Mario Loyola: Twilight in the Evil Kingdom of the Hermit Midgets
[Mario Loyola, a former foreign-policy counsel to the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, is director for Tenth Amendment studies at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.]
With Kim Jong Il’s promotion of two family members to senior military posts in time for the historic Workers’-party conference in Pyongyang last week, the Communist world’s latest succession crisis officially got under way. Actually, “promotion” may not be the right word, given that neither the Dear Leader’s 27-year-old son, Kim Jong Eun, nor his 64-year-old sister, Kim Kyong Hui, had held military positions of any significance before they were elevated to the rank of four-star generals.
For the surreal North Korean regime, these days must seem like the Twilight of the Gods. The state’s unification strategy, its raison d’être since the “military first” doctrine emerged in the early 1960s, has visibly and utterly failed. The people have been starving for decades. The government is almost friendless. The state religion — a grotesque amalgam of Stalinism, Confucian collectivism, and god-worship of the Kim dynasty — is melting into a tide from all sides. They have nuclear weapons, which must feel a bit like wielding a Götterhammer, but it has gotten them precious little of what they hoped for. Perhaps most important, Red China’s emergence as a major capitalist power presages nothing good for this aging and decrepit relic of Stalinism. In an inversion of the Wagnerian tragedy, the dwarf has been undone by the mighty....
As George Kennan wrote of the Soviet Union in his Long Telegram at the dawn of the Cold War, understanding the sources of North Korean conduct involves questions so “intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought,” that any assessment is hazardous. But one thing seems increasingly clear: If you really want to understand North Korea’s behavior, shift your focus from Pyongyang to Beijing....
Dependence on modern China is not the most comfortable place for a moribund Stalinist dictatorship to be. Despite an alliance going back to the Korean War, China’s currentcourse of economic development has put it on a collision course with Pyongyang. China reacted sharply to planned U.S.–South Korean exercises in the East China Sea not because it wants to defend North Korea but because China increasingly views its near abroad as its natural sphere of influence. Like most rising Great Powers before it, China has come to view itself as the preeminent power in its own region. That should not distract Korea-watchers from the obvious fact that the relationship of North Korea and China has been transformed — along with all of China’s other relationships abroad....
Read entire article at National Review
With Kim Jong Il’s promotion of two family members to senior military posts in time for the historic Workers’-party conference in Pyongyang last week, the Communist world’s latest succession crisis officially got under way. Actually, “promotion” may not be the right word, given that neither the Dear Leader’s 27-year-old son, Kim Jong Eun, nor his 64-year-old sister, Kim Kyong Hui, had held military positions of any significance before they were elevated to the rank of four-star generals.
For the surreal North Korean regime, these days must seem like the Twilight of the Gods. The state’s unification strategy, its raison d’être since the “military first” doctrine emerged in the early 1960s, has visibly and utterly failed. The people have been starving for decades. The government is almost friendless. The state religion — a grotesque amalgam of Stalinism, Confucian collectivism, and god-worship of the Kim dynasty — is melting into a tide from all sides. They have nuclear weapons, which must feel a bit like wielding a Götterhammer, but it has gotten them precious little of what they hoped for. Perhaps most important, Red China’s emergence as a major capitalist power presages nothing good for this aging and decrepit relic of Stalinism. In an inversion of the Wagnerian tragedy, the dwarf has been undone by the mighty....
As George Kennan wrote of the Soviet Union in his Long Telegram at the dawn of the Cold War, understanding the sources of North Korean conduct involves questions so “intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought,” that any assessment is hazardous. But one thing seems increasingly clear: If you really want to understand North Korea’s behavior, shift your focus from Pyongyang to Beijing....
Dependence on modern China is not the most comfortable place for a moribund Stalinist dictatorship to be. Despite an alliance going back to the Korean War, China’s currentcourse of economic development has put it on a collision course with Pyongyang. China reacted sharply to planned U.S.–South Korean exercises in the East China Sea not because it wants to defend North Korea but because China increasingly views its near abroad as its natural sphere of influence. Like most rising Great Powers before it, China has come to view itself as the preeminent power in its own region. That should not distract Korea-watchers from the obvious fact that the relationship of North Korea and China has been transformed — along with all of China’s other relationships abroad....