For starters, see the North Korean regime, to use a worn out cliché, “as it is”—that is, not as a regime that seeks “better relations” with Washington in a conventional sense, through bargaining away its nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction programs and expanding economic, cultural, and political ties with the U.S. and Western Europe in ways similar to what South Africa, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus chose twenty years ago, but see the Kim regime as a uniquely repressive totalitarian state that is singularly unfit to prevail as the winner in the existential contest for pan-Korean legitimacy that has been the basic internal dynamic in the Korean peninsula over the past 60 years. In other words, the North Korean regime views its nuclear and missile programs as the sine qua non to its continued preservation and even as the one panacea that perhaps one day may overturn all the gloomy indices of inferiority in state power vis-à-vis South Korea that it must live with for now and the foreseeable future. In short, the leadership in Pyongyang will not make concessions on its nuclear and missile programs unless it is confronted with a credible threat that calls into question the need for its continued existence.
Sixty years ago today, on March 5, 1953, the Soviet leader Stalin died, and the prospects for a ceasefire to the Korean War became brighter. Four months later, on July 27, an armistice agreement was reached. And the past 60 years of the history of the Korean peninsula is a testament to the superiority of democracy and capitalism over totalitarianism and communism. It is a dramatic story of the resilience of the people of the Republic of Korea, and, of course, the defense commitment of the United States to South Korea that has made the past 60 years of peace—at times unstable, but de facto peace—in the Korean peninsula possible. During this time, the Republic of Korea has developed into a model success case of how to build a free and affluent modern nation state, while North Korea has descended to become an exemplary failed state, marked by a regime that is systematically repressive and cruel like no other, and consequently a people impoverished and isolated like no other.
The grim situation in North Korea today, in which the regime elites enjoy a life of relative luxury while the vast majority of the people languish in miserable conditions under a brutal police state, are the direct product of the Kim dynasty’s determined policies over the past several decades, not the result of U.S. sanctions or unfavorable weather conditions, as some wish to believe. These resolute policies pursued by the Kim dynasty include assiduously misallocating its meager national resources and earnings from illicit financial transactions to its nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missile programs, while allowing a substantial percentage of its people to starve and waste away. The sum total of such policies is a state that is what can only be described as—grammatical propriety notwithstanding—“uniquely unique.” Allow me to give you some examples:
North Korea is the world’s sole communist hereditary dynasty, the world’s only literate-industrialized-urbanized peacetime economy to have suffered a famine, the world’s most cultish totalitarian system, and the world’s most secretive, isolated country—albeit one with the world’s
