"Life After Kim"

By Eleanor Albert

Just last week, the Democrat People’s Republic of Korea celebrated Kim Jong-Il’s sixty-ninth – or maybe sixty-eighth – birthday (a celebration that most certainly included extravagant brandy, a Kim favorite). As Kim reaches his late sixties, it is important to highlight that the average male life expectancy currently hovers around sixty-five in North Korea. Kim Jong-Il’s days are numbered so to speak.

The current US approach to North Korean policy consists of economic development to the DPRK and diplomatic relations, in exchange for the disarmament of all nuclear weapons – the largest threat that North Korea holds over the international community. While North Korea is a current threat to the international community, the potential for the regime to collapse is a greater threat.

Foreign Policy contributor Sung-Yoon Lee wrote “The regime may very well continue to maintain control over the population through the distribution of extra grain, ideological indoctrination, manufactured scapegoats -- and of course, brute force. But the end of Kim Jong Il's regime, one way or another, is inevitable.”

The agents for collapse manifest themselves in economic difficulty, the prosperity of South Korea, the growing challenges of the propaganda apparatus to control information flow, and the search for a legitimate and credible successor to Kim.

Although it has been nearly six decades since the Kims have been in power in the DPRK, the potential of regime collapse should push the United States to develop a new course of foreign policy in the likely event that North Korea falls to the pressure it faces. The future of North Korea in a post-Kim alternative political system is vital to US interests in Southeast Asia, and has also become the exemplar of human rights violations –a moral interest for the US and the West.

In the event of regime collapse, chaos will ensue in Pyongyang and require the intervention of South Korean and US troops. As Lee projects, China and Japan, the most influential regional powers will also come forward: Chinese peacekeeping forces to maintain security on the northern border with China and Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force providing supplies to and the transportation of people along the Korean coast. Despite these resilient efforts, stability will not be reached because North Korea will need to reinvent a political system and national identity, completely independent of the Kim personality cult.

The US remains reluctant to envision the commitment the government and the military will have to make to prevent major destabilization in Southeast Asia without a Kim regime in place in North Korea. With wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a supposed War on Terror (although, I am still unsure as to the effectiveness of the concept), policymakers are avoiding the potential collapse of the DPRK. Unfortunately time never takes sides and US leadership needs to come up with a reliable and sincere course of action for the long run in Korea.