I have no way of establishing whether Fareed Zakaria’s characterization of the prevailing Washington wisdom with respect to Kim Jong Un and his North Korean regime is fair or unfair, right or wrong. From his Washington Post column:
In Washington, there is a conventional wisdom on North Korea that spans both parties and much of elite opinion. It goes roughly like this: North Korea is the world’s most bizarre country, run by a crackpot dictator with a strange haircut. He is unpredictable and irrational and cannot be negotiated with. Eventually this weird and cruel regime will collapse. Meanwhile, the only solution is more and more pressure. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong?
The North Korean regime has survived for almost seven decades, preserving not just its basic form of government but also its family dynasty, father to son to grandson. It has persisted through the fall of the Soviet Union and its communist satellites, the Orange Revolution, the Arab Spring and the demise of other Asian dictatorships, from South Korea to Taiwan to Indonesia.
I don’t think he’s crazy. I think he’s all too rational and predictable and that in fact is the problem I have with the regime.
I don’t believe that Kim is content to be left alone. I think he will use the technology he’s developing to extort materiel from us and/or the Chinese. I think he is highly likely to sell that technology to anyone with cash. That’s the problem and that’s the difference between the Kim regime and other awful, tyrannical regimes. He’s a threat to us. Those other regimes are only threats to their own people.
