Who needs North Korea?

(To Giampiero Venturi)
07/02/16

This night North Korea launched a long-range missile, as planned by Defense Online a few days ago. Officially it served to put a "satellite for terrestrial observation" into orbit; much more likely it is a test for ballistic launches of strategic interest.

The incident sparked the United Nations routine protests, worried about the violation of Pyongyang's resolutions and of course those of South Korea, Japan and the USA. Seul, who considers Pyongyang an idiot twin brother capable of anything, has also hastened to point out the failure of the rocket explosion test near Jeju Island. As was normal to expect, vice versa the launch was enhanced by the official North Korean news releases and television news.

What's happening in the peninsula?

Basically nothing. More or less every six months, Pyongyang raises the volume of the Cold War that separates the two Koreas, fueling the last page of the '900 still in vogue.

To argue that the communist regime shakes the waters off to hide internal problems, leaves the time it finds. No autarkic dictatorial system would be able to survive for decades if it were not tolerated or even supported from the outside in some way.

The legitimate question to ask is how the record longevity of a regime can be objectively out of all parameters of the 21st century. The end of the Cold War should have absorbed Pyongyang in its quicksand, like all ideological systems oriented towards real socialism. Why does North Korea resist?

Let's take a look.

In the 1994, Kim Il-Sung, father of the communist nation, dies. Known as the "Great Leader", it was to megalomania like soy with spring rolls. He is succeeded by his son Kim Jong-Il. Of the father he takes the ideas and the cult of himself and the name declines in "Dear Leader".

In the 2011 Christmas days, Kim Jong-Il also dies. After the funerals and state cries, leader of North Korea becomes Kim Jong-Un, son of Kim Jong-Il, then niece of Kim Il-Sung. 

He is called "Great Successor" or "Brilliant Companion" and his haircut according to an indiscretion, would have been "highly recommended" to all male students of the republic.

Haircuts and paranoia aside, North Korea has shown a total legal and anthropological rigidity for almost 70 years.

The visit criteria are the same: practically impossible to obtain a personal entry visa, some remote possibilities apply to the collective one. The refrain is always identical. A regime official attaches himself to the tourist and accompanies him to the due places. Photographs and videos are only possible upon indication.

The absence of commercial signs and the dreamlike-suspended atmosphere that reigns in Pyongyang allows us to reiterate the question: is it possible that such a system can survive?

Net of the atomic threat, all to be verified, we can argue that North Korea is basically comfortable:

  • as a political and diplomatic experimental workshop of China, the great brother of the regime since the war of 50-53
  • as a potential threat to South Korea and Japan, which allows the US to justify the potential of the Seventh Fleet.

In this regard it is worth remembering that the only nuclear aircraft carrier with a permanent base outside the American territory is assigned to the Pacific Fleet (the Washington, stationed in Yokosuka).

If the regime in North Korea failed, we could imagine a reunification on the German model of the 1990. The peninsula would become a great South Korea and the parallel 38 would go down in history.

All too evident, however, is to point out that the American military presence, officially necessary to contain more than anything else Pyongyang, in second and third reading also has other purposes: to cool down the Chinese pressures between Japan and the South China Sea; maintain a level of strategic superiority vis-a-vis Russian Pacific ports.

Do China and the US need North Korea?

To argue that if there were no Pyongyang, another would have to be invented is not entirely wrong.

(Photo: author)