pyongyang has said countless times that if the U.S. did not threaten it, there would be no need for nuclear weapons. They claim that ridding the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons was the dying wish of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung. Yet when President Barack Obama extended an open hand to the regime, it was slapped away definitively. In his inaugural speech, President Obama promised to engage with isolated regimes in all corners of the globe if others would be willing to unclench their fist. As an initial gesture of his commitment, the new American president appointed four ambassadorial-rank special envoys for North Korea. The administration sent its top envoy, Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, to Pyongyang in December 2009 with a personal letter from President Obama for the North Korean leader, explaining the U.S.’s sincere intent to improve relations. Despite the most forward-leaning start to any U.S. administration’s efforts at engagement with the DPRK, Pyongyang did not allow Bosworth to deliver the letter to the leader. It reciprocated instead in April 2009 by conducting a ballistic missile test that overflew Japan in the direction of the United States. In May 2009, it conducted a second nuclear test. In March 2010, DPRK submarines torpedoed a South Korean naval vessel, killing forty-six young men. In November 2010, it fired artillery at a South Korean island, killing four, injuring scores, and forcing an evacuation of the island’s civilians. And in that same month, it revealed that it was pursuing a second nuclear program based on uranium enrichment, which it had denied it was doing for the previous seven years.

North Korean behavior is offensive not only to the United States. Its second nuclear test, at 9:54 A.M. local time on May 25, 2009, took place at an underground facility only seventy kilometers (44 mi) from the Chinese border. By any metric, this is a very dangerous action, threatening to Chinese interests. The test took place on Memorial Day in the United States, a national holiday, and ballistic missile tests in 2006 took place on Independence Day (July 4). Pyongyang has also called for sessions of the Six-Party Talks, which China hosts, to extend through Chinese Lunar New Year festivities. With each of these in-your-face actions by the North, international pressure mounts on China, as the only country with real material leverage on the North. Yet Beijing countenances an extraordinary amount of bad DPRK behavior, continues to feed the country with about 1 million tons of food assistance annually, and makes rote calls for a return to dialogue among all the parties. For Kim Jong-il’s seventieth birthday in February 2011, Beijing presented him with a large porcelain peach, which symbolizes longevity. The complexity of this relationship is profound.

Pyongyang claims it pursues nuclear weapons out of self-defense against a U.S. invasion, and Kim Jong-il said he was willing to give these up in exchange for security assurances and economic benefits. Yet the only monument to the late leader—in a land of thousands of statues to his father—sits in front of the Yongbyon nuclear complex, where they make plutonium for nuclear weapons. It is a fifty-foot (15 m) structure with a likeness of Kim standing with a group of scientists and soldiers urging them to work in the nation’s defense. North Korean propaganda warns their citizens to be on 24/7 alert for aggression from American imperialists. On several occasions, I have said to North Korean interlocutors that this is about the craziest assertion they could make. The United States has no intention of invading North Korea. The one administration that they were probably the most concerned about, under George W. Bush, even put in writing in the 2005 Six-Party Joint Statement that the United States had no intent to attack North Korea with nuclear or conventional weapons. I asked my North Korean interlocutors, Why would we possibly want to invade you? Even if we were the revisionist imperialists that your propaganda spouts we are, what do you have of value that we could possibly want? The North maintains its need for a powerful nuclear deterrent nonetheless. Yet thirteen thousand pieces of North Korean artillery can rain millions of shells, both conventionally and chemically armed, on the population of Seoul in one day. The warning time for a North Korean artillery shell hitting South Korea is forty-five seconds. Seventy percent of North Korea’s 1.1-million-man army sits forward-deployed on the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), ready to attack at a moment’s notice. That is a powerful deterrent to any American or South Korean contemplation of invasion. So why the nukes?

North Korea has undergone extraordinary hardships for a country that emerged at the end of World War II with one of the most developed economic infrastructures in Asia. Japanese colonial authorities had built a network of heavy and chemical industries, railroad and telecommunications systems that were state-of-the-art at the time. Today, North Korea’s industrial capacity is worn down and its economy has contracted, if not collapsed. It continues to have massive food shortages of over 1 million metric tons annually. While neighboring South Korea boasts the most online subscribers and smart-phone users per household in the world, North Korean city-dwellers still line up on the street thirty-deep to use a public phone, and less than one hundredth of 1 percent of the population has access to a computer (which itself is restricted from access to the Internet). Yet in spite of this all, there are signs throughout the city of Pyongyang that carry revolutionary slogans about the strength of the nation, the most ironic of which reads, WE HAVE NOTHING TO ENVY.

THE ARGUMENT

How did North Korea become the Impossible State? How has it survived when many others of its ilk have long since collapsed, and as revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa spell the demise of the few remaining ones like it? How could the leadership have made so many poor decisions? Why don’t the people rise up against the injustice? How can one trash an economy as bad as the North has? What do they want to achieve with their nuclear threats? Why won’t they accept help from others? And what does the leadership ultimately want?

In one sense, the answers to these questions are simple. North Korea has survived as the Impossible State because no one on the inside is empowered to overthrow it, and no one on the outside cares enough to risk the costs of changing it. But the answers are also quite complex. I believe that without looking at the history of the Kim family, its over-the-top personality cult, and its ideology, we cannot explain why the North Korean people, even those who have defected, still harbor affection for the leadership. We cannot understand the nuclear weapons threats without understanding some of the bad economic choices the regime has made over its sixty-plus-year history. We cannot understand the human rights abuses without understanding the intense paranoia of the regime. And I don’t think we can begin to understand the regime’s bizarrely professed self-confidence without understanding how it views its own history, ideology, and mission.

I believe that the forty-fifth president of the United States will contend with a major crisis of governance in North Korea before he or she leaves office. The regime has survived for this long due to a unique confluence of factors that include geography, humanitarian assistance, a temporarily generous South Korean government, Chinese support, and some dumb luck. But this confluence is dissipating. The core argument of this book is that a growing space between the state and the people will cause a crisis of governance and uproot the foundations of the regime. This gap derives from state ideologies and political institutions that are becoming even more rigid and controlling, on the one hand, while society is moving in the direction of greater marketization and economic entrepreneurship, on the other. The crisis of governance is being accelerated by Kim Jong-il’s sudden death in December 2011, which forced an abbreviated and rushed dynastic succession process to the inexperienced and not-yet-thirty-year-old son, Kim Jong-un. (We don’t know his exact age.) The state is becoming more rigid because a new leadership in North Korea must be accompanied by a new ideology. The old ideology of a Powerful and Prosperous nation or rich nation, strong army (kangsŏng tae’guk) under Kim Jong-il will not suffice, because it was an utter failure in terms of the state’s performance, with the one exception of building nuclear weapons. The new ideology that accompanies this leadership change is what I call "neojuche revivalism." This is a return to a harder-line, more orthodox juche ideology (defined as self-reliance) of the 1950s and 1960s, when North Korea saw its best days. Neojuche revivalism, moreover, denigrates as a mistake and as ideological pollution the failed period of experimentation and reform that was attempted at the end of the Cold War. The problem the regime encounters is that this hard-line ideological shift is occurring at a time when fledgling markets have become a permanent fixture of North Korean society. Government-authorized markets, but more important, black markets have emerged all over the country in response to the economic failures in the early 2000s and in response to the government’s suspension of the public distribution system. Once the state stopped providing rations of food and other goods to the people, they were forced to find their own means of survival through barter and trade to avoid starvation. The government’s failure, in this regard, led to society’s marketization. The government has since cracked down, but the change is unmistakable and unstoppable. Recent defectors from North Korea admit that they purchased as much as 75 percent of their food from the market, as opposed to receiving it through government rations. Thus, a gap, not unlike the ones witnessed in the Arab Spring, is emerging where political institutions cannot keep apace of societal changes. This combustible situation is taking place amid a shaky and unprecedented third Communist dynastic succession. This is an untenable situation. North Korea is not capable of circumventing this crisis of governance, because in the end, Chinese-style economic modernization is not possible. China had Deng Xiaoping, a charismatic leader, to push for reform. There is no Deng in North Korea. Chinese leaders espoused the virtue To get rich is glorious. But in North Korea, political control is still more important than money. We do not know what spark will cause the crisis of governance, just as no one predicted that the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a frustrated and humiliated twenty-six-year-old vegetable vendor in Tunisia, would set off the greatest movements for political change the Middle East has seen since the fall of the Ottoman Empire some ninety years ago. But it is coming.

In this book, I will also look at U.S. relations with North Korea. In November 2007, a North Korean merchant vessel was attacked by Somali pirates. The twenty-two-member crew was beaten as the ship was overtaken. The USS James E. Williams responded, freed the ship, and provided medical treatment to the North Korean crew. Both the U.S. State Department and the North Korean news media referred favorably to the operation. In the long history of U.S.-DPRK relations, this was one of the rare positive moments in a deep sea of acrimony. For North Korea, the relationship with the United States is personal. Pyongyang expresses its hostility by doing ballistic missile and nuclear tests on American national holidays like July 4 and Memorial Day, and in one instance, within a day of a sitting president’s birthday. North Korean children to this day do not know that a man has landed on the moon, since this would suggest some respect for the United States.⁷ They have never heard of Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson, but they do know of Michael Jordan and can recite passages from the movie classic Gone with the Wind,⁸ because these were personal favorites of the Dear Leader. There are anti-American billboards on the streets of Pyongyang just as there are movie billboards on Sunset Boulevard. One hears a great deal about the close relationship between China and North Korea. Indeed, China may be the one country that has consistently kept North Korea afloat despite the regime’s many mistakes, by giving it food and energy assistance. But the only country that can solve the security problem that North Korea poses is the United States. Pyongyang wants diplomatic relations with the world’s superpower, and it wants to be recognized as a normal state without the plethora of U.S. sanctions levied against it. It wants a peace treaty ending the Korean War, and it seeks to be accepted in the community of nations. The key country that can provide these benefits is the United States. The problem for Washington is that after three decades of negotiation through successive administrations starting with Ronald Reagan through to the current one, it is becoming increasingly clear that Pyongyang wants all of these things while it keeps a portion of its current nuclear arsenal, not in exchange for complete denuclearization. In surveying the history of American diplomatic efforts to stop the nuclear program, I will try to answer critical questions about how the United States should deal with North Korea. What alternatives are there to denuclearizing North Korea, if any? Does the death of Kim Jong-il and a change of regime in Pyongyang make the challenges for the United States greater or not?

IN THE PAGES that follow, I will try to unpack this enigma of a country. The world knows very little about North Korea. There is probably no society more closed off from the world today; not even Burma or Syria rival the level of control found in this country. From a government perspective as well, North Korea presents one of the hardest intelligence targets to penetrate. Very few are allowed to enter the country. Even fewer are allowed to exit. What can be seen from satellites, moreover, is probably only a portion of that which is buried deep underground in eleven thousand tunnels and caves.

Though the treatment I offer in this book is not flattering to the regime, I attempt to offer a corrective to some of the punditry, misconceptions, and caricatures in the news and entertainment media about the place. Most Americans know little more about North Korea than the comical portrayal of Kim Jong-il in the movie Team America.⁹ Numerous editorials in newspapers have referred to him as a plutonium madman with a penchant for fine cognac and Swedish models. It is also widely known that most North Koreans are told that the first time Kim Jong-il played golf, he got eleven of eighteen holes-in-one. Even serious news periodicals like the Economist could not resist, once putting Kim Jong-il on the cover with the caption Greetings Earthlings.¹⁰ If little is known about Kim Jong-il, far less is known about the heir apparent, Kim Jong-un, the third and youngest son of the Dear Leader. Up until September 2010, the only picture that existed of him in the world was one from when he was in elementary school. At the North Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) conference in October 2010, party officials declared to foreign journalists amid the massive displays of military hardware and goose-stepping soldiers that Our people are honored to serve great president Kim Il Sung and the great leader Kim Jong Il. Now we have the honor of serving young general Kim Jong Un . . . [our country] is blessed with great leaders from generation to generation.¹¹ A Washington Post front-page story interviewed former classmates at an international school in Switzerland, where Kim Jong-un reportedly studied. From these interviews, we learned that he was a big fan of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and especially idolized Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, but not much else.¹² Again, this is all very amusing and mysterious, but the lack of information about North Korea is deadly serious. Here is a country that is the newest nuclear-weapons state. It has violated every nonproliferation and human rights norm, and has sold every weapons system it has ever produced to regimes in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa that are unfriendly to U.S. interests, including Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Syria. And with the sudden death of its dictator, the state is in the process of handing power over to an inexperienced young man of whom we did not even have a picture until late 2010. We knew far more about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, the late Osama Bin Laden, the late Saddam Hussein, the late Muammar Qaddafi, and General Than Shwe in Burma than we know about Kim Jong-un, who is about to lead the world’s worst renegade nuclear state.

In order to understand North Korea, one must begin with a look at the way they view their own history. Chapter 2 will consider international relations and the Cold War through the eyes of North Korea, when the regime truly saw its best days. In chapter 3, I will offer the reader a fairly close look at the bizarre personality-cult leadership of North Korea with particular focus on the only three leaders the country has ever known: Kim Il-sung; his son Kim Jong-il; and the grandson, Kim Jong-un. I will also delineate the leadership dilemmas the young Kim faces. After studying the leadership, chapter 4 will regard the North Korean economy in the context of five historic, bad decisions made by the regime. These decisions are largely responsible for the current economic collapse of the country. Books about North Korea give too little attention to the human rights abuses. I chronicle some of the horrific stories of defectors, famine survivors, and gulag prisoners in chapter 5, which is not for the faint of heart. With this understanding of the history, leadership, economics, and society, I move to the security issues that matter most for Americans: deterrence and the nuclear program. Chapter 6 looks at the military balances that have maintained the peace on the Korean Peninsula since 1953. Chapter 7 studies the history of how Pyongyang got into the nuclear business, and the history of U.S. diplomacy to denuclearize North Korea. Chapter 8 provides the reader with an understanding of the complex relationships the DPRK has had with countries in the region, including China, Russia, and Japan. With China in particular, I argue that the relationship is not nearly as chummy as the popular press believe. The two countries in actuality dislike each other quite intensely, but they are caught in a mutual hostage relationship—the North needs Chinese help for their survival, and the Chinese need the North not to collapse. No discussion of North Korea would be complete without a discussion of inter-Korean relations and unification. Chapter 9 looks at how the two Koreas historically have thought about unification and what the prospects are for it today. I conclude the book by looking at the meaning of Kim Jong-il’s death and the Arab Spring for North Korea. As events unfolded in the Middle East and North Africa, Pyongyang banned all news stories of the demonstrations. To the extent that there were reports in the North Korean media, the demonstrations were portrayed as anti-American. The regime has banned all public gatherings and has even gone so far as to remove booths and partitions in public places like restaurants to discourage people from meeting. Hosni Mubarak reportedly was a friend of Kim Jong-il’s, and the DPRK leader must have watched with empathetic unease as Mubarak and his son, Gamal, lost control of the country amid the protests. I believe the events in the Middle East and North Africa, in conjunction with a shaky leadership transition following Kim’s death, have tremendous implications for the future of the country.

I am not the first author nor the last to write about North Korea. And I do not profess to know the truth about what happens inside this country. My analysis is based on years of study of North Korea and the East Asian region as a scholar. It is also based on my brief period of public service in the White House dealing with these issues, and interacting with the North Koreans in different places around the world, including in Pyongyang. The discussion in the pages that follow is based on facts and history, but it is also based on hunches, guesses, and gut instincts derived from these personal experiences.

Chapter Two

The Best Days

WHEN I WAS NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL STAFF TO THE PRESIDENT, ONE OF MY many tasks was to draft everything that the president and his national security adviser might read or say about Korea. What the staff writes, of course, goes through an editing and clearance process, whether by speechwriters or by other directorates at the NSC that have interests in Korea, or even by the president himself. This was a position of tremendous honor and responsibility, and I treasured every opportunity to write for the president. One of the themes that then–senior director for Asia Michael Green and I used to emphasize in President Bush’s speeches and statements was the common values and ideals that underlay the military alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea. This was an alliance born out of the Cold War, between peoples who knew nothing about one another, literally at opposite ends of the earth. There was nothing intrinsically valuable about Korea to the United States. It was merely a patch of earth that had strategic value only because Washington did not want the Communists to own it, and for which 33,692 Americans died in a terrible war.¹

But the alliance blossomed from these early days. South Korea went from an economy that USAID (United States Agency for International Development) specialists predicted would not amount to more than an agriculturally based and light-manufacturing economy to a global ranking as high as the eighth largest economy in the world (now ranked fifteenth), and one of the world’s most technologically sophisticated societies. While at the end of the Korean War telephone usage was virtually nil, today South Korea has the highest cell phone and Internet usage per population of any country in the world. Korean companies like Samsung Electronics have higher revenues today than Sony, Panasonic, and Toshiba combined. In politics, South Korea went from a Cold War anti-Communist military dictatorship to a full-fledged, vibrant democracy. During these early days, America had mixed views about South Korea. It was a bulwark against Communism and the front line of defense to protect Japan, but its authoritarian leaders were human rights abusers who trampled freedom of speech. In this regard, South Korea’s democratic transition and vibrant civil society today stands as one of the most successful cases of peaceful political transition in the history of the modern state system.

President Bush understood this evolution well. In his speeches, he would constantly refer to Korea as a model of an advanced industrialized society that emerged from the ashes of the war, and would describe the alliance between the countries as built upon a foundation of democratic values and an agenda of helping provide for the global common good. South Koreans received help from the United States in the past, but once it developed, it gave back, sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, participating in peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and East Timor, and donating to earthquake victims in Haiti. (The latter held special sentimental value for Koreans, since Haiti once donated supplies to a struggling Korea in the 1950s.) South Korea went from being a recipient of international development assistance to a provider of this assistance to poorer countries around the world. Seoul’s hosting of the G-20 summit in November 2010 was a watershed moment in Korea’s odyssey, as it became the first non-G8 country to host this global governance event. As both Presidents Bush and Obama have stated publicly, South Korea today represents the quintessential successful example of what the United States fought the Cold War to achieve.

The Cold War was integral to South Korean history, but for North Korea, the Cold War is not only its past, it is also its present and future. The country still lives in the siege mentality of those bygone days even as the rest of the region has long since moved on. The Soviet Union made peace with South Korea and normalized political relations in 1990. Communist China followed suit in 1992. But for the Kim regime, there still is no peace settlement with the United States, Japan, or South Korea. While South Korea remembers the Cold War as the distant past, the North is constantly reliving it, spewing threats about American imperialists and South Korean puppet regimes. The rote political science explanation for this clinging to the past is that the leadership needs external threats in order to justify its iron grip on the people and build its military capabilities. But I think there is more to this yearning for the Cold War. It is shaping up to be an integral part of the ideology being created for the post–Kim Jong-il era in North Korea. This ideology does not look forward; instead it seeks to revive the images and terminology of the Cold War, and shuns reform and openness. Why this fixation on the Cold War?

The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that the Cold War era has been and will continue to be the best days of the North Korean nation-state. It was during a period of about three and a half decades beginning in 1945 that the North Korean leadership and its people saw history on its side. By most metrics, the North was doing better than its rival regime in the South. There was a confidence in Pyongyang that their system was better and that unification, the ultimate Korean prize, would eventually be its destiny. Despite the failed attempt to unify the peninsula through war in 1950, events after the war bolstered North Korean confidence. Aid from two Communist patrons, political turmoil in the rival South, and the American entanglement in Vietnam were all perceived as trends that favored Pyongyang. If you travel to Pyongyang today, you would see neat eight-lane-wide thoroughfares, carefully manicured public spaces, and a city planned around iconography and monuments dedicated to Kim Il-sung, the first leader of North Korea. But you would also notice that almost everything looks retro—in the sense that it was all built in the 1950s and 1960s—when the North had the resources and capacity to govern as a fairly well-to-do Communist state. The Cold War represents history, but it also represents an aspiration point for North Korean ideology. This history and narrative continues to inform North Korea’s back-to-the-future thinking today. It is to this history that I now turn.

THE NORMAL NARRATIVE for North Korea that we see used on CNN or in Time magazine goes like this: weak, desperate, and starving country. No money, no friends. An outlaw state. Kooky and isolated leader. But what we fail to understand is that this is largely a two-decades-old, post–Cold War narrative about North Korea that coincided with the first revelations of its pursuit of nuclear weapons in the late 1980s, early 1990s. The media then drew links between the country’s relative deprivation and the leadership’s gambit to shift all remaining resources to becoming a nuclear weapons state.

But in North Korean minds, for ninety years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea was hardly a basket case. It was a well-endowed and well-supported country, which was a model example for communism in the developing world. Looking at the country today though, few people could imagine that North Korea was the most industrialized and urbanized Asian country to emerge from World War II. This was because Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945 left massive industries in northern Korea. Colonial authorities built mines and processing plants for deposits of coal, iron, magnesium, and zinc, which were more plentiful in the north than in the south. The Japanese constructed large nitrogen fertilizer plants, and scores of reservoirs and hundreds of pumping stations, which allowed the North to fully fertilize and irrigate its lands. By 1945, when Korea was liberated by Soviet and U.S. troops, the northern half possessed 76 percent of the peninsula’s mining production, 80 percent of its heavy industrial capacity, and 92 percent of its electricity-generation capabilities.² The North Korean government found itself in 1945 inheriting and nationalizing state-of-the-art factories and technology. By contrast, in South Korea, which the Japanese treated as the bread basket of the Korean colony, there was no industry to nationalize and only scorched rice paddies.

I was reminded of North Korea’s superior position in these early years at a dinner hosted by the Chinese at the state guesthouse during a round of Six-Party Talks in 2005. I sat with my North and South Korean counterparts as we continued the day’s negotiations on what sorts of energy assistance could be provided to the North in exchange for their denuclearization. The North insisted on light water reactor (LWR) technology (civilian nuclear energy), because that was the deal they were promised by the Clinton administration in an earlier agreement made in 1994. The South Koreans, knowing the Bush administration’s reluctance to give any form of nuclear capacity to the North (and the administration’s allergy to this element of the Clinton-era agreement), instead offered the North 2 million kilowatts of conventional electricity annually as a substitute. This was objectively a better offer, because the power would be immediately usable, whereas a light water reactor–based civilian nuclear energy grid would take over ten years to build. The South Korean delegate said his country could provide this to the North through existing power stations and the laying of power lines northward across the thirty-eighth parallel. The North Korean delegate refused the idea outright, remembering clearly what the then-richer North had done some fifty years earlier to the electricity-deprived South. In 1945, the North had inherited the largest collection of hydroelectric power plants in Asia from the Japanese occupation, which enabled them to produce electricity for the whole peninsula. When the peninsula was divided at the thirty-eighth parallel by U.S. and Soviet occupying forces, one of the main power plants in Korea was located on the northern side of the dividing line with power distributed through lines southward. Once the division became permanent, however, the North cut off all electricity to the South, creating tremendous hardship. Though the South Korean delegate promised that his country would never cut off power in the same way, the North refused to even consider the idea.

The Korean War from 1950 to 1953 leveled a lot of the North’s inherited advantages. Kim Il-sung’s mistaken calculation to invade the South led, among other things, to U.S. carpet-bombing of the country, which essentially wiped out all Japanese-built industries. (In defending the South, the United States dropped more bombs on the North than they had done in all air campaigns in World War II.) China and the Soviet Union, however, worked hard to rebuild the country. The North benefited immensely from this. Only two weeks after the August 1953 armistice ending the war, Kim Il-sung gave a speech titled Everything for the Postwar Rehabilitation and Development for the People. The first Three-Year Plan’s (1954–1956) focus was on reconstruction and expansion of heavy industry as the basis of national power. Kim Il-sung received heavy industrial equipment, power plants, hydroelectric dams, electrified railroads,