In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Knights of Camelot are on a quest for the Holy Grail, but find their way barred by a group of ornery French knights – never mind what they are doing in England – who have walled themselves inside an impregnable castle. After a pathetic attempt to breach the walls fails, Sir Bedivere the Wise devises a scheme to do through guile what could not be done through force. He persuades King Arthur to build a large, hollow wooden rabbit, leave it at the castle gate just before nightfall, and wait for the curious French knights to pull it inside. The French do so, at which point it occurs to the Englishmen that they were supposed to be inside the rabbit. Bedivere’s “ingenious” plan ends with the French catapulting the empty rabbit back onto the humiliated English.
On several levels, this scene is a near-perfect analogy for South Korea’s and our own failed efforts to “engage” North Korea, right down to the French knights’ vitriolic-yet-awkward taunts. (The Korean Central News Agency, for example, has a curious affinity for the word “brigandish.”)
As a Trojan Rabbit strategy, the Kaesong Industrial Park, which South Korea finally closed last week after a twelve-year run, was as obviously flawed as Sir Bedivere’s. At Kaesong, a force of 55,000 regime-selected North Korean workers labored in South Korean-owned factories. The idea behind Kaesong and projects like it, collectively called the Sunshine Policy, was to use cultural and economic means to achieve political ends; in this case, to use commerce to induce North Korea out of its isolation and into the light of global civilization.
But if the last 20 years taught us anything about North Korea, it’s that no amount of engagement can change a regime that’s determined to maintain the status quo. As Nicholas Eberstadt has documented, Pyongyang has always been vigilant against “the imperialist’s old trick to carry out ideological and cultural infiltration.” It surrounded the Kaesong complex with barbed wire, surrounded the North Korean workers with minders, and prohibited direct contact between them and their South Korean bosses. Rather than catalyzing reforms in North Korea, Kaesong became a significant source of cash — $120 million last year alone — that helped to sustain, rather than change, North Korea’s totalitarian system.
Kaesong workers probably fared better than most North Koreans (a pathetic standard, indeed), but their “wages” were paid into regime-controlled accounts, and it was never clear how much the workers themselves received. There were also persistent questions, including from the U.S. Treasury Department, about how Pyongyang used this money. U.N. Security Council resolutions require member states to “ensure that any funds” paid to Pyongyang are kept out of the hands of those involved in North Korea’s WMD programs, and prohibit the transfer of funds to North Korea that “could contribute” to its nuclear or missile development.
For years, probably because Kaesong continued to enjoy political support in South Korea, Seoul ducked these nagging questions. Last week, however, the South Korean government made the bombshell claim that Pyongyang had diverted 70 percent of the “wages” and fees it received at Kaesong to its prohibited weapons programs, and toward the purchase of luxury goods for His Corpulency’s table. Since then, it has partially reversed itself. After noting that “[i]f there is clear proof for the North’s misappropriation, it would constitute a breach of relevant U.N. resolutions,” the South Korean Unification Minister said that “[t]here are concerns” about Pyongyang’s diversion of the funds, but denied having “clear evidence.” Either way, for whatever period of time Seoul harbored these suspicions, but failed to put in place financial controls to prevent Kaesong from indirectly funding Pyongyang’s weapons programs, it violated U.N. resolutions that were approved for its own protection.
So it has always been with brilliant-on-paper schemes to change North Korea through engagement. Unfortunately, the harder some people try to change Pyongyang, the more Pyongyang changes them. The price of operating in North Korea is to operate by Pyongyang’s rules, keep its secrets, and refrain from asking uncomfortable questions.
The Associated Press knows this well. It went to Pyongyang in 2012, promising to open North Korea to the world. In reality, it reported little real news, disseminated plenty of North Korean propaganda, and found itself dodging questions about censorship, bias, and conflicts of interest. Aid workers went to Pyongyang to feed the hungry and heal the sick. Pyongyang arrested some of them and expelled others, and those that remained did not apparently protest. The Egyptian conglomerate Orascom invested millions in building North Korea a cellular network. Last year, Orascom’s stock price collapsed after Pyongyang prevented it from repatriating its profits. Orascom wrote the entire investment off after North Korea confiscated the network.
Serious questions about other engagement programs remain unanswered. Did an exchange program between Syracuse University and a North Korean university give the regime technology it now uses to plant spyware on its citizens’ computers and trace electronic samizdat? Is it true, as a nonproliferation expert hasalleged, that Pyongyang may be using a Swiss-funded bioinsecticide program to weaponize anthrax? Or, as defectors have claimed, that the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, or PUST, founded by engagement-minded Christian missionaries, is helping to train North Korean hackers?
The operators of these projects haven’t answered those questions. They may be afraid to say. Most likely, they don’t know, have no way of finding out, are afraid to ask, and don’t want anyone else to ask, either. The writer Suki Kim spent a year undercover as a teacher at PUST and wrote a memoir about the extremethought control the authorities exercised over students. To prevent that story from being told, PUST’s backers tried to censor Kim after her return to the United States.
Pyongyang’s greatest engagement success may be enlisting its partners in engagement as censors, financial underwriters, and in some cases, as apologists. But why should North Korea be exempt from the rules of transparency, accountability — and humanity — that apply everywhere else on Earth? Many North Korea watchers would laugh at the idea of asking Pyongyang to open its books and verify that Kaesong “wages” aren’t used for nukes, but once Pyongyang has conditioned us to think that the rules of civilization don’t apply to it, it has already won. The idea of engagement was to condition Pyongyang to follow our rules, not the other way around. To engage without principle is of no more use than placing an empty wooden rabbit inside the castle walls. Any benefit an unreformed Pyongyang derives from it is just another missile to catapult back at us.
Kim Jong-un’s nuclear and missile tests left South Korean President Park Geun-hye little choice but to close Kaesong. The tests refuted the ardent hopes of some Korea-watchers that His Porcine Majesty was a reformer-in-waiting. Instead, in recent years, North Korea has carried out multiple armed attacks and cyberattacks against South Korea, including cyberattacks against banks, newspapers, the Seoul subway system, and even nuclear power plants. South Koreans’ alarm about the North’s progress toward a nuclear arsenal has even led some politicians to call for Seoul to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and develop its own nuclear deterrent.
Seoul’s only other option is to appeal to the U.N. and its allies to force North Korea to disarm with sanctions. President Park probably draws hope from the effect sanctions had on North Korea in 2005, and more recently, on Iran. But she could not ask other nations to improve the enforcement of sanctions while Seoul itself was subsidizing Pyongyang, and perhaps funding the very weapons programs that South Korea sought to extinguish.
Closing Kaesong was a domestic political sacrifice for Park, but internationally, it regained her the credibility to ask other world leaders to combine their economic pressure against Kim Jong-un. In Washington, a virtually unanimous Congress has approved tough new sanctions to freeze Pyongyang’s assets and block it out of the international financial system. Japan has also banned remittances to North Korea and port calls by North Korean ships. China finds itself increasingly isolated in its willful failure to enforce U.N. sanctions. South Korea has welcomed Congress’s tough new legislation. By pressing China and Europe to enforce sanctions strictly, it has finally taken a leading role in a global response to the greatest threat to its own peace and freedom.
The lesson Seoul and Washington have finally learned is that one cannot make a coherent policy by subsidizing and sanctioning the same regime at the same time. The time may eventually come for engagement — most likely after a change of management in Pyongyang, and after North Korea shows us that it is serious about disarmament and humanitarian reforms. Until then, the best advice for naive foreigners who think they can change Pyongyang with Trojan Rabbit schemes is, “Run away!” You won’t change Pyongyang, but Pyongyang just might change you.
Joshua Stanton blogs at www.freekorea.us and assisted the House Foreign Affairs Committee with drafting the House’s original version of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016. The views expressed are his own.
