Kim’s war vis-à-vis Putin’s war

We must build our insight to see through what the North really wants to get.

Kim Byung-yeonThe author is a chair professor of economics at Seoul National University. In the late 1970s, Pravda — the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — ran an unusual article urging Russians to stop feeding meat to their pets. U.S. intelligence experts viewed the article as a political propaganda: The Communist regime only wanted to brag that the Soviet economy had already caught up with America in terms of consumption. The article was not entirely wrong: Due to their overly low prices of meat, some Russians did feed their pets meat. But Moscow hid the truth. Meat was extremely cheap in Russia due to hefty subsidies from the government. Around that time, the Communist government spent up to 7 percent of the GNP to stabilize food prices due to its credo that prices of daily necessities should not change. As a result, the Soviet economy was crumbling from a growing fiscal deficit and a lack of money for investments. The propaganda paper distorted the whole picture by concealing the truth and revealing only some facts to the outside.

The power base for dictators lies inside, not outside. Without an imminent threat of war or foreign intervention, dictators’ behavior and policy mostly target their internal situation. If you ignore this, you can make the mistake of comprehending all their acts and rhetoric in the context of external conditions. If so, what really made North Korean leader Kim Jong-un threaten to devastate South Korea? And what forced him to order massive shelling drills along the Northern Limit Line on the West Sea from the beginning of the year, and what compelled him to abandon his predecessors’ legacy of pursuing a peaceful reunification of the divided land and define the inter-Korean relations as being “between two hostile states”? Why did Kim go so far as to threaten to “conquer South Korea”?

The reason is the ongoing internal war over ideology in North Korea, which started after the failed Hanoi, Vietnam summit five years ago. Kim Jong-un championed self-reliance to help the impoverished country survive, but a multitude of North Koreans were already familiar with South Korean culture and capitalism. Merchants removed the labels from South Korean products and sold them to their peers covertly. Many of the merchants pleaded smugglers to bring in South Korean rice cookers from China.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un smiles with Russian President Vladimir Putin during his visit to the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East on Sept. 13, 2023, on the sidelines of their summit. [KOREAN CENTRAL TELEVISION]

As Kim stressed, markets in North Korea were “the stronghold of capitalism” and “the hot bed of South Korean culture.” After market activities became difficult following the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Kim found a good opportunity to kill the “three monsters that are markets, capitalism and South Korean culture,” starting with the methodical campaign to eliminate South Korean culture, already widespread in North Korea. The court can even deliver a death sentence to those who circulate South Korean culture domestically.

Kim Jong-un’s jingoism reflects his determination to remove his people’s admiration for South Korea from their mind. As long as North Korea respects a peaceful reunification, South Korean culture needs to be understood instead of being wiped off. Those who had tasted the efficacy of capitalism from makeshift markets across the North resisted Kim’s merciless crackdown on South Korean culture. The regime felt the need to polish its logic and build legal grounds against South Korean culture to effectively penalize North Koreans who still worship it. Pyongyang believed that a ratcheted-up war threat and large-scale shelling drills could help its people perceive South Korea as an enemy state. Kim’s deepening sense of crisis was in tandem with his war over ideology.

Kim Jong-un’s war bluffing reflects Russian President Vladimir Putin’s shadow. If Kim’s threat of war works, Putin will benefit the most. If South Korea — the only country on earth capable of supplying a large quantity of artillery shells to Ukraine — decides to stock ammunition to brace for its own war, Russia can maintain its supremacy over Ukraine in the ongoing war. How nice would that be for Putin? The United States also would have to focus on defending the South against the North, which would also benefit Russia.

Did Kim really make the bluff at the request of Putin, or was it just a coincidence? At the time, Russian diplomats were busy engaging in “diplomacy” toward South Korea by threatening a war in the peninsula and pressuring Seoul to maintain the status quo. What kind of deal did the two leaders strike for their common interest?

If Kim is engaged in an internal ideological war, Putin is engaged in a real war. But the two wars are interlinked. We must find out where the intersection is. We must build our insight to see through what North Korea really wants to get, instead of naively believing what it says. At the same time, we must warn Russia about the danger of its honeymoon with the North. If Russia supplies North Korea with weapons technology, we must tell Russia — quietly yet clearly — that our policy toward Ukraine can change.

Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.