Redefining The ‘Axis Of Evil’

Pyongyang has also defied greater economic pressures to change. After decades of steady economic deterioration, today's North Korea is pitifully poor. Its exports in 2006 totaled just $1.5 billion, compared with South Korea's $326 billion. In the late 1990s a famine created in part by the socialist agricultural system killed as many as a million people and left a third of North Korean children stunted by malnutrition. These woes moved Kim to experiment with private markets, but on a scale too small to energize the economy—perhaps because he fears the loss of political control that major reform might bring.

The fear of chaos is shared by the major powers pushing North Korea to give up nuclear weapons in the Six-Party international talks. China, South Korea, Japan and Russia are all on or near North Korea's borders. None welcomes the specter of regime collapse and the refugee flows that could follow. Their aim is to contain North Korea's nuclear program, not to force regime change or even reform, and analysts who expect more miss this point.

South Korea, which would bear the brunt of a Northern implosion, is most leery of dramatic change. Many South Korean businessmen see the country as a potential source of uncomplaining, low-wage labor that will help them challenge China's export factories. "Seoul wants North Korea to be its Mexico," says Park of the U.S. Institute of Peace.

To be Mexico, a successful emerging market, would be a huge improvement for North Korea. Abandoning his nuclear weapons for U.S. diplomatic recognition and security guarantees could give Kim the space he would need to move ahead with modernization efforts, if he wants to. The fact is, no one outside North Korea knows for sure whether its secretive leader is a reformer or not.

That's a shame. Pyongyang has much to gain. The nuclear deal would clear the way for new investments from China and South Korea, which could rebuild a decrepit energy grid and expand special economic zones like the one currently maintained at Kaesong, where Northern workers labor in South Korean-owned factories. There's also been talk of connecting rail lines from South Korea through North Korea to China, of massive South Korean job-training programs for Northern workers. Even the hard-line Lee administration has already set a goal of helping the North raise its per capita GDP from $1,800 to $3,000 over the next decade. But all that presumes that Kim can somehow rise above his country's long-established track record as a shifty negotiator, a belligerent beggar and a famously unreliable business partner. It's entirely possible that the North is ready to change its bad habits of old. For the moment, though, the latest breakthrough looks more like the first step on a long and bumpy road filled with myriad obstacles that could bring the journey to a halt at any time.

© 2008