North Korea’s Kim Jong-un seems increasingly addicted to scaring the world by firing ballistic missiles. After a lull of over two months, the regime fired another on Wednesday, the 16th this year. The launches have become more frequent and more aggressive. In August and September, the regime launched missiles over Japan, and it now boasts the capacity to strike the U.S. mainland.
The U.S. has imposed round after round of unilateral and multilateral sanctions on the regime and recently (and accurately) reclassified it as a state sponsor of terrorism. China, traditionally the North Korean government’s furtive benefactor, seems at last to have concluded that its policy of propping up the Kim regime is no longer tenable. But it may be too late. After Trump’s visit in early November, the Chinese dispatched a senior diplomat, Song Tao, to North Korea, likely in order to urge Kim Jong-un to show some willingness to negotiate over the country’s nuclear weapons program. Multiple media reports indicate that the dictator, in a remarkable show of contempt, refused to meet with Song. That’s just as well, however—direct negotiations with Kim are a fool’s errand, as western diplomatic efforts have proved repeatedly.
The word “crisis” is overused in political and diplomatic discourse, but the North Korean problem may soon become a genuine crisis. The regime is a kleptocracy—what little wealth it has is taken by the Kims and the country’s military and bureaucratic elite—but layer upon layer of international sanctions may dry up even that wealth and so provoke a dramatic response from inside the country: a coup, a strike on the U.S. or one its allies, or some combination of the two.
The situation requires unorthodox thinking and boldness. Trump, for good and ill, specializes in both. One idea that deserves some thought by the president’s national security team: Trump could speak directly to the North Koreans—not to Kim Jong-un, as in his “Little Rocket Man” and “fire and fury” remarks, but to the dictator’s generals and military advisers, to the country’s elite bureaucrats, and even to the country’s subjugated and terrorized populace.
How? His Twitter account.
We realize that ordinary people in North Korea can’t use the internet. Access to media not approved by the regime is strictly forbidden; violators are punished severely. Even so, the North Koreans aren’t as sealed off as they used to be. What little we know about life on the inside tells us that some North Koreans now watch South Korean soap operas and read Chinese news. We suspect both ordinary and elite North Koreans know more about the outside world than Westerners give them credit for. That tens of thousands have defected over the last 30 years suggests some awareness of the wealth and openness beyond the country’s borders. People find things out—by word of mouth, by written messages, by surreptitious looks at forbidden books and newspapers and websites—and that is as true of North Koreans as it is of anybody else.
What would Trump tweet? The messages themselves might draw from the president’s humane and cogent speech in Seoul. The president need only assure the North’s citizens that the United States knows what they suffer and wishes them only freedom from their oppressors and the prosperity their labors deserve. The tweets could be posted first in Korean, then followed up by English translations.
One scholar who has openly proposed the idea is Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. “Do you really think,” he asks, “that if prisoners in Siberian gulags could hear about and read Ronald Reagan’s speeches, North Koreans can’t hear about Donald Trump’s tweets?” In an age of cheap and instant communication between continents, the idea that a Twitter account with over 43 million followers can’t penetrate a poor and decrepit police state’s borders seems almost laughable.
The message of freedom—the prospect of living without fear, of making one’s own choices, of working for oneself in a nation ruled by law—might work powerfully on the minds of North Korean subjects. Many, no doubt, have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in the Kim cult that they cannot reason for themselves; but perhaps not all. The message of freedom would weaken the regime’s cohesion and encourage a coup by leaders of a more peaceable and reasonable disposition.
True, it may not work. But neither will the traditional diplomatic routines of making bogus deals and hoping for the best.
