I think by all means the U.S. should invade North Korea, not so much out of fear the Chinese, or even Russians, if not the South Koreans, might enter the conflict. It's really in the hope that somebody, anybody, will also enter the fray. You would think the Chinese would enter, just like last time, but perhaps the Russians might send troops. You would hope the South Koreans might be suckered into it. The plan would be to surrender to the first third party who enters the conflict. If no one else enters, you would just have to finish the job. Just promise everyone immunity. Since anyone would be better than the current regime, there's nothing to be concerned about there as well.
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Toppling Kim Jong Il
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But there's a way to change that equation. The past 15 years have seen the spontaneous growth of grassroots markets in the North and partial disintegration of state controls. Rumors of South Korean prosperity have begun to spread, assisted by popular smuggled DVDs of South Korean movies. The world's most perfect Stalinist regime is starting to disintegrate from below.
The best way to speed things up is for Washington and its allies to push for active engagement with the North in the form of development aid, scholarships for North Korean students and support for all sorts of activities that bring the world to North Korea or take North Koreans outside their cocoon. Such exchanges are often condemned as a way of appeasing dictators, but the experience of East Europe showed that an influx of uncensored information from the outside is deadly for a communist dictatorship.
Pyongyang understands the danger of such exchanges, but it needs money and technology badly enough that it might allow them nonetheless—so long as they fill its coffers and don't look too dangerous. This is even more the case when exchanges ostensibly benefit members of the elite. For example, a scholarship program to study overseas would go mostly to students from top families. Yet this wouldn't limit its impact: experience of the outside world will change these young people and turn some of them into importers of dangerous information. A similarly small step helped to unravel the Soviet Union: the first group of students allowed to study in the U.S., in 1957, numbered just four and were carefully selected. Yet two grew up to become leading reformers, and one of them—Alexander Yakovlev—is often credited as having been the real mastermind behind perestroika.
This approach will take time, but it's the only one likely to work. The sole way to make North Korea less dangerous is to change its government. And the only way to do that is to change the North Korean people themselves.
Lankov is an associate professor of North Korean history at Kookmin University in Seoul and travels frequently to the North.
© 2009
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