Fareed Zakaria GPS, CNN Sunday morning 10 Eastern and Pacific.
Imagine if you were at the middle ages. There we have a king and his many loyal supplicants. For a long time, he's never named an heir. But he finally does, anointing his youngest son the heir apparent. But the son has no experience, little charisma and generals ain’t thought of very highly. So the king also appoints a regent - someone to watch over the younger royal. This regent just happens to be married to the king's sister. So to boost her power, the king puts her in charge of the army. All clear? Now this might sound like the middle ages, but it's actually North Korea today. Kim Jong Il has put forth his succession plan. His youngest son Kim Jong-Eun will inherit the seat of power, but real power will be in the hands of the regent, Kim Jong-il's brother-in-law. And to keep it all in the family, Kim Jong-il's sister, who is the regent's wife, has now been made a four-star general. Just like that.
Now this would be an amusing diversion of modernization experience in history except that it is not likely to be stable at all. North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world, run by a repressive dictatorship, has a million man army, famine recurs constantly, the leadership spends untold millions on itself. It is both stagnant and yet fragile. No one really believes that 20, 25 years from now, this dictatorship will still be ruling North Korea. Something is gonna give. I was in South Korea this week. And in talking to many of the people who ran that country, I noticed that no one really wants to grapple with the prospect of a North Korean collapse. It's too massy, too expensive, but we need to think about it. We need to talk about it. When it happens, and it will happen. The United States and China in particular could end up going down an extremely confrontational path. You see this has to be resolved. Will a unified Korea have North Korea's nuclear weapons? What happens to American troops because a unified Korea would now be in American ally with nuclear weapons and American troops bordering China? Rather than wait until crisis strikes in the middle of all this, this is the time to start sorting all this out by talks between China, South Korea and the United States, privately of course, but urgently. |