As ever with North Korea, which has no free press or free speech whatsoever, much remains murky. These latest reports on Kim's health attribute the cancer information to unnamed Chinese and South Korean intelligence officials. The U.S. State Department has refused to comment, apart from such stuff as a spokesman's quip Monday that Kim "Didn't look in the pink of health."
Among U.S. policy-makers, lists have been circulating of likely candidates to succeed Kim. High profile names include Kim's 26-year-old son, Kim Jong-un, and Kim's 63-year-old brother-in-law, Chang Song-Taek, a top-ranking official.
But how a transition of power might play out inside North Korea is even less clear than what's wasting Kim. Unlike a democracy, North Korea's totalitarian regime has no clear transition process. Kim Jong-il has ruled as pretty much a one-man show. He has been godfather of North Korea's global rackets, including its nuclear program, since inheriting the helm in 1994 from his late father, Kim-il Sung--who ruled for 46 years after being installed by Stalin when North Korea was founded, in 1948.
According to a Mar. 16, 2009 report from the Congressional Research Service, since Kim fell ill last year, "A collective decision-making apparatus has emerged, apparently headed by his brother-in-law, Chang Song-Taek." But even that won't tell you much about what comes next.
What is clear is that more than ever, there's an urgent need in Washington for contingency plans on this rogue state. North Korea's regime has established itself as a hub of trouble in Northeast Asia, trafficking missiles and nuclear technology to the Middle East, producing nuclear weapons and issuing apocalyptic statements such as recent threats to wipe America off the globe and drown South Korea in a nuclear "fire shower." Pyongyang's officials have become expert over the years in translating all this into diplomatic shakedown rackets that help sustain the regime.
So far, the Obama administration's main approach has been to seek a return to the negotiating table, and tighter sanctions on North Korea by the United Nations. The main result has been a U.N. resolution too watery even to allow U.S. forces to board a North Korean freighter, the Kang Nam I, which was suspected of carrying an illicit weapons cargo. U.S. warships shadowed the Kang Nam, which returned to North Korea with its cargo undelivered but also uninspected and unconfiscated.
In other words, on North Korea, President Obama has so far been treading the same dead-end diplomatic road followed by Presidents Clinton and Bush. That path resulted in the failures, respectively, of the 1994 Agreed Framework on a North Korean nuclear freeze and the Six-Party Talks pursued by Bush.
Meanwhile, the North Korean nuclear arsenal has grown, and North Korea's proliferation networks and the accompanying dangers have spread. Not only was North Korea complicit in Syria's building of a secret nuclear reactor (destroyed by an Israeli air strike in September 2007), but a May 27, 2009 Congressional Research Service report cites menacing developments like "a direct collaborative relationship between North Korea and Iran in developing nuclear weapons," and notes that according to European and Israeli defense officials, North Korea and Iran have had a deal "for North Korea to share data from its October 2006 nuclear test with Iran."
With chances growing of an imminent transition of power in North Korea, the cliché formulation of crisis may well apply--there is danger, but also opportunity.
For the U.S. one of the dangers will be the temptation to woo any new ruler, or rulers, of North Korea with yet more talks and aid, in the hope that some kind of reform might defang the regime. The problem is that whoever next takes command in Pyongyang will be inheriting a system built around totalitarian rule, global racketeering and nuclear extortion. It would be hard for any successor to Kim Jong-il, even with the best will in the world (and that is unlikely), to dramatically change course. Recall the disappointment that followed Washington's hopes for reform in Syria, when the young, Western-schooled Bashar Assad took over from his late father, nine years ago, in Damascus. The iron, terrorist-sponsoring system rolled right on.
In the happy event that any successor to Kim is genuinely open to trying to transform North Korea into a benign and free state, there should be no need for wooing by Washington. Pyongyang should be left to become the suitor. Even if that happens, President Obama would be wise to beware the expertise of North Korean officials in rolling Washington for aid, concessions and rotten deals.
But the best option, for Washington and the rest of the democratic world, would be to take advantage of every opening afforded by a transition to work toward bringing down the North Korean regime.
During the previous transition, in 1994, when Kim took over from his father Kim-il Sung, North Korea went through a period of internal uncertainties. It was a moment in which President Clinton might have seized the chance to try to strangle the regime, which with the 1991 Soviet collapse had lost its longtime sugar daddy. Instead, Clinton went with an idea put forward by Jimmy Carter during a 1994 visit to Pyongyang and struck a nuclear freeze deal: the Agreed Framework. That helped legitimize Kim Jong-il as a ruler brokering big international deals with the U.S. and its allies, and got him a flow of aid that helped sustain his regime while he consolidated power. All told, the U.S., since 1995, has shipped $1.2 billion worth of free fuel, food and other aid to North Korea. During that time, Kim has built missiles, nuclear bombs and proliferation networks, while the North Korean people have starved.
With North Korea's second transition in 61 years now on the horizon, we are seeing a flurry of threats directed by Pyongyang at the democratic world. The Obama administration, to its credit, has recently bestirred itself to more actively pursue North Korean proliferation-related companies. That was something the Bush administration began doing during Bush's first term, and by 2005 the plan was achieving visible success. But such projects were then shoved to the back burner in 2007, in hopes of appeasing North Korea at the Six-Party Talks. Right now, a great deal more effort is needed to choke the Pyongyang regime. The U.S. Treasury, which has done yeoman's work on this front but been smothered in recent years by the "soft power" diplomacy of the State Department, needs a freer hand to run down North Korean offenders.
One of the North Korean companies newly designated as part of Pyongyang's proliferation network, for instance, is Namchongang Trading Corp., blacklisted by the Treasury in June. Great. But what took so long? Namchongang featured more than a year ago in a Washington Post story by Robin Wright and Joby Warrick as "the critical link between Pyongyang and Damascus" for procurement of materials needed by Syria for building that illicit reactor on the Euphrates.
It's a good bet that a lot more of North Korea's network could be exposed, and penalized, were official Washington eager to do so. One approach would be to pour a lot more energy into cultivating resources such as North Korean defector Kim Kwang-Jin, who was recently profiled in the Washington Post and on the Fox News Web site. Once a high-ranking North Korean official working for the Kim regime as an insurance manager based in Singapore, Kim Kwang-Jin was brought to Washington this year by a private watchdog outfit, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Fluent in English, he has been detailing in interviews some of his firsthand experience inside North Korea's worldwide web of corruption and cash.
But Kim Kwang-Jin is more the exception than the rule. To date, the U.S. has been weirdly stingy about bringing in North Korean refugees and defectors who might be able to provide insights into North Korea's system, or information about its networks. Over the past five years, the grand total of North Koreans admitted to the U.S. as immigrants comes to the pitiful total of 90, an average of fewer than 20 per year.
Of course, one of the fears surrounding visions of the collapse of the North Korean regime is that waves of refugees might flood China and South Korea. That this should be any bar to the possibility of bringing down the Pyongyang government is one of the immense shames of the modern world. On humanitarian grounds alone, freeing North Korea's people of the Pyongyang regime should be a priority for Western governments. Lots of attention has been devoted, with good reason, to such horrors as genocide in Darfur. But in terms of the human toll of state-induced famine and other official forms of brutality, the millions of lives lost under Kim Jong-il's reign in North Korea rank right up there with the killing fields of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.
During the last North Korean succession, history's tide was still flowing in favor of the West. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and China was learning to manufacture sneakers but was not yet a major backer of regimes like Sudan's. Iran's regime was virulent, but years away from the bomb. There was some margin to overcome the folly of a diplomatic deal that helped North Korea's malign and extortionist regime survive. The main price was paid by North Koreans, who instead of entering the rolls of post-communist countries in transition, died in the shadows of the Kim dynasty.
This time around, the margin for folly has been squandered. North Korea has been testing nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. Its terrorist partners in such places as Iran and Syria are part of a proliferation web that poses a direct threat to Israel, and a broader threat to the West. If North Korea grinds into transition, and Washington makes the same old mistake of helping to grease Pyongyang's gears, the price may be paid not only by the people of North Korea, but by a great many Americans.
