The world dangerously misunderstands North Korea

Before Kim Jong-un erases all memory of this month’s unpleasantness by attending another performance of Disney characters, let me state the very obvious: North Korea has become more belligerent and dangerous since it began taking the command economy apart in 2002. Or to put things in the form of a law: the more North Korea’s economy comes to resemble the South’s, the more the regime must justify itself through ostentatious progress on the military-nuclear front. To Americans stuck in Cold War thinking, it seems counterintuitive indeed. In one East Bloc country after another, marketization led inexorably to political reform as well. But mere economic change was never going to thaw this ultranationalist state. One might as well expect a fair-trade agreement to secularize Iran.

As if the communist fallacy were not misleading enough, the regime is wrongly thought to have pledged itself to strict self-reliance as well. Hence the assumption that cross-border trade must be eating away at the very heart of the orthodoxy. I am not sure where this misunderstanding started. Kim Il-sung frequently and explicitly reconciled self-reliance with imports as well as infusions of foreign aid. The ruling ideology commits itself only to the catch-all concept of “our style of socialism,” which is why the country’s new entrepreneurs consider themselves as loyal to the state as everyone else.

Though some Pyongyang watchers fantasize about internal turf wars inside the regime between “pragmatists” and “ideologues,” there would be nothing pragmatic about abandoning an ideology that has so far done a sterling job of maintaining a stable and supportive population. The peninsula already has one economy-first state zipping around the track. There is little political capi tal to be had from entering the race a hundred laps behind, as North Korea’s party and military are well aware. A rising GDP is nice to have, of course. Calls for more consumer-goods production and a rise in living standards were typical in official propaganda under Kim Jong-il too, well before the international media started interpreting them as signs of a fresh wind. But whatever progress is made on the economic front, North Korea has to keep asserting its superiority on nationalist grounds instead, always presenting itself as the stronger and purer of the two Koreas.