Plus ca change: Kim fires more missives, more missiles

TOPSHOT - North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un attends a welcoming ceremony and review an honour guard at the Presidential Palace in Hanoi on March 1, 2019. (Photo by MANAN VATSYAYANA / POOL / AFP) (Photo credit should read MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty Images)

International-relations pros watching Northeast Asia may be forgiven for a sense of deja vu. A pattern is emerging on North Korea-US relations. One the one hand, Kim Jong Un dangles carrots – such as Friday’s “beautiful” letter to his counterpart, US President Donald Trump – while also brandishing his stick – short-range missile tests – such as his hefting of a brace of missiles into the Sea of Japan on Saturday morning. Trump, for his part, praises Kim’s letter-writing skills, but brushes off the missile tests.

How does this pattern move the pieces on the strategic chessboard? As far as can be seen, not much.

Since the failure of February’s Hanoi summit to reach a deal, and despite this summer’s Kim-Trump photo op in the DMZ truce village of Panmunjom, there has been no concrete progress between the two sides despite the good vibes that seem to unite the two leaders. And while Trump seems willing to play the waiting game, Kim is running out of both options and time.

Dashed hopes

The Kim-Trump relationship has become a nexus of regional peace hopes after decades of hostilities marked by not a single leader-to-leader meeting. Certainly, with North Korea being less a one-party, more a one-man state, where the closed-door decision-making takes place in small circles – the reigning Kim, informed by a close cabal of trusted advisers – Trump’s decision to meet with Kim offered the chance of a breakthrough. Given so many failures by working-level negotiators over the decades to reach any kind of modus vivendi beyond a tense and uneasy strategic status quo, the possibilities of the two leaders indulging in facers ignited long-dormant hopes.

After last year’s Singapore summit, most talk was of denuclearization, plus a Korean War peace treaty and improved Pyongyang-Washington relations. But this year, while chatter about denuclearization continues relentlessly (if a little hopelessly), Pyongyang’s negotiating aim appears to have shifted away from peace moves and toward sanctions relief.

That, however, is one area where Trump – perhaps wisely – has stood firm. Some criticize the US president for demanding an end-result (that is, denuclearization) before offering in-process concessions (that is, sanctions relief). And indeed, Trump may be lacking in diplomatic finesse and strategic brilliance; his self-identity is as a negotiator, based on his pre-presidential years in business. But in that role at least, he seems to understand the power of leverage.

This presents Kim with a dual problem.

Rocks and hard places

The young neo-monarch has, on numerous occasions, pledged to upgrade his people’s standard of living. And in that he has some grounds for optimism.

One heritage of his father’s ruinous reign was marketization. Amid killer famines in the 1990s, desperate North Koreans turned to China trade to survive, bartering anything they had for food and medicine. The markets survived the famines, upgraded to to total-consumer goods emporia, and brought new levels of discipline and competency to what had been a disastrously mismanaged economy. For the average North Korean, the markets have replaced the long-imploded state distribution system as their leading source of goods.

Moreover, the economy continues to advance. Indications are that the key players in the North Korean economy – the donju (“money masters” – that is, the key investors) are now shifting from trade to manufacturing, producing goods for domestic consumption.

Yet no economy – even North Korea’s – is an island. The heavy sanctions imposed since 2016 are now, according to multiple reports and sourcing, biting. It is hugely difficult now for any player to shift money into or out of North Korea without incurring the wrath of the US Treasury. Moreover, flow of goods into North Korea is also heavily sanctions and over-watched.

Hence the dual problem.

First: Kim has made public promises of economic betterment, which he is not honoring, and at the same time, he is likely beholden to the top donju. (It is far from clear how tightly he is beholden, but even his own wife, Ri Sol Ju, is believed to be a donju – indicating how tightly entangled the political elite and the new monied class are.)

Second: Even though he is most assuredly in charge of his military, he cannot ignore factions. This, some suggest, means Kim may very well be facing pressure from his hawks. So far, his new global engagement policy, as announced in his New Year’s Day speech of 2018, has delivered very little beyond photo ops with world leaders (Trump being the most high-profile, but also including Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and South Korean President Moon Jae-in). Sanctions remain in place.

Some pundits believe that hawks are arguing for a more aggressive policy – hence Kim’s repeated barrages of short-range ballistic missiles and even multiple-launch rocket system missiles in recent weeks. Why now?