Twenty years ago, a business wanted to be President of the United States.
Now, he's celebrating his first anniversary as President elected.
However, his old promises seem to be more difficult than thought to keep.
Until now, he showed us that to achieve his diplomatic goals,
or simply to fill the American Treasury,
he had a method, an old theory,
an art of the deal.
To show one's strength before negociating.
Even if it means to promise fire and fury to North Korea on the aniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombing.
August 8th 2017
In the US, President Trump played the bad cop figure.
Then he played the good cop figure during his visit in Asia, at the begining of November.
The operation is an economic success.
South Korea and Japan will command American weaponry for several billion dollars.
But a problem still lives on:
the Pentagon is still afraid of an Asian major power shift with a new nuclear state.
And the Popular Democratic Republic of North Korea doesn't seem ready to negociate its full access to nuclear weapons.
So despite his art of the deal, why Donald Trump might be disapointed?
It's no secret that North Korean government is often depicted as a caricature to be analyzed by psychiatrists,
and not as a political enigma, neither as a subject of analysis.
While it is the first reflex to have in front of an adversary.
Master Sun Tzu could only approve. (Know your ennemy and yourself; If you know yourself and not your ennemy, for every victory you shall also suffer a defeat; If you know neither yourself nor your ennemy, you will succomb at every battle)
On the other hand, it is very easy to make fun of North Korea, with its surrealistic system,
or to edict sanctions against it to conceal the fact that the international community is unable to prevent its nuclear mastery.
Therefrom, saying that Kim Jong-un is symbolically humiliating his American opponent, reduced to the formulation of hollow threats, there is only one step.
At the same time, it is also easy to recall that North Korea maintains a wild hatred over the countries that gave it the most humanitarian aid when it needed the most.
Between 1995 and 2008, the American Congress announced that it gave the equivalent of 1,3 billion dollars in food and energetic aid,
while South Korea gave 7 billion dollars.
Again in September 2017, despite the sanctions, South Korea managed to unlock 8 millions dollars for the UNICEF and the World Food Programm to continue helping at its northern neighbour.
Do we have to deduce that North Korea managed to secure its interests, when it became a nuclear state while manipulating the great powers with a Machiavellian pragmatism?
As it understood that a flawless diplomacy wouldn't lead it anywhere, and that a provocative one would support its economy.
In fact, Pyongyang is far from being crazy, on the contrary.
Its strategic objectives are perfectly clear.
But to qualifying North-korean leaders as "rocket-men", and refusing to consider that North Korea always wanted a life-insurance against external threats, is clearly a sign of blindness.
Make no mistake, North Korea could one of the most rational state of these last decades,
with a foreign policy that achieved its goals.
This hypothesis is difficult to consider in Western countries,
but it still will be bringed up in a second episode.
Meanwhile, we must understand how was built a unique political regime, dynastic and totalitarian, far from Cold Wat communism, which every brother fell in eastern Europe.
At a time when opinions are thriving over North Korea's behaviour, it is a good food for thought to remember one of American historian Bruce Cumings' sentence:
People's Republic drives mad those who talk about it.
So, between the mysteries of an isolated state and the madness of those who talk about it, it is time to wonder on what is this apparently unstoppable North Korean state based on.
First things first, what could we say about the relationship between North Korea and its neighbourhood, and its environment?
I's a small country, about half the size of Great Britain for "only" 25 million inhabitants.
And surrounded by most of the greatest powers:
China among them, Russia which shares a very short border with North Korea.
Japan, and of course South Korea, which is now the 11th global economic power, just ahead Russia.
Relationships with these economic, demographic or military giants, are few but they exist.
At the Chinese side of the northern border, one can find an important Korean community, in the Yanbian autonomous prefecture.
Some decades ago, the community was developped and seduced by Beijing and Pyongyang
But today, this prosperous cluster chose the Chinese capitalism instead of North Korea.
With time, illusions went away, especially when 250,000 North Koreans crossed the border in 1995 in order to flee the great famine.
And since China signed a free-trade agreement with South Korea in 2015, the community only has eyes for Seoul.
On the other hand, the Chinese city Dandong is a real entrance door for North Korea.
Every day, cars, trucks and Chinese trains, full loaded with food and raw materials, cross the border.
It is by this ombilical cord that half or even the 3/4 of North Korea-China trade operates.
In this city of one million inhabitants, North Koreans legal workers are easily spotted.
They hold businesses and entertainment establishments in a growing urbanism where investments from all Asia arrive, including from South Korea.
However, for 64 years, the two Koreas have been divided by a "demilitarized zone" (DMZ).
And as its name doesn't tell, it's the most militarized border of the world, closely guarded by dozens of thousands soldiers.
Measuring 250km long and 4km wide, this place became a real natural reserve where 67% of animal and vegetal species of the peninsula are represented, thanks to the lack of terrestrial conflicts.
Which is not the case of maritime borders for they are contested.
But this Cold War scar mustn't make us forget that cooperation existed: since 2002, South-Korean workers were engaged in the Special Economic Zone of Kaesong,
and regularly crossed the border.
Yet, in February 2016, Seoul called back its workers to denounce the war-like speech of its neighbour and its recent nuclear test.
In fact, North Korea presents a much moreauthoritatarian regime than its neighbours.
In theory, the state is ruled by a Korea's Workers Party, which disposes an extreme majority at the People's Assembly.
In pratice, the power is monopolised by the executive branch, but is not dependant of one personn only, because the Supreme leader has to maintain balance between the Army, the Party and mostly the ambitions and the nuisance of his subordonates.
The country has known 3 leaders who passed their power from father to son:
Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un.
And each one could correspond to a specific historic period.
Kim Il-sung, the beloved regime founder.
He was the captain of a prosperous country until the end of the 1970's, when North Korea began to stagnate while the Soviet Union was shrinking.
Religiously venerated, he officially continues to rule North Korea from the afterlife, thanks to his "Eternal president" title.
Kim Jong-il, the austere and discreet president who would have pronounced only one public speech in 17 years of power.
He is assimilated to the catastrophical misery from the 1990's, a period called "the arduous march" which may have caused 200,000 deaths or more.
Officially, the causeof this disaster are natural phenomenons between 1994 and 1998.
In truth, the situation was provoked by the end of Soviet imports of agricultural machinery and manufactures.
A whole economic system had to be reformed, when the Red Cross intervened for the first time in North Korea.
He also illustrated himself with his arm wrestling with the US, with whom he wanted to exchange his nuclear program against a political recognition and a material support.
He aslo had to tolerate black marcket and corruption in order to save his regime in crisis.
Finally, Kim Jong-un, the less experimented from the three.
In power at 29, he looks to evoke his grand-father figure, always happy when he visits his population.
His objective is to show that the dark hours of his country are over,
and that the independance granted by the nuclear bomb will allow him to continue to improve the quality of North-Korean lifes, while he's reforming his economy.
The secret of that kind of dynasty resides in a clever mix of national memory, and monopolisation of political power, and a quest for definitive sovereignty. (A country deprived of its destiny Korean socialism Nuclear security and global crisis)
"When whales clash, shrimps have broken backs"
This Korean proverb perfectly summarize the past of a country trapped between great powers.
The feeling of a Korean destiny deprived by foreign interventions has been crystallized and maintained in Pyongyang,
while every Korean draw their patriotism from the forced division of their nation.
Chinese peoples, Manchu, Mongols, Japanese, French, American,... the invaders list is even longer that many times, the control of Korea wasn't the main objective of the interventions.
And this because of the geographical position of the country.
As early a the 17th century, after Japanese and Manchu invasions, ruine and famine provoked a strong resentment in the peninsula.
And the Korean monarchy, shamed by defeats, refused any contact with the external world.
The Hermit Kingdom was born.
It's in the 19th that Korea had to confront again the rest of the world
Catholic missionaries met strong hostilities when they weren't executed.
And China's fate, cut into multiple concessions by Western powers, drugged with opium, manipulated and economically exploited,
led Korea to adopt xenophobic laws.
In 1884, the peninsula was covered by engraved pannel, saying:
"No to the barbarian invasion of Westerners, to sign with them is to sell the country"
Yet, during the new war between China and Japan, in 1894-1895,
Korea went back to its status of middle ground, and ended up under japanese influence after Japan's victory.
Japanese empire authority was completed in 1905, after a victory against Russia, and in 1910 when Korea was officially integrated. (In 1895, the Korean queen Min, is raped, stabbed and burnt alive by a japanese comando; she was planning to make an alliance with China or Russia against Japan)
Japanese colonisation period began, and still constitutes a fundamental element in modern Korean identity.
Because the Japanese occupation and repression, entailed the first nationalist dynamic of a country deprived of its culture.
Indeed, to legitimize their arrival in the peninsula, the Japanese created the believe that Japan and Korea were the same country, the same people, with the same culture... Japanese culture of course. (Naisen ittaï doctrine, Japan and Korea are one)
Every Korean knowledge was erased from school programms, only Japanese language had to rule,
political religion of shintoism was obligatory,
Seoul was renamed Keijo, every citizen had to adopt a Japanese name. (Map of renamed Korean places)
Yet , the trauma caused by the 35 years -long occupation, doesn't stop there.
While Japanese imperialism spread accross Manchuria in the North and China in the East, dozens of thousands of sexual Korean slaves, euphemistically called "Comfort women", were traded among the imperial troops.
Koreans were also used as tests (guinea pigs?) for the 731 Unit, a biological weapons center,
which had nothing to envy from an extermination camp, where several diseases as plague, cholera and typhus were tested among near populations.
Between 1939 and 1945, at least 600,000 Korean workers were deported to Japan to serve in factories, in order to maintain war effort.
If Japanese colonization allowed the industrialization and administrative modernization of the country,
the several war crimes and mass slavery still haunt the relations between Seoul and Tokyo.
However, for Pyongyang, which first legitimacy rests on the resistance against the invader, it is out of question to forget such a trauma, neither to forgive to those who collaborated.
In August 15th 1945, Korea was officially free, until it was separated in two parts ten days later between Soviets and Americans.
Unable to agree upon the fate of the peninsula, the two superpowers were already convinced by Cold War mentality.
Each organized their own elections, on both sides of the 38th parallel, which became a political border.
August 15th 1948, South Korea Republic was proclaimed, followed by People's Democratic Republic of NK the September 9th.
The man chose by the Soviets was a peasant son, noticed in the anti-Japanese guerilla in Manchuria: Kim Song-ju or Kim Il-sung as stated his war name.
Even if his activity of resistant was true, his presentation to the North Korean people didn't proceed as expected.
Convinced that it would meet a warlord, the 70,000 Pyongyang residents come to see him, discovered a young man of 33 years old, with a simple attitude, and surrounded by Soviet advisors.
Yet, the local population already paid the price of political puppets and foreign influence.
Some even left the ceremony before its end. (Fictive images, its a North Korean reconstitution)
In Seoul, the US brought back a well known anti-communist, the President Syngman Rhee,
whose authoritarian power only ended as a pure dictature
On his side, Kim Il-sung inspired himself from his stalinian "godfather".
Without considering Korean history, both super-powers pushed the Korean pars to tear each other apart,
while colonialism had grown the idea of a real reunification.
The Korean war started on June, 25th 1950, when the North attacked, and can be seen in three phases.
The first one testifies a quicke victory of the North to the extreme south of the peninsula.
The second one exposes the intervention of an international army of 300,000 soldiers, whose 260,000 were Anglo-Saxon, with a United Nations warrant.
The Soviet Union quickly understood that it wasn't a good idea to boycott the meetings of the Security Council, because the decision has been taken while its absence.
The frontline was pushed back to the Chinese border. But even at this time, the young communist Mao Zedong's China didn't want American troops at its border, and supported the North Korean buffer state.
So, for the third phase of the conflict, Chinese army swept Korea up to the 38th parallel for 2 years, with inconclusive talks,
until US President Eisenhower came to power.
He wanted the war to end quickly and demanded an armistice, otherwise he would use the atomic bomb, 8 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
An armistice was signed on July, 27th 1953 between the United Nations, China and North Korea, "until a true peace treaty is signed", this treaty, Koreans are still waiting for it.
Undeniably, the Korean war is the most important matrix of North Korean mentality, mostly for its extreme violence,
comparable to Vietnam war, or even worse if we acknowledge that Korea was more urbanized.
Moreover, images were scarce, and because of the censorship, there were few informations about the US carpet bombing.
Still imprecise, the numbers indicate 1 million dead soldiers for 2 million dead civilians, or 3 years of war for 3 million dead.
The lack of critical feedback about this conflict entailed on what many called: "the forgotten war".
American historian Bruce Cumings depicts a very severe review of the US government of the time,
which, according to him, didn't look any pacific compromise to conciliate the old collaborants from the southern police, army and government of Seoul, and the communists of Pyongyang.
The author also reports the means used to destroy the North Koreans from the air, without totally exclude the rumors of chemical weapons or the help of officiers from the 731 Unit.
All this because on the ground, Kim Il-sung's divisions were dreadful with their experience in anti-Japanese resistance and in Mao Zedong's civil war.
More than 635,000 tons of bomb and 32,557 tons of napalm were used.
Which is more than was bombed during the Pacific campaign against Japan.
Even worse is the fact that when no other military was available, the bombings were focused on civilian infrastructures,
the dams to cut electricity and agriculture, or simply cities, sometimes completely razed, like Pyongyang.
The brutality deployed during this war, lead by the same generals that crushed Japan, is paradoxical, because it was at this time that the US began to look like the "policeman of the world", after atomizing Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and hesitating to atomize North Korea as well. (Over a period of 3 years, we should have killed something like 20% of the population" Gl. Curtis LeMay)
Here is the origin of a constant foreign bombing fear, hammered by the North Korean regime and symbolically recalled by US Air Force drills in South Korea.
Sometimes, we can hear that the Cold War never ended in Korea, yet if we look at the national memory, it is the Korean war that is not over, or even the Japanese colonization.
On the other hand, it has been assumed that anti-americanism was present before the war, and that Kim Il-sung only used the war to confort his nationalist and racist vision where Koreans formed the "cleanest race".
After the war, Pyongyang understood that its moutainous country was difficult to invade by land but that it could never control its aerial space against the US and their allies.
Nearly all the military capabilities are underground, inside a gigantic network of tunnels to be protected from any bombing,
even the Pyongyang metro is located at a 100 meters deep, and is also an anti-atomic shelter.
Once put in its context, the paranoid state seems clearer.
More than an emergency state, it is a war state that justifies the powers of the North Korean governement
From this memory maintained by the state, the leader is depicted as a warrior and an architect, two values that the Kim family must expose to its population.
As for the Chinese solidarity, and the reconstruction of Pyongyang by the Soviets, they were both less credited
letting almost to forget that it was the great Cold war players that created North Korea. ("Remember the imperialist wolves")
Thereby, at the begining of its reign, Kim Il-sung understood that his power would last if he linked himself with a national focus, behind which everyone would fit, willingly or by force... (Fictional images, NK reconstitution)
The writer and diplomat Mirabeau wrote about 18th century Prussia, Germany's ancestor:
it is not a state with an army, it's an army with a state.
Well, with North Korea it is not a state conducted by a family, its a family that constructed its own state.
Since its establishment, North Korean power considerably evolved, because nothing prefigured such political grabing from Kim family.
Despite Soviet-Chinese origins, North Korean doctrine surpassed socialism as exported by Moscow,
in order to create its own ideology, deeply anchored in Korean culture.
As a proof: since 2010, the word "communism" vanished from the Constitution.
What happened?
A frequently misknown reality is the prosperity of North Korea.
Until the end of the 1960's, Pyongyang was economically ahead of Seoul.
From 1945, Stalin sent thousands of experts to revive an industrialized country and rich in coal, iron, and uranium. (NK is believed to be the first global reserve of rare-earth elements, precious metals used in electronics for example )
which wasn't the case of the agricultural South whose the US mistrusted.
Moscow's human and financial support allowed Kim Il-sung to construct and reconstruct in a few years only after the war an advanced country in comparison of the southern neighbour,
which was several times subject to important demonstrations, often repressed in blood with the police of the Japanese colonization. (1948-1949, the police kills 30,000 communist militants, children included, in Jeju island, which population was about 300,000 personns)
Benefiting of a considerable advantage, Kim Il-Sung concentrated very fast the army, the Party and the government's direction around his body.
As early as 1948, statues of him were already erected, as "father of the Nation".
However, Moscow's unconditional support short-lived.
Three years after Stalin's death in 1953,
Nikita Khrouchtchov, at the Soviet Party Congress, said that the Father of the Peoples was a tyrant, whom cult of personality paralyzed the country for 30 years.
Still in 1956, during the 3rd Congress of the Korean Party, the USSR delegate, Leonid Brejnev, promoted the "leninist standards of collective management"
Kim Il-sung understood the message: his old protector wanted his head.
When the pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet factions of the Party tried to overthrow him, the Korean leader took advantage of the recent division between China and USSR to organize a major purge against his opponents.
In 1961, for the 4th Korean Congress, Kim Il-sung had made disappear every opposition, and had placed loyal subjects to high responsability positions.
The 1967purge against the 2/3 of regional senior executives only extended the end of political pluralism.
Kim Il-sung had vainquished the supporters of foreign doctrines from Moscow and Beijing, he then introduced himself as a true Korean.
His personnality cult was definitly acquired in 1974 when the Monolithical Ideological System has been adopted;
or ten prinicples which present the Korean leader as a model to follow, to whom the people must obey for thanking him about pursuing a real Korean ideology. (We must give the best of ourselves to unify all the society with the revolutionary ideology of Kim Il-sung; We must honor the great leader Kim Il-sung with all our fidelity; etc.)
Wrongly considered as the regime's creation, the Juche concept refers to the faculty of acting alone, and means in everyday language "autonomy" or "independance".
In a political context, the Juche is the total opposition to the millenary idea of submission to the great power, here China or the Western powers.
And that's exactly what Pyongyang is blaming Seoul for.
During the Japanese colonization, the Juche was conceived and linked to the unity of the people, welded by its Korean identity,
or a strong reaction against the cultural extermination organized by the occupant. (Shin Chae-ho, dead in 1936, anarchist historian, he might be the first theorist of the Juche)
In 1955, Kim Il-sung rose for the first time, in private, the idea that marxism-leninism had to be adapted to the Korean society.
But he awaited 10 more years to make public this nationalist turning. (The concept has been adapted internationally by communist or third world movements, like the Black Panthers in the US for example)
he eventually wrote it in the Constitution in 1972, and 20 years later, the Constitution was no longer mentioning marxism-leninism.
From this doctrine, one must recall 3 pillars: a complete sovereignty insured by economical and military independance.
Pyongyang's famous madness seems now to become a clear rationality.
The nuclear programm and economy developpment allow an absolute independance in front of other nations, and then a dialogue of equals.
And the carrier of such a project could only be the North Korean leader, whom power monopoly and quasi-divine cult associate very well with this national mission.
"If the Revolution is not achieved in my lifetime, it will be continued by my son and my grand-son"
That's what Kim Il-sung would have said in 1943
The eternal president was right, each of his heirs constructed a historic legitimacy to strengthen Kim family's power, and make it look superhuman over the years.
To anchor himself in national history, Kim Il-sung told that it was his grand-father that repelled the American intervention of 1866.
He hired archeologists to link his figure to the first mythical king of Korea (Dangun, the son of the sky), which his tomb, located near Pyongyang, was restored in 1994.
Kim Jong-il's birthplace was changed to corespond to the sacred mountain Paektu.
As for Kim Jong-un, his experts discovered in Pyongyang the secret lair of the mythical creature belonging to another Korean king.
This political manipulation of History let us think that a dynastic power in North Korea wasn't obvious.
As an example, the reference "hereditary succession" had a very severe definition in the Dictionary of Political Terminology of 1970, two years later, the definition vanished from the new edition. (hereditary custom of exploitation societies; issue des sociétés esclavagistes, la succession héréditaire a été adoptée par les seigneurs féodaux comme moyen de perpétuer leur pouvoir dictatorial)
Kim Il-sung considered very early to make his son his successor, to the detriment of his brother, opposed to the Juched idea and personnality cult, whom also had political support.
Among the new purges between 1973 and 1987, the Party's publications were very clear: the succession would be from father to son.
The benevolent leader could then peacefully die in 1994, three years later, after the national mourning and depite few critics, his son took the power without problems, a political feat much harder to repeat for Kim Jong-un.
In August 2008, Kim Jong-il suffered a brain injury, he then understood that time was short to prepare his successor by default: his third son.
Because Kim Jon-nam, the first son, who should have be his heir, has been discredited in Japan where he attempted to viisit Disneyland with his family.
As for the second son, he was judged too soft.
The "Morning Star Prince"'s political carreer was therefore constructed from scratch.
He followed his father everywhere and his time of appearance on television rose, just as his military ranks.
New elections, with only one candidate, allowed the arrival of younger executives, supposedly faithful to Kim Jong-un.
At the death of the Korean leader, on December 17th 2011, everything seemed prepared for his succession.
But he was only 29 years old, and he knew that he wasn't accepted by the others officials.
The senior officials were eliminated, especially those who helped him to carry his father's coffin, and even those who trained him politically.
Jang Song-thaek, his uncle by alliance, with many political fonctions, and follower of Chinese interests, was arrested and executed in 2013.
If something should have happened to the heir, it is assumed that his more liberal uncle would have been his successor,
or support Kim Jong-nam, assassinated in Kuala Lumpur's airport 4 years later.
It is thus free from any internal threat, thanks to purges, that Kim Jong-un imposed himself as an undisputed leader in the 2016 Party COngress.
And showed to China that North Korean power would remain North Korean.
Socialism's reform is an important commun point between these leaders.
Because with time, the concept became a kind of permanent liberation movement,
and that's why every Kim must show himself as an ideologist.
Once in charge, Kim Il-sung applied the Juche, his son Kim Jong-il, after the famine and the economical collapse of the country, wrote in 1998 the Army priority in the Constitution (Songun Doctrine).
Namely a pact with the Army to keep its fidelity, in exchange it became the first economic and political actor by the businesses mangement.
As for Kim Jong-un, his addition to the national ideology was the double push (Byongjin doctrine), the nuclear development and the economic reforms.
In other words, the strengthening of the Army with the bomb while taking back its power over businesses and politics for the benefit of the Party.
Every time, the goal is to adapt socialism and the previous Kim legacy to this actual situation, and never oppose the way shown by Kim Il-sung.
This remodeling of socialism with a Korean touch, doubled by a repressive and violent system, allow to install a solid state in North Korea,
much more stable than the South Korean governement which encountered 2 coups d'Etat, assination attempts, and a destitution for corruption.
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