Robin Burk of Winds of Change asks us a very interesting question:
Given years of starvation, the brutal if canny dictatorship of Kim Il Jung and the occasional exploding train, why hasn’t the North Korean state collapsed?
Could it be that U. S. humanitarian aid to North Korea is propping up the North Korean state? Robin goes on to present extensive quotations and analyze an article by Nicholas Eberstadt in Policy Review, The Persistence of North Korea. Read it. It provides considerable background for a discussion that, given the threat that North Korea provides in the area of nuclear proliferation, we’re likely to be a hearing a lot more of in the next few years.
I think there are a number of problems with Mr. Eberstadt’s article. The first problem is that reliable trade information about North Korea is quite hard to come by, particularly trade between North Korea and China. We don’t honestly know how much trade there is between China and North Korea (or aid for that matter).
The second problem is that the article doesn’t consider in any great degree the effects of North Korea’s trade with two of North Korea’s traditionally most significant trading partners: Russia (particularly in the USSR era) and Japan :
North Korea shipped $225.62 million worth of goods to Japan in 2001, according to figures compiled by the Korea Trade Investment Promotion Agency in South Korea. Its next biggest markets were South Korea, which imported $176.17 million, and China, $166.73 million.
But by far the biggest problem with the article is that, while documenting $1 billion of U. S. humanitarian aid over 10 years, it doesn’t document the undocumentable—North Korea’s trafficking in illegal goods:
Out of the three sources of illicit trade, drugs earn the most for North Korea, with estimates putting the income between $US500 million ($A760 million) and $US1 billion a year.
So add to the humanitarian aid the illegal North Korea trade in weapons technology, remittances sent home by ex-pat Koreans living in Japan, and sales to Japanese meth addicts and you’ve got a $1 billion per year trade that dwarfs the effects of humanitarian trade in propping up the North Korean regime.
The substantial interests that China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea have in North Korea are precisely why I believe that the multi-lateral talks that the Bush Administration has orchestrated are probably the Administration’s greatest triumph. And, as I’ve written before, no talks that don’t include China (in particular) are worth conducting.
I don’t want to discount or diminish the U. S.’s unforeseen-secondary-effects humanitarian aid assistance to North Korea. Or the EU’s for that matter. There’s the same moral quandary facing us in that regard as faces anybody confronted with a panhandler on the street. Are you giving the panhandler a handout to help him (which is virtuous) or to assuage your own guilt (which is not)? Do you care whether he takes your money and buys booze?
If you really, sincerely care about that panhandler’s need, your stewardship responsibilities go farther than tossing him a few bucks, averting your eyes, and hurrying away.
UPDATE: Submitted to Beltway Traffic Jam.
I’ll answer the lead question. South Korea has convinced its largest donor, the US, that the security of the world relies on peace on the peninsula. There’s no difference between the extortion the ROK has exercised and the blackmail Pyongyang has practiced. Both are looking for handouts, only Washington needs Seoul to survive the Cold War for ideological reasons.
I live in South Korea, I love my family and Koreans, but let the innocent leave the capital behind for the chaebol owners and politicians, and let the North Koreans destroy it!