It’s well known that China, despite its increasing annoyance with Kim Jong-un, does not want the North Korean regime to collapse. Beijing has its own geopolitical—if utterly amoral—reasons for holding this position, primarily that it fears a united Korea with a U.S. military presence. More disturbing is that, according to senior official in the Obama administration, the United States government does not want North Korea to collapse either.
“‘North Korea’s collapse has never been and is not a policy goal of the Obama administration, [said] a senior official [in] the White House,” reports the Korea Times.
“‘Regime change is not our goal,’ said Jon Wolfsthal, special adviser and senior director for arms control and nonproliferation at the National Security Council (NSC),” the newspaper continued, “He said the U.S. objective is a denuclearized, stable Korean Peninsula; it is not to change the North Korean regime but change North Korean behavior.”
There are a couple of problems with this position. The first is logical: You simply can’t have the mix of factors that Wolfsthal claims is the U.S.’s goal—namely, a North Korean regime in power and a denuclearized peninsula. Pyongyang has made it abundantly clear that it will never surrender its nuclear weapons program, which it sees as essential to its survival. If you want a denuclearized Korea—and that’s certainly a worthy goal—then you want a new regime.
But more deeply, the policy is appalling on the moral level. Accepting the existence of the North Korean regime means being fine with the enslavement of some 20 million people. It means signing off on a hideous, heavily militarized border than has kept families torn apart for more than half a century. And it also puts the U.S. at odds with South Korea, which takes striving for unification as official policy.
