Testimony of Sung-Yoon Lee
Kim Koo-Korea Foundation Professor in Korean Studies and Assistant Professor
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Foreign Affairs Committee,
U.S. House of Representatives
"North Korea’s Diplomatic Gambit: Will History Repeat Itself?"
April 11, 2018
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and distinguished members of the Subcommittee:
I am honored to have this opportunity to present my views on how best to address North Korea’s 2018 version of post-provocation peace ploy.
I. North Korea’s Unconventional Antics are Approximately Predictable
When pundits intone North Korea is “unpredictable,” what they actually mean is that the ultra-weird, cultish Kim dynasty is “unconventional.” Isolationist, poor, nasty, brutish, and strangely buffoonish, the North Korean regime defies the conventions of the “nation state” or “rational actor.” Hence, its strangely bellicose rhetoric and threatening actions come across as “unpredictable” or “irrational,” while its post-provocation concessionary ploys, such as calling for talks and summit meetings, creates variously illusions of “crisis averted” and even a “breakthrough.”
The North Korean regime is a bizarre composite of contradictions. For example, the leadership deifies itself and revels in luxuries while systematically depriving its population of the even the most basic rights, such as, of the freedom of domestic travel, access to foreign media, and as the UN Commission of Inquiry Report on Human Rights in North Korea alleges, the “right to food and related aspects of the right to life.”[1] The regime approaches foreign policy with a mix of medieval unsophistication and avant-garde criminality.[2] The nation boasts of having become a full-fledged nuclear state after firing an inter-continental ballistic missile with the range to hit every corner of the United States,[3] while without fail each year secures its place in the world’s
- ↑ See “Report of the Detailed Findings of UN Commission of Inquiry Report on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” February 2017, 144-208. https://documents-ddsny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G14/108/71/PDF/G1410871.pdf?OpenElement
- ↑ The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the only state in the post-1945 era that, as a matter of state policy, has mass produced and exported contraband such as drugs, counterfeits, fake familiar-brand cigarettes and pharmaceuticals, all the while assiduously adhering to the norms of state-sponsors of terrorism with active proliferation and political assassinations abroad.
- ↑ Mark Lander and Choe Sang-Hun, “North Korea Says It’s Now a Nuclear State. Could that Mean It’s Ready to Talk?” The New York Times, November 29, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/world/asia/north-koreanuclear-missile-.html
