North Korea: 2012-2016

[George L. Singleton]

Your summery overview thoughts and observations are of course darn good.

I worked the "Korea Scenario" as a chief of J4 computerized wargamming (as a reservist doing only IDTs and ADTs, some TDYs) for first old US Readiness Command, which morphed into US Special Operations Command. We used Star Wars funding as there was so much of it out there at that time with few knowing how to use it all!!!Thus, I have some 1980s into the 1990s focused Korean "awareness."

My take is that China is the key, always has been, as it was China which drove the Korean War, my view, as much as Russia. *Russia and China competed heavily to be "the one" to guide/control old N. Korea...today a modernizing China is the item, my view at least.

WHERE I DISAGREE is that I think China can or could form a consortium with the same folks involved in the "talks" with N. Korea, and that group can be added to by any all nations who want to in effect "invest" in to be developed or to expand on and improve existing N. Korean industries...TV sets comes to mind.

I am a stubborn Irishman and am convinced that no matter who is in charge that the chance to have a more diversified manufacturing economy, with help to train up workers to do technology related production, and compounded by helping them with on the ground and hydrophonic agriculture is something that "has" to appeal to N. Korean from the top down as well as from the bottom up.

Attention creates "fondness" a lot more than just waitng to see what comes next. Business is still the best and most creative vehicle to find a better way for them and us all, my stubborn free enterprise system view.

GREED has damn near wrecked the entire free world with crooked securitized mortgage derivatives and this sort of b.s. has to really be stopped...as the same crooks under new "banners" are already trying to jump start such cheap criminal rip offs again as fast as they can.

This remark comes from me with over 14 current, consecutive years as a real estate broker, one who never did a dirty deal, but who certainly "felt", which was proved by our damned near total banking/financial sector collapse, we just couldn't be doing so well as the phoney, trumped up securitized mortgage paperwork told us we were doing. Wordy, I admit!

[Dayuhan]

WHERE I DISAGREE is that I think China can or could form a consortium with the same folks involved in the "talks" with N. Korea, and that group can be added to by any all nations who want to in effect "invest" in to be developed or to expand on and improve existing N. Korean industries...TV sets comes to mind.

I am a stubborn Irishman and am convinced that no matter who is in charge that the chance to have a more diversified manufacturing economy, with help to train up workers to do technology related production, and compounded by helping them with on the ground and hydrophonic agriculture is something that "has" to appeal to N. Korean from the top down as well as from the bottom up.

Attention creates "fondness" a lot more than just waitng to see what comes next. Business is still the best and most creative vehicle to find a better way for them and us all, my stubborn free enterprise system view.

I agree that business is the ideal vehicle and China the most practical conduit.

I also agree that there has to be some inherent appeal to the idea of a more functional economy, both industrial and agricultural. So far, though, this appeal has been canceled out by an obsession with self-reliance and an hyper-exaggerated fear of external influence. Up to now the fear seems stronger than the desire.

There might be some advantage to be gained in making initiatives in this direction, even knowing that they would be rejected: there is at least a chance that at some level somebody might begin to ask (very privately) why such advantageous moves are so frightening. Even if that starts at a fairly junior level, this has to be seen as a long term initiative, and junior will someday be senior. The mid-level military and government bureaucracy has to be aware of the success that South Korea and China have achieved without compromising their independence. Thought control cannot be total, and the older generation will die off.

GREED has damn near wrecked the entire free world with crooked securitized mortgage derivatives and this sort of b.s. has to really be stopped...as the same crooks under new "banners" are already trying to jump start such cheap criminal rip offs again as fast as they can.

This remark comes from me with over 14 current, consecutive years as a real estate broker, one who never did a dirty deal, but who certainly "felt", which was proved by our damned near total banking/financial sector collapse, we just couldn't be doing so well as the phoney, trumped up securitized mortgage paperwork told us we were doing. Wordy, I admit!

Having spent some years in the financial writing and editing world, I've a thought or two myself on the evolution of the risk-intensive mentality and the various consequences thereof. I wouldn't by any means exonerate the financial speculators, but I think far too little attention is paid to the role that bad government policies piled on top of other bad government policies had in creating an incentive structure that actively promoted excessive risk. Blaming the traders exclusively for what happened is in my view a lot like leaving a few kilos of ground sirloin in your dog kennel and then spanking the bad doggies for eating it...

But this was about North Korea, and I digress (not for the first time).

[orange dave]

This Chinese model is undoubtedly a viable way for NK to get out of their current mess. I would just caution though that just because China is right next door, and has some cultural heritage in common with them (which both countries' Communists of course reject) not to assume that this is the most obvious thing for them. When I was in North Korea, my guides couldn't care less that the Olympics were going on only several hundred miles away - they didn't find any ideological validation from that, the way China did so enthusiastically.

Another model for resisting a more powerful foe, which I think the North Koreans will see as equally valid, would be the Islamist one. Create roadblocks for everyone, and let yourself be guided by a moderately coherent set of demands which will never come to pass. Though Islam isn't universalist like Soviet Communism, Chinese Communism isn't either, so the two are on equal ground on this point.

Korean culture seems to take very well to religion, compared to other East Asian cultures - at least South Korean culture is that way, and I would assume there's something universally Korean about that. I've been reading recently about how prone North Koreans are, on a personal level, to infighting over nothing. (This is the sort of basic intelligence which is crucial to understanding a country, and Western culture in general tends to focus too much on the government, without understanding its total role in society.) Perhaps the North Korean authorities might see fit to address this problem, linking it to official corruption, under the guise of political reform. This could be through some sort of Confucian revival. Political Islam shows them how they can do this without taking the edge off of their anti-Americanism. So while they might appear to lose their Communist ideology, the only change in their foreign policy might be some degree of economic power to use behind their threats. China recently has been thinking about returning to its Confucian roots (for instance, Confucius institutes overseas) so this may turn into fad. This wouldn't necessarily put the US in any better of a position.

I think it therefore is important not to appear to be giving too much attention to problems in the Middle East, in order to make that model of politics look less viable - these things are all connected as parts of the same system. From this perspective, it's not so important that there be a peace settlement, just that the US not have its hands on whatever happens. I suspect that giving the various ME actors more ownership over the peace process will actually be beneficial in the long run. More practically, the anti-American and anti-Israeli sectors of political Islam aren't necessarily one and the same, and I think it is possible to talk about splitting the two. This is what I mean by a dual-use policy: it's not duplicity, just putting a higher priority on something that should have been done anyway.

[George L. Singleton]

Has anyone noticed in today's world news that South Korea's Hyuandai has reopened talks for plant/production inside N. Korea?

I was formerly unaware that Hyuandai already had a foothold inside N. Korea.

Interesting!