Underlying N. Korea’s Bold Moves

What is Kim Jong Il up to? Has he made a fundamental decision to change North Korea’s strategy and to pursue economic reforms?

Or are this week’s summit meetings and Pyongyang’s other recent diplomatic overtures merely a tactical move, intended to shore up Kim’s militarized regime and show the hard-pressed North Korean people that the rest of the world comes courting their Dear Leader?

In Washington and other capitals, policymakers and think tanks, intelligence analysts and spooks, administration officials and campaign advisors all are wrangling over what Kim Jong Il’s recent moves portend.

Let’s oversimplify (after all, what are columnists for?), and divide the Korea-watchers into Believers and Skeptics.

The Believers say North Korea is now in the midst of far-reaching transformation. They predict the summit in Pyongyang between Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Kim Dae Jung will turn out to be merely one step in this process, which will continue to unfold. “There may be more bold initiatives to come,” says Joel Wit of the Brookings Institution.

And they argue that North Korea would be willing to negotiate away its missile and nuclear programs and defuse military tensions if the United States would only lift economic sanctions and begin to accommodate Pyongyang.

“As North Korea begins producing other goods for a world market, it will have ways to acquire hard currency other than exporting missiles,” writes Leon V. Sigal, the author of the book “Disarming Strangers.”

No way, say the Skeptics. Kim Jong Il doesn’t want to open up North Korea. Rather, he’s just trying to come up with enough aid to preserve his regime and his million-man army.

North Korea’s diplomacy “is motivated solely by a desire to improve the regime’s control,” says Chuck Downs, a former Pentagon official and author of “Over the Line: North Korea’s Negotiating Strategy.”

“What they’re really after is to strengthen their military capabilities, especially their new strategy of pursuing long-range [missile] attack capabilities rather than invasion forces,” Downs says.

Skeptics say Kim Jong Il decided to open up to South Korea and to other American allies, like Italy and Australia, to undercut the United States, hoping Washington eventually will have to deal with him.

“He [Kim Jong Il] has made a determination there’s not much more he can get from the United States, because of the elections,” says Richard L. Armitage, another former Pentagon official who is now an advisor to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. “He’s not stupid.”

The best clue to understanding Kim Jong Il’s strategy is to see how he handles North Korea’s failing economy.

If Kim’s aim is to make North Korea more prosperous by launching economic reforms, then he’d try to trim down his military. In per capita terms, North Korea has the highest military budget in the world.

On the other hand, if Kim’s strategy is to keep North Korea afloat mostly through food aid and other handouts from abroad, then the more threatening the military, the better: The fear of it helps him to extort money from overseas.

Marcus Noland of the Institute for International Economics, who has just completed a detailed study of the two Korean economies called “Avoiding the Apocalypse,” says North Korean officials talk about opening up but still have no idea how the rest of the world works.

“The North Koreans are like the people who have seen the instructional video on how to play tennis but have never struck a ball with a racquet,” Noland says.

Noland argues that the North Korean regime would derive huge benefits from economic reform; national output could go up more than half and trade could quintuple. But his book concludes it’s more likely Kim Jong Il will try to “muddle through” without major changes.

Skeptics aren’t always right. In the late 1980s, Washington was full of Gorbo-skeptics: Soviet specialists who insisted right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall that Mikhail S. Gorbachev represented just a different face on the same old Soviet Communist regime.

But with Gorbachev, there were signs of change on the streets and among the people. Remember his drive against alcohol or his campaign against the privileges of the nomenklatura?

We’re not seeing anything remotely like that in North Korea now. Kim Jong Il’s changes to date have been only in the field of diplomacy.

“If Kim wanted to carry out economic reform, we’d see it happen domestically first. He has complete control over that society,” says Downs. “We outsiders shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that somehow, an approach to us indicates somehow a desire to reform inside North Korea.”

The betting here is that on North Korea, the Skeptics will be proved right. Kim Jong Il is smiling this week, but let’s look again in six months or a year. We can expect more crises, more threats and more missile diplomacy.

“The threat that North Korea possesses is its sole asset,” writes Noland. “It is unlikely to negotiate away this asset very easily.”

So far, what hasn’t changed in North Korea seems more important than what has.