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North Korean winter: stability or discontent?

As regular readers will know, North Korea is not my thing, even if I have a good deal of experience on nuclear nonproliferation issues.  The last time I posted a piece devoted to it was more than a year ago, though I’ve mentioned it more often as an American priority.  In the wake of Kim Jong-il’s death, the best I can do is offer a summary of what I think obvious.

North Korea is a priority for the U.S. because of the risks its nuclear weapons program poses, both for proliferation and for targeting America and its allies in South Korea and Japan.  Kim Jong-il’s regime managed to test something like nuclear weapons twice (in 2006 and 2009), was developing longer-range missiles and is thought to be on the verge of acquiring substantial quantities of enriched uranium.  North Korea has already been involved in murky missile and nuclear technology trade with Pakistan and Iran.

The first American concern will be short-term stability.  The Obama Administration is quite rightly indicating that it is watching the situation and consulting with Seoul and Tokyo, but it would be a mistake to say or do anything that could provoke military action by Pyongyang, which readily perceives threats and uses attacks on the South both to rally internal support and to extract assistance from the international community.

This will put Washington for the moment on the same wavelength with Beijing and Moscow, which fear instability.  China in particular is concerned about millions of refugees crossing its border.  It will also worry that the Americans intend to take advantage of Kim Jong-il’s death to liberate North Korea and reunify it with the South.  That is something Seoul says it wants and the Americans would be hard put not to support, but the process by which it happens could be dramatically problematic as well as costly.  China does not want a reunified, Western-oriented, strong Korea on its border.

A great deal now depends on what happens inside North Korea.  The New York Times quotes an unnamed American military source:

Anyone who tells you they understand what is going to happen is either lying or deceiving himself.

I would be deceiving myself.  So I won’t try to tell you I understand what is going to happen.  Things to watch for?  Whether calm prevails for the next week or so, whether the funeral comes off on December 28 without signs of tension in or with the army, whether the succession to Kim Jong-un is orderly, whether food prices remain more or less stable, whether there are military maneuvers against the South. So far, the announcements out of the North suggest things are under control.

Past the next few weeks, Washington will need to decide what to do.  In a remarkable but little remarked shift of policy, the Americans–who had said they would not meet with North Korea bilaterally unless it gave up its nuclear weapons programs–began meeting bilaterally with the North Koreans in 2006 as soon as they tested a nuclear weapon.  Now they say they won’t return to the six-party talks (involving China, Russia, Japan, and the Koreas) unless than the talks are substantial (which means progress can be made on nuclear issues).

My guess is that we’ll see talks, but with a few months delay.  North Korea is not as desperate as once it was.  It will not want to rush into international talks before settling its domestic situation.  The regime will want to reconsolidate itself and bargain with the five other parties from a position of strength, which likely means continuation of the nuclear and missile programs in the interim.

The wild card could be the North Koreans themselves.  If protests start, the regime will crack down hard.  There are signs the security forces are deploying to prevent trouble.  Markets are closed.  North Korea is a brutal dictatorship far beyond the imagination of Tunisia or Egypt, where protests have felled long-ruling presidents.  Could this be the winter of discontents?

PS:  Written before Kim Jong-un became the designated successor, but still of interest:  Preparing for Sudden Change in North Korea – Council on Foreign Relations.

PPS:  Just imagine what these people will do the day they are free to do as they like: