Over time, North Korea has become highly effective at the craft of drawing periodic international attention to itself. Most recently it has done so through its acquired nuclear technology, announcing in sudden and dramatic fashion its intention to conduct satellite launches and underground nuclear tests. The last set of tests occurred in December last and the United Nations Security Council duly responded with a relatively tame but, nonetheless, interesting reprimand of the Kim Jong Un regime.
If the North Koreans may have found the fact that China, by far the country’s most important ally was part of the recent Security Council consensus galling, perhaps even disturbing, that has not stopped the regime from responding to the UN’s condemnation of its action by straightaway issuing another notice of its intention to conduct further tests. Not only has the most recent pronouncement been made with an even greater measure of vitriol, it specifically targets Pyongyang’s enemy, the United States.
A point has now been reached where the threats by North Korea to conduct nuclear tests have become an integral element – perhaps the most important one – in the country’s foreign policy tapestry, there being, as far as anyone can tell, no other reliable means through which the regime can seek and secure serious international attention. This argument holds good except for a period during the mid-1990s when the country was gripped by a famine of such severity – the number of victims of the famine has been, variously, estimated at numbers ranging from several hundreds of thousands to upwards of two million – that the international community had little choice but to pitch in with an intense humanitarian effort to salvage the situation.
There are reports which suggest that the country could face yet another famine in the foreseeable future. This is the same North Korea that continues to invest billions of dollars in acquiring a nuclear capacity which, apart from being of questionable security value, it simply cannot afford. But that has never mattered much to the three generations of Kims who have ruled Korea since the end of the Second World War. For them, it has always been a matter of putting up a front, holding fast to the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes in circumstances where the regime is painfully aware of the fact that the DPRK is a hobbled, underdeveloped country ruled by men who have, for more than half a century, held millions of people hostage to what are little more than pipe dreams.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to call for reforms in the DPRK which, both politically and economically, would wrench the country out of the cocoon of anachronism in which it has nestled for so many decades. The problem is, of course, that such reforms would have to be ponderous and painful and even then may be strictly limited by the desire of the Kim dynasty to ensure that it does not itself become a victim of those reforms. If there may have been a few reported early signs that the Kim Jong Un regime may have been ‘talking’ modest reforms, the recent bellicose pronouncement regarding more satellite and nuclear tests, the earlier UN Security Council admonition notwithstanding, suggests that Pyongyang is still far from being ready to begin to shrug off its siege mentality.
The most disturbing thing about the manner in which North Korea now chooses to conduct its diplomacy is the fact that while its nuclear capacity is known to be limited (how limited, is far from clear) threats of nuclear tests and actual tests have added to already existing tensions on the Korean Peninsula, and the rest of the international community cannot any longer blind its eye to the likelihood of – at the very least – sporadic armed or even a more protracted confrontation between the two Koreas. Once that happens the likelihood of expanded international tensions arising out of big-power interventions on either side can add to already existing centres of conflict that are raging in the parts of the Middle East and North Africa and to which, up to this time, there appears to be no end in sight.
