Opinion: Lessons for the Next North Korean Dictator

(June 8) -- At a rare meeting of North Korea's Potemkin Parliament on Monday, Kim Jong Il, the 68-year-old Dear Leader of Pyongyang's Juche dictatorship, cleared a political path for the succession of his youngest son, the Michael Jordan-obsessed, PlayStation-addicted, Jackie Chan-loving Kim Jong Un. Little is known about Kim the Younger, other than his abiding interest in basketball and a Swiss boarding school education.

On Sunday, South Korean journalists managed a rare interview with Kim Jong Il's eldest son, the porcine ne'er-do-well Kim Jong Nam, once presumed to be the successor to the Kim dynasty. But the 39-year-old squandered his birthright as third-generation North Korean despot when he was detained by Japanese authorities in 2001, traveling on a fake passport en route to Disneyland in Tokyo.

So the South Korean hacks asked Kim Jong Nam about the sinking of the Cheonan, the South Korean navy vessel torpedoed by the North in March, resulting in the deaths of 46 sailors. Demonstrating that his father selected the correct dauphin, he responded with panic: "I don't know. Please stop."

But for Kim Jong Un -- his 27-year-old little brother and future boss -- the incident contains many lessons on how to extort the West.

To wit: Bad behavior by North Korea gets rewarded.

While Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently declared, with characteristic opaqueness, that the Cheonan outrage cannot go "unanswered," previous administrations have let it be known that North Korea can act with impunity.

In fact, it would often receive financial support, in the form of blackmail payments to prevent future bad behavior.

The Bush administration, for instance, removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and generally made a hash of American policy on the peninsula. Pyongyang merited inclusion on the list as a result of its 1987 bombing of a South Korean passenger jet, which the U.N. Security Council debated but refused to condemn.

In his brilliant book "The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters," historian B.R. Myers notes that President Bill Clinton sent a "groveling letter" to ensure Kim's participation in the 1994 Agreed Framework on nuclear weapons, which did nothing to halt the country's program but provided North Korea with massive quantities of free oil in the lean years after the Soviet collapse.

Add to this cursory list North Korea's recent missile tests over Japan, two underground nuclear tests and the selling of weapons (both conventional and nuclear) to an assortment of unsavory dictators, and one quickly understands that Pyongyang risks very little when attacking a South Korean navy ship. It likely assumes the Western response will conform to this shameful pattern of complaisance.

Kim also understands that, among the younger generations in Seoul -- who, like Kim Jong Un, have been untouched by the war that divided Korea -- there exists little passion for confrontation with the North. Indeed, the ruling conservatives were battered in local elections last week, widely seen as a referendum on the government's handling of the Cheonan incident.

But how clever is North Korea's strategy of baiting its enemies? And how well will it serve its next generation of leaders?

To the casual consumer of international affairs, Kim seems, well, nuts. Sure, there's a lot to chuckle about: Kim's perfectly creased pantsuits, thinning pompadour, clunky orthopedic shoes and obsession with American movies -- and his impressive talent at extorting the West.

Kim can afford a hearty laugh at the expense of the international community. Its weak hand and North Korea's military might, which could flatten Seoul within an hour, allow for a consistent gaming of the West. To take hostages, as the PLO understood, is often effective. But it's hardly brilliant diplomacy. So now we enter the phase in which Western diplomats appeal for calm on "both sides," thereby treating perpetrator and victim as co-responsible parties. There's another minor victory for the North, another lesson for the next Kim-to-come.

Thus far, South Korea has acquitted itself well, firmly establishing North Korean culpability. Its government has worked through the United Nations in its quixotic and fruitless demand that Pyongyang be censured by the Security Council. China, terrified of a reunited, pro-Western Korea on its border -- forget supposed concerns about a potential "refugee crisis" -- will likely veto even the most watered-down rebuke.

So 46 South Korean sailors are dead and Kim Jong Il eagerly awaits his letter from the United Nations, expressing anger and disappointment. In South Korea, voters punished the ruling conservatives for taking a tough stand toward their fanatical neighbors to the North.

You see how this works, Kim Jong Un?

Michael Moynihan is a senior editor of Reason magazine.

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