IS THE KIM FAMILY REGIME RATIONAL AND WHY DON'T THE NORTH KOREAN PEOPLE REBEL?

• Author: Sylvester, John

Text:

IS THE KIM FAMILY REGIME RATIONAL AND WHY DON'T THE NORTH KOREAN PEOPLE REBEL?

By David S. Maxwell, Georgetown University

http://www.fpri.org/enotes/2012/201201.maxwell.nkorea.html

Reviewed by John Sylvester

Rejecting economic dynamism, North Korea is an outlier in East Asia. A traditional Korean tyrannical and isolationist kingdom, its generals and courtiers now prop up a stripling new king. That elite desperately wants to protect the ancien regime and its privileges. The security system, therefore, is modern and so far able to suppress unhappy peasants.

The author of this paper, David Maxwell, is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel who served in Korea, the Philippines, and Japan and is now with the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He maintains that the vital national interest of the regime is the protection of Kim family rule, and to that end it acts rationally towards both external and internal threats. It wants nuclear weapons because it has seen that the regimes in Iraq and Libya fell because they did not possess them. Nor is the regime suicidal; despite its many provocative acts, it will avoid war with South Korea and the U.S. because it knows it would lose.

The regime is ruthless towards those who...