For bonus points, think about how China must feel about North Korea being a nuclear power.

          There’s nothing like waking up to news of North Korea’s continued inscrutable behavior. Not that Pyongyang’s discomfort over US-South Korean joint exercises is particularly strange; even China is squirming at the idea of the George Washington hanging around in the Yellow Sea casting meaningful glances at shore. What is strange, though, is the rest of the situation. The torpedoing of the Cheonan was strange enough, but Ri Tong-Il’s comment that these exercises represent a danger to the security of not just North Korea, but the entire region, sounds kind of like a threat. The facile explanation of this strange behavior is that this is standard behavior for totalitarian regimes; with the continuing illness of Kim Jong-Il, and the ongoing discussion of succession, it’s possible that the North Korean government felt that they needed to manufacture a victory to sell domestically. This continued belligerence on the international stage, however, suggests that the answer is somewhat more complicated.
          The North Korean government has it roots in the period immediately following the Second World War. Having been occupied by Japan during the war, Korea was first divided by the simple fact of US-Soviet tensions in the wake of peace, and then officially by the United Nations. Like most second-generation totalitarian leaders, Kim Il-Sung was installed to reinforce the local interests of his beneficiaries, the Soviet Union, and went about establishing a military. The agreement dividing North Korea along the 38th parallel had originally included provisions for a general Korean election in 1948, but this was blocked by Soviet refusal to allow UN officials north of the border. The result was the establishment of the Republic of Korea in the South, and soon thereafter the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in response.
          By 1949, US military backing had made it clear that any continued hoping that Korea could be reunified by Stalinist revolution was in vain, and Kim Sung-Il had begun to seek support from his allies for an invasion of the South. Fighting had been on-going along the border for the better part of a year, but Joseph Stalin had been reluctant to bring the Soviet Union into direct conflict with the United States. By January of 1950, however, both the Soviet development of nuclear weapons and the promised support of Mao Zedong, Stalin changed his tune. Still refusing to commit troops in direct aid of the invasion, he did authorize further aid in the form of equipment and training along with his approval of the invasion.
          Despite a chain of extreme reversals and counter-reversals for both sides, the November 1950 entry of Chinese forces into the war resulted in two years of stalemate, with the front stabilizing along the eventual border by 1953. The armistice ended the fighting, though peace was never officially declared, and the Korean Demilitarized Zone was established. Kim Il-Sung was able to use the war to great effect in his bid to solidify his control of North Korean politics. Backed by the army and respected for both his role in the war and his previous record of resisting the Japanese during the occupation, he began a series of show trials followed by executions, purging sources of potential opposition.
          The next two decades saw expansion of North Korea’s economy, lasting until the 1970s. Rising oil prices, a series of bad decisions involving military spending and mining industrialization, and a policy of isolationism and self-sufficiency damaged the North Korean economy to an extent that would eventually prove to be beyond repair. The decision to borrow foreign capital, which was then invested in military industry in an attempt to reduce dependence on China and the Soviet Union led to a policy of increased sales of mineral resources. The fall in prices of these materials left the DPRK unable to pay its foreign debts, and thusly unable to acquire new sources of capital to finance its badly overstretched command economy. Kim Il-Sung’s decision to maintain ideological purity rather than institute limited market economy reforms further damaged the country’s economy, a trend that continued under Kim Jong-Il, culminating in the three-year-long famine starting in 1996 that killed nearly a million North Korean citizens. Today the country is dependent upon foreign food-aid to feed its population, and is unable to maintain a reasonable standard of living outside of the capital, with severe shortages of food, medicine, a level of technology well below that of the early 20th century, and a population increasingly disinclined to fear the government.
          The end of the Korean War suggests some answers to the questions raised by North Korea’s recent actions. The most obvious potential answer is that this resembles the run-up to the Korean War, in terms of North Korea’s attempts to maneuver her allies into supporting military action. With the recent economic troubles the country has experienced, this whole business with the succession, and the fact that the economic and social success of South Korea has been undermining the legitimacy of the North Korean regime for several decades, this scenario is lent a certain degree of credibility, painting a picture of an attempt to repeat Kim Il-Sung’s success in consolidating power after the armistice. The flaw with this idea, however, is that as a matter of course we’re supposed to think of nation-states as rational actors, and the likelihood of the North Korean government surviving a war of any outcome is low. Even so, the North Korean government’s historical lack of regard for its polity could indicate that this is seen as a viable strategy.
          More plausible, though, is a scenario in which North Korea feels threatened by improving relations between Beijing and Washington. China’s recent stance of soft power and diplomacy, along with the Obama administrations shift away from the balance-of-power-politics practiced during the Bush years, could be seen by North Korea as a threat to one of their few remaining ties to the outside world. The aim of the exercise, therefore, would be to put North Korea in a position of conflict with the US that would force China to strongly back one side or the other.
          Let’s talk about China, actually. China’s support of the often erratic Pyongyang regime is typically characterized as support for one of the other remaining communist nations on the planet, or as a matter of power politics and opposition to US regional power. Frankly, I think that this view is facile, confrontational, and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of China’s stake in regional events. The majority of China’s recent international disputes have centered around either economics (oil in the South China Sea, currency valuation, trade relations &c.), or perceived interference in internal affairs (which is to say, Taiwan), indicating that China has more than minor worries about maintaining stability. In short, China can neither afford to go to war, nor even to appear as a belligerent on the international stage, as any economic disruption that brings their economic growth rate below something like 7% will bring their population growth rate into conflict with a Malthusian limit; people will start starving, and the government will face a domestic crisis of confidence.
          So what’s with China’s continued reticence regarding denuclearization, chastising North Korea for sinking the Cheonan, and the recent yelling about these joint exercises? Well, it looks like North Korea’s strategy is working, but not for the reasons that they’d hoped. It seems that China agrees with the notion that the North Korean government would not survive a war, and North Korea seems determined to start one. Whether or not they feel they wish to come to North Korea’s aid for ideological reasons, China seems bound to prop up the North Korean regime for at least the near future. Why? To paraphrase a friend of mine, the biggest open secret in East Asia is that nuclear weapons barely mean anything. The real question is what’s going to happen when North Korea collapses, and millions of refugees begin pouring into Manchuria.