Pyongyang's Survival Strategy
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Pyongyang’s Survival Strategy Pyongyang’s Survival Daniel Byman and Strategy Jennifer Lind Tools of Authoritarian Control in North Korea In the early 1990s, many observers predicted that Kim Il-sung’s regime would not survive the cessation of Russian aid and the resulting downward spiral of North Korea’s economy. Speculation about regime collapse intensiªed when the less charis- matic Kim Jong-il succeeded his father in 1994, and again after the 1996–97 famine that killed upwards of a million North Koreans. Gen. Gary Luck, com- mander of U.S. forces in Korea, declared in 1997 that North Korea would “dis- integrate.” That same year, a U.S. government and outside team of experts predicted regime collapse within ªve years.1 Another decade brought more prognostications: in 2000 Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet warned that “sudden, radical, and possibly dangerous change remains a real possibil- ity in North Korea, and that change could come at any time.”2 Three years later, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said that North Korea was “teetering on the edge of economic collapse.”3 Contemporary accounts warn that the regime is threatened by the growing ºow of information into the country or by popular outcry touched off by the government’s 2009 bungling of currency reform.4 Daniel Byman is Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Jennifer Lind is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. They are also grateful to Lisa Baldez, Peter Beck, Stephen Brooks, John Carey, Robert Carlin, Victor Cha, Bruce Cumings, Michael Green, David Kang, Michael Mazaar, Daryl Press, Richard Samuels, Scott Snyder, Benjamin Valentino, Christianne Hardy Wohlforth, William Wohlforth, and Sarah Yerkes. In addition, they wish to thank participants at the conference “Why Communism Didn’t Collapse: Understanding Regime Resilience in China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba,” Dartmouth College, May 25–26, 2007. 1. Quoted in Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York: New Press, 2004), p. 199. For reviews of this literature, see Marcus Noland, “North Korea after Kim Jong-il,” No. 71 (Wash- ington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 2004), pp. 12–15; and Kongdan Oh and Ralph Hassig, “North Korea between Collapse and Reform,” Asian Survey, Vol. 39, No. 2 (March/April 1999), p. 289 n. 4. 2. George J. Tenet, director of Central Intelligence, statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “The Worldwide Threat in 2000: Global Realities of Our National Security,” 106th Cong., 2d sess., March 21, 2000, https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/ 2000/dci_speech_032100.html. 3. U.S. Department of Defense, “Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Q&A Following IISS Asia Security Conference,” Singapore, Singapore, May 31, 2003, http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/ transcript.aspx?transcriptidϭ2704. 4. Choe Sang-hun, “Economic Measures by North Korea Prompt New Hardships and Unrest,” New York Times, February 3, 2010. On information ºows, see Andrei Lankov, “Changing North International Security, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Summer 2010), pp. 44–74 © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 44 Pyongyang’s Survival Strategy 45 Reports of the Kim regime’s death, however, have been greatly exagger- ated. What has kept the regime in power despite the many challenges it con- fronts? What are the implications for the regime’s future durability and for its foreign policy? Understanding the answers to these questions is vital for in- forming U.S. policy, which at times has been predicated on predictions of the regime’s short lifespan. In 1994, some ofªcials in Bill Clinton’s administration reportedly agreed to support the provision of light water reactors to North Korea under the assumption that the country’s imminent collapse meant that Washington would not have to deliver on its promises.5 Furthermore, knowledge of what underpins the regime’s power is essential for understanding which coercive levers are more or less likely to inºuence its decisionmaking, particularly with regard to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Indeed, the signiªcance of this topic goes well beyond North Korea: the United States regularly confronts a range of autocracies that endure de- spite their cruelty and mismanagement (Iran being another prominent exam- ple).6 Washington must understand what keeps these regimes in power as it strives to weaken or contain them. Understanding Kim Jong-il’s tenacity is also vital for social science, which often regards famine, economic disasters, le- gitimacy challenges, and other crises as death knells for an authoritarian regime. Drawing from a literature about authoritarian control, we argue that the Kim regime relies on several tools to stay in power: restrictive social policies; manipulation of ideas and information; use of force; co-optation; manipulation of foreign governments; and institutional coup-prooªng. These tools help to explain its seemingly puzzling survival and suggest that a revolution or coup d’état in North Korea remains unlikely. When designing coercive strategies, such as economic sanctions, U.S. and in- ternational policymakers should target the regime’s elite core rather than the country as a whole. Most traditional means of coercion, such as broad sanc- tions or limited military strikes, are likely to fail or may even increase the Kim regime’s control. With regard to North Korea’s nuclear program, in particular, the United States must recognize that much of its logic is internal to the re- gime, helping it to win the support of key constituents: therefore security guar- Korea,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 6 (November/December 2009), pp. 95–105; and Choe Sang- hun, “North Koreans Use Cellphones to Bare Secrets,” New York Times, March 29, 2010. 5. Selig S. Harrison, Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reuniªcation and U.S. Disengagement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 4. 6. Richard Bernstein, “In Tehran, Shades of Tiananmen,” New York Times, July 1, 2009. Many U.S. ofªcials expected Saddam Hussein’s regime to fall in the aftermath of his Desert Storm defeat. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2007). International Security 35:1 46 antees or other inducements that try to reduce Pyongyang’s external threat environment will be of only limited effectiveness. The literature on authoritarian control applied to the North Korean case pre- dicts the Kim regime’s continued resilience. Does this mean that the regime will survive indeªnitely? Not necessarily. What this body of theory does, at its best, is allow scholars and policymakers to identify which categories of events are more or less likely to occur. As is always the case in social science, there are factors that affect politics on the ground, which even the best theories do not capture, and which this analysis will thus not consider. There is always, as Niccolò Machiavelli put it, fortuna whose whims a leader may or may not sur- vive.7 Nevertheless, to contribute to the debate about the Kim regime’s future, we argue that a substantial theoretical literature would hold that the factors that promote regime stability continue to be present in North Korea. In the next section, we outline theories about how dictators stay in power, support them with additional evidence from autocracies in the Middle East and North Africa, and apply them to the North Korean case to understand the strength of the regime’s position there. We show that the Kim regime, far from being sui generis or led by erratic leaders, has pursued a wide range of policies that have sustained dictators all over the world. Before concluding, we address several important counterarguments to our ªndings. In the ªnal section, we discuss the implications of this analysis for regime stability and for U.S. policy toward Pyongyang. The Authoritarian Toolbox in North Korea Authoritarian regimes are threatened by popular revolution (whether peaceful or violent) or by a coup led by the military or other elites.8 A large literature has identiªed and substantiated how dictators survive in the face of these threats.9 From this literature, we develop a “toolbox” that dictators rely on to 7. On contingency, see Richard J. Samuels, Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 4; and Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Vol. 4, Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 8. Authoritarian regimes may also be toppled by a foreign power. This article does not examine how leaders protect themselves from this threat; we consider external forces only insofar as they inºuence a leader’s ability to defeat domestic opponents. 9. Classic works on revolution include Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987); Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978), and Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, N.J.: