Tag Archives: Defeat

The regime in North Korea
successfully launched a long-range missile last week, drawing
ire from the rest of the international community, including a

condemnation by the U.N. Security Council. The United States
called the missile test, ostensibly the launch of a weather
satellite, a “highly provocative act.” Even China said it “regretted”
the action. The on-the-surface uniform response from North Korea’s
neighbors and much of the rest of the world belies a much more
complex geopolitical landscape, one the regime in North Korea has
successfully manipulated to remain in power for more than half a
century.In 2007, a presidential election in South Korea handed a

resounding defeat to the ruling party, attributed in the linked
editorial at least in part to the government’s “favoritism for
North Korea and decrease in cooperation and friendship with the
United States and Japan vis-a-vis China and North Korea.” The
election was sandwiched by resignations of consecutive prime
ministers in Japan. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which had
ruled Japan almost continuously since World War II, eventually lost
power in elections in 2009. The shifting geopolitical landscape
created the space for North Korea, having extracted fuel aid for
cooperation, to abruptly test a rocket and withdraw from the six
party talks set up in 2003. They no longer served the regime any
purpose.Though Kim Jong Il died in 2011 after ruling the country 17
years, his son, Kim Jong Un, was able to consolidate power through

brute force, his family’s preferred management strategy. A
failed rocket launch this April, early in the young dictator’s
rule, timed for the 100th anniversary of the birth of
his grandfather, the founder of North Korea, did little to weaken
to his position
internally. Last week’s successful rocket launch came ahead of
the
one year anniversary of Kim Jong Un’s father’s death as well as
elections in Japan and South Korea. While the last polls of the
race
showed the opposition candidate surging to near the margin of
error against Park Geun-hye, the ruling party’s candidate, Park
ended up winning a close race. Her opponent, Moon Jae-In, the son
of North Korean refugees,
campaigned on a policy of rapprochement and was able to close a
significant deficit in the polls as the North Koreans prepared
their missile launch. Nevertheless, Park has
vowed to reach out to North Korea and ease her party’s hard
line stance.In Japan, meanwhile, the LDP took the reins of
power again in an election held this week. The hawkish
Shinzo Abe, the first of the two prime ministers to resign in
2007-2008 in fact, will become Japan’s prime minister again. He has
promised more military spending by the country, which has been
severely restricted on that front since the end of World War
II.And in the background there is China and the United States.
China began a leadership transition earlier this year. While the
Chinese “regretted” North Korea’s missile launch last week, the
leadership appears poised to keep up its support for the regime, as
a buffer to the United States (and its allies Japan and South
Korea, between which 63,000 U.S. forces are based). In the mix as
well is an ongoing dispute over uninhabited but resource rich
islands in the East China Sea, claimed by China, Japan and South
Korea. President Obama’s first post-election foreign trip,
meanwhile, was to Southeast Asia, part of the administration’s
“Asian pivot.” Notably the trip included
a stop in Burma, a country ruled by a military dictatorship
facing U.S. sanctions since 1997, some of which have been lifted
this year. Myanmar, the administration hopes, can become an example
for other dictatorships (read: North Korea) that with at least some
inkling of reform, rapprochement is possible. Myanmar
at one point even tried to acquire nuclear technology, from
North Korea. The hopeful policy is reminiscent of the Bush
Administration’s hopes after Colonel Moammar Qaddafi voluntarily
gave up his purported WMD arsenal in 2003. The move was seen as
a positive outcome from the invasion of Iraq as cautionary tale, as
well as an exemplar of rapprochement. We all know how that turned
out.But regimes like Qaddafi’s, or Bashar Assad’s, or even Hosni
Mubarak’s or, in this case, Kim Jong Un’s, are almost always
destined to perish, whether or not a “great power” tips the scale
one way or the other. The North Korean regime is by far the most
totalitarian on the planet, yet when the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il

the tears were largely forced. It is sustained by the cult of
personality surrounding the Kims, but they survive thanks also to
the fantasy that American imperialists stand ready to invade and
enslave the population. The presence of all those U.S. troops
(about 63,000 deployed in and around South Korea and Japan) helps
feed that fantasy even though neither the “imperialists” in
Washington nor Beijing may be planning to invade North Korea. On
the contrary, their imperial machinations create a climate in the
region that helps feed the regime, often quite
literally.  … Read More