Let’s be honest — our relationship with North Korea has never, ever been good and we are unfortunately at fault for some of that.
Now, don’t get me wrong, North Korea is an abusive totalitarian state with an abusive totalitarian leader. They engage in human rights violations and aggressively control the material put out by the media. In short, they’re not the best.
But like I said earlier, we’re not, nor should we be, absolved of blame. Consider our moral and ideological imperialism in South Asia and our greater role in the Korean War. In the 1950s, North Korea tended communist, and South Korea embraced American systems of democracy and capitalism. The situation mirrored, largely, the Vietnam War that would happened years later. The North invaded the South, and just like Vietnam, we intervened, waged aggressive and violent war against them and pulled out. This left them devastated and thereby created a power vacuum large enough for a dictator to take advantage of. But, of course, we had interests and we had to assert our national dominance against China and the Soviet Union.
North and South Korea have still never resolved the war and believe it or not, tensions are still very, very high. Since the Korean War, U.S. foreign policy has been based on de-escalating the looming threat of nuclear warfare. No matter what you do, don’t provoke the sleeping beast.
Yet, Mike Pence is just a couple hundred feet from North Korean soldiers, hoping very much to provoke them. According to him, our past policy on North Korea hasn’t been working or resolving any necessary issues, and it’s about time for an upheaval. But what exactly does an “upheaval” mean for the Trump administration?
It means economic pressure and the repeated, almost uncomfortable assertion of American power and masculinity. It’s business-like, dog-eat-dog style intimidation. A firm handshake and a vaguely threatening look. It’s apparently how we conduct all of our foreign policy now, from refusing to shake Angela Merkel’s hand to flaunting our — or rather our president’s — assets around Xi Jinping.
But this kind of bullish diplomacy, if you can even call it that, doesn’t and won’t work. It’s outdated, of the Cold War, and not at all appropriate in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world. So sending Mike Pence to cross his arms and stare down a bunch of North Korean soldiers across the Korean Demilitarized Zone is a bad idea. Period.
On Monday, a North Korean envoy warned that Pence’s looming and uncomfortable presence could breed nuclear war. Now, how seriously of a threat that is, I don’t know. North Korea does have nuclear missiles and the capacity to fire those missiles. They might not reach the United States, but the prospect of a nuclear holocaust is so horrifying even leveraging the threat of it — which states never ever leverage — ought to be taken seriously. The consequences of nuclear war weigh much less heavily on North Korea than it does on everyone else.
Do we just leave them alone and keep going on the way that they have been? Well, I can’t give you a very good answer, because the solution to that problem ought to be considered by international relations experts and academics more versed on North Korea than an undergraduate philosophy and American history major. I can say, however, that we must consider the safety and security of South Korea because they have to bear the bulk of North Korea’s aggression. We must also consider that totalitarianism is ingrained in the lives and cultures of the North Korean people. They might not consider our intervention and presence particularly sound or conducive to the betterment of their society. We just can’t impose a lifestyle on people who have been taught their entire lives to hate us.
So no, don’t provoke the beast. Handle the beast accordingly, without patronizing it and without imposing Western moral values on it. Nuclear war is incredibly scary, and though North Korea isn’t a particular menacing threat now, it very well can be later.
