DIPLOMACY HITS KIM
Kim Jong Il never lets us down. When President Bush, reacting
to the nuclear test, announced that he would seek further
sanctions against North Korea, Kim replied that he would
interpret any such move as an act of belligerency warranting a
declaration of war against the United States. This would be opera
bouffe, the equivalent of Monaco announcing that it would bring
down the Federal Reserve -- except for the item that calls Kim
Jong Il to the world's attention, namely the possibility that he
has a nuclear warhead gestating or even actualized.
Understandably, curiosity about this man, though frequently
appeased in years gone by analysts and newsmen, has been renewed.
An Australian paper speculates that it is inconceivable that Dear
Leader would actually drop the bomb, for two reasons: One, that
such an act would bring on a terminal devastation of Pyongyang;
the other, that he would then be without any repertory left to
arrest the attention of the world.
We have been told for many years that Kim is obsessively vain.
But I had not remembered the document of September 1997 from the
official government news agency. Reproduced here are the last few
sentences of the paean, which serve our purposes. The official
document concluded:
"The General is the mental pillar and the eternal sun to the
Korean people. As they are in harmonious whole with him, they are
enjoying a true life based on pure conscience and obligation.
They are upholding him as their great father and teacher, united
around him in ideology, morality and obligation. So their life is
a true, fruitful and precious life without an equal in
history."
In North Korea such tributes as these substitute for food,
which does not exist, at least not enough to feed the country's
21 million people, 10 percent of whom died of starvation in Kim's
first half decade in power.
It is widely noted that for all that he thinks of himself as a
leader with a divine afflatus to bring to his people and the
world the fruits of Juche (the North Korean variant of Leninism,
with a little Ayn Rand mixed in), he is himself a man of total
self-indulgence, devoted to porn, Scotch and Daffy Duck
cartoons.
The recounting of details of this kind serves no purpose
except as it is helpful in illuminating his special madness. It
is that, but observers note that he is expert in the single
discipline that matters, which is his ability to stay in absolute
command of his country.
President Bush has reiterated his commitment to diplomacy as
the instrument to use in the days ahead. And the United States
made strides in the critical two days after the policy of
sanctions was announced. The Soviet Union and China were slow to
come around, and China is still problematic, but some sort of
blockade on naval traffic is on its way, and diplomacy is geared
up for the challenge.
There is no way, however, in which Mr. Bush can undo the
sentiment he expressed to Bob Woodward four years ago: "I loathe
Kim Jong Il. I've got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he
is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these
prison camps -- they are huge -- that he uses to break up
families and to torture people. It appalls me."
Such sentiments don't do much to enhance diplomacy. Inevitably
they remind us, by contrast, of the oleaginous references to
Stalin and Hitler and Mao Tse-tung by yesterday's diplomats on
the make. But even if Mr. Bush reproduced his words to Woodward
on a calling card to distribute among diplomats bound for
Pyongyang, this would surely not affect the man who sees himself
as the mental pillar and the eternal sun to the Korean
people.
The proposed sanctions could hypothetically immobilize Kim.
You can reduce the need for food by depriving incremental
millions of it, but a million-man army needs fuel. Unfortunately,
there isn't any way to seal the border to the north, sufficiently
to block extra fuel from passing through the long frontier North
Korea shares with China. China has a special consideration here.
The pressure of masses of North Koreans who want food and
stability creates a huge problem, so much so that the Chinese
worry more about instability in the Korean peninsula than about
nuclear bombs dispatched from Pyongyang.
The diplomatic ideal, where China is concerned, is to mount
sufficient pressure to influence Kim's behavior, but not so much
as to threaten his hegemony. The final formulation of Beijing's
collaboration will be critical, and the challenge in Washington
is to egg it on to ensure that Dear Leader will recognize that he
has gone one step too far.