Military Officer - July 2007 - (Page 58)

W T The soft landing 58 MILITARY OFFICER J U LY 2 0 0 7 hile Washington focused most of its attention in 2006 on the military mission in Iraq and the diplomatic dance in Iran, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il threw a pair of temper tantrums with missiles and nukes, reminding Americans that the dangers posed by terrorism and tyranny are not conﬁned to the Middle East. State: How a Nuclear North Korea Threatens America (Regnery Publishing Inc., 2004). North Korean children are taught that the younger Kim was born “at the foot of a sacred mountain in North Korea and that double rainbows appeared at his birth.” One hagiography of Kim calls him a “heaven-sent brilliant commander.” Doubtless, Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker desired such homage, but most East Germans never offered it. In short, a gentle collapse of North Korean communism and absorption into South Korean democratic capitalism seems unlikely. Even so, the economic costs of German uniﬁcation give us a sense of the staggering bill South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. will be expected to pay after Kim. ■ Some 15 years after uniﬁcation, as the German magazine Der Spiegel reported in 2005, the East is unable to survive without government subsidies amounting to about $100 billion a year. ■ Germany still pours 4 percent of its GDP into its deformed eastern half. ■ After investing roughly a trillion dollars into the communist carcass, the average unemployment rate in eastern Germany still is about 18 percent. Owing to their prison-like isolation, the North Koreans of today are more impoverished and less adaptive than the East Germans of 1989-90, which means the economic costs will be even higher. The gravest danger on the Korean peninsula, of course, is a second Korean War — or if you prefer, a continuation of the ﬁrst Korean War, which technically was only paused in 1953. Given Kim’s fusillade of missile tests in July 2006 and apparent nuclear test three months later, it’s a danger that seems to be edging from the possible to the probable. With or without war, however, one thing is certain: Neither Kim nor his regime will live forever. The end could come sooner rather than later. In fact, the consensus among North Korean defectors recently interviewed by the Korean Institute for National Uniﬁcation is that North Korea will collapse in ﬁve to 10 years. How will the Kim dynasty collapse? And what can America do to prepare for that eventuality? History offers some sobering, albeit imperfect, parallels. he ideal parallel — the bloodless, jubilant reuniﬁcation of East and West Germany at the end of the Cold War — is also the least likely. First, it pays to recall that North and South Koreans, quite unlike East and West Germans, fought a brutal hot war to usher in the Cold War. They bear scars and wounds that pre-uniﬁcation Germans did not. Plus, for East Germans, there was no “Dear Leader” to worship. There was neither cult nor personality for which to live and die. By 1989, even the true believers understood the communist state was an abject failure. This is not the case in North Korea, where the people are isolated completely from the outside world and totally controlled by a propaganda machine that deiﬁes the regime. There is a depth of regime-worship among North Korea’s 23 million subjects that is perhaps unmatched anywhere on Earth and eclipsed by just a handful of historical examples. Consider some of the evidence unearthed by William C. Triplett, who wrote about the Kim dynasty in Rogue N The China syndrome ot that long ago, China, too, was a hermit kingdom, ravaged by internal purges and paranoia, spiritually committed to a messianic regime and its revolution. However, it no longer suffers these maladies. (This is not to say China doesn’t present formidable challenges for the U.S., but that is a subject for another essay.) Today, China is a nation eager to be part of the world’s interlocking system of trade. In fact, The International

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Military Officer - July 2007 Contents From the Editor From the President Your Views MOAA Directory Rapid Fire Washington Scene Financial Forum Ask the Doctor Chapter Activities Cover Story: In Focus After the Kim Dynasty Animal House Paying Tribute MOAA Member Services Pages of History Faces of MOAA Information Exchange Advertising Index MOAA Scholarship Donors MOAA Calendar Sounding Taps Encore

Military Officer - July 2007

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