The Impossible State, Updated Edition: North Korea, Past and Future

512 Pages·2018·5.62 MB·English

by  Victor Cha

Dedication
For my mother, Soon Ock, and my wife, Hyun Jung
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
A Note on the Korean Text
Preface
One: Contradictions
Two: The Best Days
Three: All in the Family
Four: Five Bad Decisions
Five: The Worst Place on Earth
Six: The Logic of Deterrence
Seven: Complete, Verifiable, and Irreversible Dismantlement (CVID)
Eight: Neighbors
Nine: Approaching Unification
Ten: The End Is Near
Eleven: Unpredictable
Epilogue: Whiplash
Acknowledgments
Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Praise
Also by Victor Cha
Copyright
About the Publisher
A Note on the Korean Text
Romanization of the Korean language has long suffered from a lack of a single,
agreed-upon standard for spelling, which is why you will variously see “Kim
Jong Il,” “Kim Jong-Il,” “Kim Jong-il,” and “Kim Chŏng-il” in the press and
academic publications. The book at hand uses something of a mishmash of
different standardized Romanization techniques. For names and places that will
be familiar to many readers, such as “Kim Il-sung,” “Kim Dae-jung,” and
“Pyongyang,” Revised Romanization is used. For names of people and places
less familiar to the casual observer, McCune-Reischauer Romanization is used.
And for those who aren’t acquainted with Korean, Chinese, or Japanese names,
it bears pointing out that in nearly all cases (with the exception of a few, whose
names are widely known and/or used in the reverse order, such as Syngman
Rhee), Korean, Chinese, and Japanese names are written in their traditional
order, with the surname first and the given name last.
Preface
THE IMPOSSIBLE STATE WAS THE FIRST BOOK PUBLISHED AFTER THE DEATH OF NORTH
Korea’s second leader, Kim Jong-il, and the sudden ascension to the leadership
of his twentysomething-year-old son, Kim Jong-un. At the time, the future for
this small isolated regime appeared uncertain at best, and that of its young leader
far from bright. Since publication of that first edition, however, so much has
happened, most of it worrisome. The world saw North Korea conduct seventy-
two ballistic missile tests and four nuclear detonations that demonstrated not
only rapid advancements in their capabilities, but also progress toward
threatening the U.S. homeland with a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile.
The United States did little to address this threat during the eight years of
Barack Obama’s administration. Pursuing a policy of “strategic patience”—
defined as not wasting political capital or diplomatic energy on a negotiation
without some (unlikely) sign of North Korean interest—Obama preferred to
focus on opening relations with Burma and Cuba, and investing politically in a
nuclear agreement with Iran rather than North Korea.
In South Korea, we saw the impeachment of the conservative government
led by President Park Geun-hye, and the election of the first progressive
government in the country in a decade, devoted to improving relations with
North Korea through diplomatic and economic engagement policies. The period
since publication of The Impossible State also saw an extraordinary deterioration
in China’s relations with both Koreas. In the case of the North, China’s leader Xi
Jinping’s distaste for the young Kim’s belligerence resulted in an extraordinary
period of non-dialogue that came to a close only in 2018. With South Korea,
China embarked on a draconian economic sanctions campaign against it for
acceding to the emplacement of an American missile defense battery in the
country.
But most important, the intervening years saw Kim Jong-un declare at the
end of 2017 that after one half century of development, North Korea had
achieved the status of a nuclear weapons state. As I discuss in The Impossible
State, the regime devoted an inordinate percentage of its national resources to
this project. It started, based on newly obtained archival CIA satellite imagery,
in 1962, two years before China exploded its first nuclear bomb.1 This was
indeed a watershed moment for the country, and it is appropriate that the second
edition of my book picks up from this development. In 2018, we saw a flurry of
diplomacy unprecedented in history. The North Korean leader, normally isolated
from the entire world, held three summits with Xi Jinping, two summits with
South Korean president Moon Jae-in, and a historic meeting with the American
president Donald Trump in Singapore. Is this diplomacy an effort at
peacemaking with de facto acceptance by the international community of North
Korea as a nuclear weapons state? Or is this diplomatic outreach a new effort by
Kim to shed his isolation and seek reconciliation with longtime adversaries?
At the end of the first edition of The Impossible State, I wrote that there
would be some major political discontinuity involving North Korea during the
term of the forty-fifth president of the United States. I did not specify whether
that discontinuity would be negative or positive, but believed that the status quo
could simply not hold. I still support that prediction and would argue that some
of the things we have seen so far have already validated that claim. But what I
did not expect was that the source of this change might come from an
unpredictable and impulsive U.S. president. Donald Trump is unlike any U.S.
president who has dealt with North Korea. And so I think it is appropriate that
the epilogue focus as much on him as on the North Korean leader because this
president’s unconventionality could take the Korean peninsula in the direction of
a peace treaty—or in the direction of a horrible war.
2018
Chapter One
Contradictions
WE PASSED OVER BARREN AND GRAY FIELDS AS THE GULFSTREAM VI TOUCHED DOWN
on the empty runway of the airport. As the plane taxied on the tarmac, there was
no flight traffic to be seen. No baggage carts or fuel trucks shuttling about. It
looked as though we were the only arrival or departure of the day. We cruised
past two passenger planes with propeller engines, the kind you would see in a
1940s Humphrey Bogart movie. Then the plane turned right and the main
terminal came into view, a small 1960s-era building about one-tenth the size of
today’s international air terminals. Scrawled across the top of the edifice with
large, red block letters was PYONGYANG, written in English and in Han’gŭl
(Korean characters). Hanging atop the center of the Sunan international air
terminal’s façade was an oversize portrait of the first leader of the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea), Kim Il-sung.
We prepared to deplane into the cool spring air, after the long flight from
Elmendorf Air Base in Alaska. It was dusk with an orange glow to the sky, and it
was eerily silent: no street sounds, no car horns, no birds. We disembarked one
by one, following established security protocol, while two security officers,
known as “ravens,” checked each of our names off the passenger manifest. The
ravens then escorted us to a receiving party of North Korean airport staff and
foreign ministry officials, who were standing on the tarmac in front of the Kim
Il-sung portrait. It was at that point that our security detail turned around and
headed back to the plane. I blurted out, “Hey, aren’t you guys coming with us?”
The agent, looking puzzled at my naive question through his dark sunglasses,
responded, “No sir, we stay with the plane. Too much sensitive comms
equipment aboard to stay overnight in enemy territory. We will transport
southbound to Osan [air base in South Korea]. See you on the other side in a few
days, sir.” The Gulfstream VI was a military plane that the White House
provided at the request of New Mexico’s then-governor Bill Richardson who
had pressed the George W. Bush administration to allow him to visit North
Korea. The plane was capable of confidential communications (and probably a
whole host of other things I was unaware of). I then remembered that the ravens,
who were fully armed, always checked us on and off the plane at our various
stops along the way, but the only time they ever separated from the plane was
when we overnighted at Elmendorf Air Force Base, a secure facility. I thought to
myself, “U.S. military plane, invaluable; U.S. government officials,
expendable.”
My job on this trip as National Security Council (NSC) staff was to
accompany the governor and make sure he did not make any nuclear deals
outside of the ones we were then trying to negotiate through the Six-Party Talks.
Our specific mission was to negotiate the successful return of a set of POW/MIA
(Prisoners of War/Missing in Action) remains from the Korean War that was
held by the Korean People’s Army (KPA). Two experts from the Defense
Department were detailed for the trip. One was a forensics expert. The other was
a Central Asia policy expert, who also was a Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown
University, and on whose dissertation committee I later served. Richardson, then
about to announce his candidacy for president on the Democratic ticket, was the
media highlight of the trip (he had brought with him Andrea Mitchell of NBC
News and an Associated Press correspondent, to ensure adequate publicity), but
this was the first time U.S. officials from the second term of the Bush
administration had entered North Korea. The last time had been in 2002, when
the United States confronted North Korea about a clandestine second nuclear
program that was in violation of standing agreements. This sparked a major
crisis that led to ballistic missile tests and, ultimately, a nuclear test by
Pyongyang. So no one knew exactly what to expect.
As we walked up a small set of steps to meet the receiving party in front of
the VIP entrance, the only recognizable face was that of Mats Foyer, the
Swedish ambassador to Pyongyang, who I later found out had insisted on being
at the airport to greet us, since Sweden was the protecting power for American
interests in North Korea. This arrangement with Sweden exists because the
United States has no embassy in Pyongyang, as it remains technically at war
with the country. A cease-fire, not a peace treaty, ended hostilities in 1953. I
looked over my shoulder to see our plane departing down the runway, and
mumbled to the two Pentagon officials standing next to me, “The three of us
should stay together, and not get separated during this trip.” Once inside the
terminal, we were offered some refreshments and exchanged some diplomatic
pleasantries. We were asked to pay an entry fee in cash. (Credit cards don’t work
in North Korea.) We were given our schedules by the hosts, which under normal
circumstances would be something handled by our embassy and for which every
detail would have been painstakingly ironed out in advance of the trip. In this