Perestroika on the Peninsula

As rumors swirl that Kim Jong-Il has been shot, the Pyongyang regime is apparently seeking a return to the six-partite talks that Kim poo-poohed:

North Korea wants urgently to restart six-party talks on its nuclear programmes, but is still demanding certain conditions be met, a top U.N. official has told South Korea's Yonhap news agency.

North Korea agreed with the format of the talks, Yonhap quoted Jean Ping, president of the U.N. General Assembly, as saying on Thursday. Officials told him during a visit that Pyongyang was committed to denuclearising the Korean peninsula, it said.

Let's think back to the eighties for a moment.

It was 1986; the United States had gone, in ten short years, from full-out appeasement and military decay to outright confrontation with Soviet expansionism; we were supporting anti-Communist movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia; in 1983, we'd looked a Communist regime in the eye and kicked it in the groin. We were not only deploying Pershing II and Cruise missiles to Europe - the doomsday weapons of last resort - we were adding conventional troops as well, troops with the equipment and doctrine and, increasingly, technology to meet the Warsaw Pact army in head to head combat and, maybe, repel it. The western Navies, led by the US, had built up to the point that the expansion of the Soviet fleet as a sea-denial force was effectively neutralized.

This, combined with the economic decay of the Soviet system, rendered forty years of hard-line confrontation with the West obsolete. To a Western nation, that would have been at worst a neutral thing - but the Soviet ruling elite was faced with a conundrum. Unable to defeat the West in out-and-out conflict, it had to be able to beat the West in the battle for the hearts, minds, wallets and lifestyles of the people; the Politburo knew it had no chance as it was.

So Mikhail Gorbachev was ushered to the front of the stage, talking of Glasnost (transparency) and Perestroika (restructuring). In retrospect, American leftists, desperate to redeem their movement's largely shameful performance at foreign policy since the death of JFK, claim that Gorbachev took office as an agent of the voluntary resignation of the USSR from the world stage - but that's absurd. Gorbachev's initial mandate was to save the Communist system, to paste on a human face that would allow the system a fall-back position that would preserve the power and position of the ruling caste. Americans, with our tradition of peaceful transition of power, have little knowledge of how dictatorships transfer control; it usually involves the losing party getting shot in the back of the head.

Gorbachev failed in his primary mission, preserving Communism, of course - but to Gorbachev's credit, he was able to bring the system to a relatively soft landing, without the bloodshed that attended the fall of Nicolae Ceaucescu in Romania, and of many other dictators through history. The key point to remember is that Gorbachev's initial mission was to save Communism, not to bury it.

As much as Kim Jong Il is identified as the face of the Pyongyang regime, he's far from the only shareholder in the enterprise. The world's most massive police state was administered by many chiefs - who must regard the consecutive passing of international Stalinism, Communism, the "Third World" "system" that shielded them from so much international opprobium, and finally the unmolested network of terror-sponsoring states as harbingers of what awaits them if the masses they've starved, beaten, murdered and made disappear manage to grab the truncheon away from them.

In 1983, the invasion of Grenada sent a message to the Russians; we were not playing the game anymore.

Today?

North and South Korea, the United States, Japan, Russia and China have met for three inconclusive rounds of talks but a fourth set for September did not materialise. Analysts said Pyongyang wanted to assess the outcome of the U.S. election.

North Korea has demanded the withdrawal of what it calls a hostile U.S. policy before it will return to dialogue.

And on November 2, the people of the US said "no"; our policy would remain hostile to the thugs who have starved, beaten and tortured the people trapped north of the 38th Parallel this past 59 years.

If indeed Kim has caught terminal Makarov Flu, look for some of those other stakeholders to put forth someone to present a new front to the West; that new face might be a Korean Gorbachev, or someone with a different version of the Kim-like hard line, but that person like Gorbachev will have a mission; keep the status quo in effect as long as possible, to allow the current stakeholders to retain their power - or at least, their lives.

If Kim is indeed dead, President Bush needs to go to Seoul, and give the 21st-century equivalent of the "Tear Down the Wall" speech - to send the same message to the tortured, beaten, starved people north of the world's last Iron Curtain that Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech sent to the zeks in the Gulag 20 years ago - "We remember you. We know you're there. You're not forgotten. In so doing, Bush will send the message to their overlords; "In history's long term, you are not the sharks. You are the chum. And you have millions of sharks penned up in camps, beaten, intimidated; when you stop beating them and shooting them and holding them hostage, they will smell you in the water, and then you are done".

Today, I'm thankful that we're at a juncture where this might just be possible.

Posted by Mitch at November 25, 2004 02:21 AM | TrackBack