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North Korea against Whom?

Erik Mobrand - 3/8/2006

Gordon G. Chang, Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World. New York: Random House, Jan. 2006. 327 pp. $25.95 hardcover.

Tim Beal, North Korea: The Struggle against American Power. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, Sept. 2005. 342 pp. $80.00 hardcover, $29.95 paperback.


In October 2002 the Agreed Framework that supplied North Korea with U.S. aid since 1994 in return for promises not to produce nuclear weapons broke down and led to the current standoff on North Korea's uranium enrichment program. Since then, rounds of six-party talks involving the United States, North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia have sought to deal with the impasse. The United States refuses to talk with North Korea directly. The world is faced with the question of what is to be done with a secretive country that may or may not have nuclear weapons.

What are we to make of the current situation? Two recent books on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), both written for general audiences, offer widely divergent views on the nuclear problem. Tim Beal, a New Zealand-based academic and host of a website on North Korea, provides a guide to sifting through the sparse and often-politicized information on the reclusive country. Gordon Chang, lawyer and author of The Coming Collapse of China, has produced a polemical treatise on the crisis, claiming that the need for decisive action trumps any gaps in knowledge.

The subtitles of the volumes by Beal and Chang sum up their contrasting interpretations of the current North Korean situation. According to Beal, the development of the North Korean nuclear problem is a story about interaction between the DPRK and the United States. The immediate cause of the current crisis was American fear of Japanese-North Korean and North-South rapprochement. A summit between Tokyo and Pyongyang in September 2002, as well as an impending South Korean election, prompted Washington to abandon the framework, as the current administration has sought an "ABC" (Anything But Clinton) policy on North Korea.

For Chang, on the other hand, North Korea is threatening the world in a crisis of its own making. American involvement extends only to failing to act earlier to protect the "global order" from North Korea. Chang does not mention Washington's role in the breakdown of the 1994 Agreed Framework. Overstating his case, Chang seems to have forgotten about decades of Soviet aid, the withdrawal of which plunged the North Korean economy into turmoil: "Neither friend nor foe has had much influence on the fanatical and militaristic state, not even the mightiest nation in history" (p. xx).

Chang notes that President George W. Bush's "impressive achievement" has been to keep North Korea "off balance" (p. 212). (Is this an accomplishment?) Chang is upset, though, about American reliance on cooperation in Northeast Asia to address the problem. Washington's "generous policy" (p. 131) has been to have China disarm North Korea. Chang tells us that the U.S. is being forced to "bend to Seoul" (p. 113), before going on a tirade against South Korean leadership - based largely, it seems, on a discussion with a conservative South Korean economist-turned-legislator. Rather than celebrating South Korea's turn to democracy since the 1980s, Chang blames "recent South Korean presidents" for not calling the DPRK what it is: "South Koreans have, in their newfound wealth, lost their way" (p. 175).

What is the solution to the current situation? Chang considers engagement with North Koreans - not their government - to be a long-term answer that could empower the people to overthrow the regime. But Chang is convinced danger is imminent, and he brushes this approach aside. What worries Chang is that Pyongyang will sells its nukes to terrorists who will sneak them across the Mexican border into the United States. And that is why Washington must act, the sooner the better, to wipe out the threat from North Korea.

Offended by the regime's existence, Chang tells us it is time for it to go. An American encounter with the DPRK would be "a fight to preserve the liberal international system" (p. 225). Is Chang calling for the U.S. to strike North Korea? Presumably, but what does he mean when he advises, "we have to steel ourselves for war if we don't take great risks for peace" (p. 219)? What might those "great risks" be, if not military ones?

Beal has a response to Chang's righteous indignation. Beal warns the world, and especially Americans, to consider carefully whether extreme measures on North Korea would truly be motivated by moral concerns, including the regime's human rights record: "The coexistence of genuine moral fervour over crimes committed by others with a readiness to commit one's own is not uncommon. The road to empire is paved with good intentions" (p.130).

For Beal, the optimal solution is for the United States to acknowledge the existence of the Pyongyang regime. Progress will be difficult until Washington takes Pyongyang seriously and starts discussions. The United States could help revive the North Korean economy quickly, which would set the country on a road toward positive social and political change.

Chang's whole argument comes down to the claim that we should worry about North Korea selling weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. This possibility must figure among low-priority security concerns. Nuclear weapons are not needed for devastating attacks to occur, as 9/11 demonstrated. Shifting resources to address this threat would be incommensurate with its rank behind more likely sources of insecurity. Furthermore, if weapons proliferation is truly a concern, then North Korea, which Beal notes conducts missile sales equal to 0.3% of the United States' (p. 186), is not the biggest problem.

More to the point, international assistance to North Korea's economy would reduce the likelihood that the regime would turn to weapons trading for cash. Chang opposes aid, because it funds the regime - but expanding the country's resource base would diminish the threat of Pyongyang selling weapons to terrorist groups. The danger of searching for good and evil in a complex world is that it may obscure the least bad solution.

Neither book offers new information on North Korea. Beal and Chang approach the country as outsiders, and they miss some of the important developments in the region, especially in exchanges between China and the DPRK. Still, Beal has done the public a service by offering a guide to widely-available sources that anyone can look through to draw their own conclusions on the North Korean nuclear issue.

Chang's book seeks to provoke, but with the pretense of informing. On North Korea's nuclear program, Chang writes - without explanation of how he knows it - that the "soundest view" is that by late 2007 Pyongyang will be able to produce uranium for two to six bombs per year (p. 33). Chang's expertise is left in doubt by mistakes in his book, ranging from downright falsehoods (that legislator Park Geun-hye is the favorite in the next South Korean presidential election, p. 214) to half-lies (that China's Chongqing is the largest city in the world, p. 117).

The far better-informed Beal is more honest about unknowns. The situation with North Korea is not only complicated; it is unclear because information is scarce and sometimes manipulated. But there is danger in the view, expressed by Chang, that "When there's not much to go on, the simplest explanation is often the best" (p. 63). Chang does well to remind us of U.S. "responsibility" to the world, but he neglects the other side of that responsibility - to show restraint in resorting to its superior coercive power.