What North Korea Really Really Really Wants
by Richardson ~ January 30th, 2007. Filed under: Axis of Evil, Diplomacy, Geopolitics, Kim Jong-il. 
Yesterday Gypsy Scholar commented on an opinion piece in the Washington Times by Robert Carlin and John Lewis titled, “What North Korea Really Wants” (27 Jan). Their argument is that:
Above all, it wants, and has pursued steadily since 1991, a long-term, strategic relationship with the United States. . . The North Koreans believe in their gut that they must buffer the heavy influence their neighbors already have, or could soon gain, over their small, weak country. This is hard for Americans to understand, having read or heard nothing from North Korea except its propaganda. . .
Yeah, North Korea really knows how to play hard to get, with the nukes and all.
Today the Christian Science Monitor has an article titled – can you guess? – “What North Korea Really Wants” (30 Jan), by Tony Hall, a former congressman and ambassador, and self-described humanitarian activist. His argument is that:
They want more help from the West, particularly from the US. Above all, they want the respect and security that they believe would spring from a lasting bilateral relationship with the US, not from the current six-party talks. They’re crying for attention, and the only way they know to command it is to fire their missiles and rattle their nuclear bombs.
The consensus of both of these “What North Korea Really Wants” arguments is that North Korea wants engagement with the U.S., including diplomatic, security, and financial relations, and all the trappings that go with them.
I believe that position to be fundamentally flawed.
North Korea, or more precisely Kim Jong-il, wants to survive, which means not taking steps that would erode the basis for the regimes power – the Kim family cult. Rather than rehash it, I’ll just point to my counter argument: North Korea’s Strategic Disengagement Explained. I’ve seen nothing lately to change my opinion on the matter.
January 31st, 2007 at 1:23 pm
‘What North Korea Really Really Wants’ … has been spelled out, quite lucidly, in Chuck Downs’ book ‘Over the Line: North Korea’s Negotiating Strategy’.
Yep, it’s all there … one book says it all.
It’s pretty discouraging that ‘adults’ like Robert Carlin, John Lewis and Tony Hall continue to think that yet another replay of ‘Lucy, Charlie Brown and that dang football’ is, somehow, going to result in something different from all the other times that this ‘game’ has been played for the last 50 years.
February 2nd, 2007 at 9:47 pm
Those of some of the stupidest thoughts I’ve heard about NK not coming from a Korean college student’s mouth (or pen).
Who these guys are really writing about and for are those in the West.
You can see it by how they twist what could be a tiny grain of truth:
North Korea has been trying since perhaps the mid to late 1990s to get the United States to make up for the mammoth loss NK suffered when the USSR collapsed and China started requiring more barter than the one-sided, welfare gravey train Pyongyang and enjoyed during the Cold War.
Yes, Pyongyang wants the US to wipe away or greatly descrease sanctions against it (all sanctions).
It wants the US to give it direct material support.
In short, it wants whatever it can get from the United States in the way of aid and help.
But, what these guys don’t want to admit is that —– NK wants all these things for —— nothing….
NK isn’t going to give up the nukes it has.
It isn’t going to allow any kind of repetitive inspecition regime a nuke deal would take.
It isn’t going to downsize its military.
It isn’t going to open the nation up to outside information.
It isn’t going to open the nation up to outside trade.
It isn’t going to stop terribly oppressing its own people.
And all of these “isn’t”s point to why some nimrods end up writing stuff like these articles above:
they view Pyongyang as a hopeless case. They can see no way to get Kim Jong Il to change.
So, “how can the situation improve?” they think - and then they point to the other side and say, “You should change…”
They look for real positive movement from the side they can imagine can move or be influenced to move.
And behind this is some vague hope that if we show so much goodwill, maybe, just maybe, Pyongyang will budge……..though only South Korea is willing to say that out loud….
February 8th, 2007 at 9:45 am
[…] clear judgments. The only way to interest the left in the atrocities in North Korea is to adopt this suggestion and form a “strategic relationship” with Kim Jong Il. We could sell them guns. […]