Predicting the collapse of North Korea is a bit like predicting the collapse of Donald Trump’s lead in the polls: it never seems to happen. Yet, on several occasions in recent days, South Korean president Park Geun-hye has intimated that North Korea’s horrific regime may be more unstable than we realize.
According to the Hankyoreh, a left-wing South Korean daily, President Park made closed-door remarks that reunification could “happen tomorrow.”
The paper reports:
“Unification could happen tomorrow, so you need to be making preparations,” Park was quoted as saying by an attendee at a closed-door intensive round table session among the PCUP‘s civilian members at the Blue House on the morning of July 10.
“Civilian unification experts who attended said she appeared to be alluding to a possible collapse in Pyongyang,” the paper continues, “Another attendee reported coming away with ‘the impression that she was making veiled references to strange currents in North Korea.’”
At several meetings I attended in Seoul last month with figures in the South Korean government, I heard much the same: President Park appears to believe that Kim Jong-un’s regime could be on the brink of collapse. And given that South Korea’s intelligence services have the best available information on what’s going on in the North, her musings can’t be dismissed as mere wishful thinking. Still, given the way things have been going, it remains just as likely that come January 2017, President Donald Trump will dealing the latest provocations of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
