Assessing Kim Jon Un of North Korea
Solly Rakgomo | Thursday September 14, 2017 16:23
I strongly believe that Kim Jong-un is not mad. Quite the contrary. By producing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capable of delivering them to US territory, Kim has obtained near-assurance that the aggressive US will not attack it, in yet another attempt at regime change.
Born in 1984, Jong-un was seven when the US first bombed Iraq, supposedly to force its troops out of Kuwait. Then the US imposed sanctions on the country that killed half a million children. He was 11 when the US intervened in Yugoslavia, bombing Serbs to create the dysfunctional client state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was 15 when the US bombed Serbia and created the dysfunctional client state of Kosovo. He was 17 when the US bombed and brought regime change to Afghanistan. Afghanistan today remains in a state of civil war, still hosting US troops to quell opposition. He was 19 when the U.S. brought down Saddam and destroyed Iraq, producing all the subsequent misery and chaos. He was 27 when the US brought down Gaddafi, destroyed Libya, forced the Yemeni president from power causing chaos, and began supporting armed opposition forces in Syria. He was 30 when the US State Department spent $5 billion to topple the Ukrainian government through a violent coup.
What I can safely tell you is that Kim Jong-Un knows his country’s history, and how the US invasion from September 1950 levelled it and killed 29% of the population while Douglas MacArthur considered using nuclear weapons on the peninsula. He knows how US puppet Synghman Rhee, president of the US-proclaimed “Republic of Korea,” having repeatedly threatened to invade the North, executed 100,000 South Koreans after the outbreak of war on the grounds that they were communist sympathisers who would aid the enemy. Jong-un was 10 years old when the US and North Korea signed the Agreed Framework, by which North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear power plants, replacing them with light water reactors financed by the US and South Korea, and the gradual normalisation of US-North Korea relations. He was 16 when US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Pyongyang and met with his father Kim Jong Il. In that same year, Paul Roulfe says South Korean President Kim Dae-jung met with Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang during the period of “Sunshine Diplomacy” which was eventually sabotaged by the Bush/Cheney administration. He was 20 when the agreement broke down (undermined by Dick Cheney and his neocons in 2004). Selected as successor, he became the new absolute leader of North Korea at age 27, a young, vigorous, well-educated man groomed for the post and with a strong sense of dynastic responsibility. That means returning the DPRK to the relative economic prosperity of the 1970s and 80s, when average per capita energy consumption in the north exceeded that of the south. Analysts suggest that Kim has made economic development primary, and the long-standing “military first” policy is giving way to a policy more empowering civilian Korean Workers Party leaders. The DPRK economy, according to The Economist, “is probably growing at between one and five percent a year.”
Most importantly Kim is rationally aware of the threat the US poses to his country. So his strategy has been to sprint towards nukes while he can. Perhaps he thought that since the Trump administration was (and is) in such disarray, no violent response was likely. But it was risky; the US president is, after all, unstable and ignorant. He has asked his advisors repeatedly, why can’t we use nukes since we have them?
The fact is, Mattis, Tillerson and McMaster have been presented with a nuclear fait accompli to which they must respond, in a period of diminishing US influence and relative economic decline. They cannot do it by dropping a MOAB bomb (like they did in Afghanistan in April) or a missile strike on a base (like they did in Iraq the same month, to display their manhood). Jong-un has insured that.
If Jong-un plays his cards right, he will get international recognition for the DPRK as a nuclear power, the same degree of recognition afforded other non-NPT signatories like India, Pakistan and Israel. The US will have to defer to Chinese and Russian sobriety and abandon hollow threatening rhetoric. It will have to back down, as it did in the Korean War, when it realised it could not conquer the North and reunify Korea on Washington’s terms and had to accept the continued existence of the DPRK. In return for tension-reducing measures by the US and the South, and the establishment of diplomatic and trade ties. North Korea will suspend its nuclear weapons programme, content with and proud of what it has accomplished. It is the only way.
The other way is suggested by John McCain, crazy warmonger to the end. He said that if the North Korean leader “acts in an aggressive fashion”, whatever that means to McCain who will never realise that his bombing of Vietnam constituted aggression, “the price will be extinction.” Just knowing that the enemy is capable of contemplating one’s people’s extinction surely motivates some leaders to seek the ultimate weapon. The dear young Kim pulled it off. He replicated what Mao did in China between 1964 and 1967. He got the bomb, which had been introduced to the world over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. And never used anywhere since in the years since, in which the US has been joined by the USSR, UK, France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan as members of the nuclear club. He has no reason to use it, unless the US gives him one. Negotiations on the basis of mutual respect and historical consciousness are the only solution.