18 [Engaging North Korea: an interview with Tony Namkung: Critical Asian Studies: Vol 50, No 2

Engaging North Korea: an interview with Tony Namkung: Critical Asian Studies: Vol 50, No 2

Journal
Critical Asian Studies
Volume 50, 2018 - Issue 2

Engaging North Korea: an interview with Tony Namkung
Kevin Gray
Pages 167-175 | Published online: 25 Apr 2018

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https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2018.1455799

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Introduction

K.A. “Tony” Namkung has been intimately involved for many years in fostering dialogue between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the Republic of Korea (ROK), Japan, and the United States. These have included unofficial (Track II) and official discussions, as well as assistance to humanitarian and other not-for-profit organizations working in the DPRK. As part of his efforts, Dr. Namkung has made more than seventy trips to the DPRK. He is currently a member of the National Committee on North Korea (NCNK).11

Established by Mercy Corps in 2004, the National Committee on North Korea works to build trust between the United States and the DPRK, improve cooperation and exchanges between the two sides, and promote peace on the Korean Peninsula.

For more information, see: https://www.ncnk.org/who-we-are/mission.

View all notes
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Q: Much of the commentary around the Korean issue contains implicit or explicit assumptions about what North Korea wants and what North Korea’s endgame is. The more hawkish opinion tends to look at the country as having the objective of reunifying the peninsula by force using nuclear weapons to blackmail the United States. Those people are who are more engagement-oriented say that North Korea is just trying to protect its own system and establish the kind of security it needs to achieve this. Could you start off by giving your views on that question, and what you think North Korea is trying to achieve and what its long-term goals are?

A: I think that one thing to point out is that every threatening statement they have made in public, every single one without exception, and there have been hundreds, maybe thousands now over the years, is always conditional. It is always, “as long as the US maintains its policy of hostility … ,” then, this, and that without fail. I do not think there has been a single instance where they have issued a 100 percent threatening statement without that proviso, that condition. They do not observe all the usual conventions of social intercourse and normal human behavior. I do not think they are quite ready to have a full normalization of relations and a peace treaty, and so on.

But clearly, they want and need a new relationship with the U.S. So, the second part of my answer would be, “Well, why?” If you look at the events surrounding Kim Il Sung’s final years in the early 1990s, you can see a shift in strategic thinking. With the prospect of a communist system worldwide that had collapsed before their very eyes, no longer having the ability to play off Moscow against Beijing as they did so cleverly to ensure their survival over many decades, and China going the way of the capitalist roader, I think that Kim felt that he had to turn and reach an accommodation with the West, especially with the United States – being in their perception the ringleader. They also needed to start up talks with both Japan and South Korea, who are always subordinate to the U.S. Not that he had any particular love for any of these countries, and not that he expected the DPRK to ride off into the sunset with the U.S. at any time.

But in order to secure the survival of the Korean people into the future, I think that he felt he needed to move away from that old bipolar communist system and reach an accommodation with these three countries in particular. So, if he can do that, he can turn the U.S. into kind of a distant friend. Don’t get too close, but you are just not very good at nation-building, occupation or, you don’t know a thing about those things, all you know is the military. So do not get too close, but be a distant friend, so that you are kind of a protector – a shield of some kind against would be predators in the neighborhood, especially China, Russia, and Japan.

So I think those are the motivations. Nobody ever stops to ask, “Why are they talking to these three countries at all if they hate them so much?” Why? You would think that they would have just said, “Go to hell!” and, “We’re not talking to you.” You cannot imagine ISIS inviting the New York Philharmonic to Raqqa to put on a concert where these suicide bombers stand up at the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner. What is that all about? People don’t ask these kinds of questions.

Q: From the beginning of this year, with Kim Jong Un’s New Year’s speech, and now with the talks surrounding the Olympics, it looks like there has been a sharp change in strategy on the part of the North Koreans. And to some extent South Korea is responding to this. What do you think this tells us about North Korea’s strategy? And also, where do you think this will go? Do you think that this will lead to a new era of renewal of inter-Korean cooperation or a Sunshine Policy Mark II?

A: I’m not sure what the future holds for this – whether it will spark something more substantive or longer term that involves the U.S., but it is clearly a tactical move at this stage. I don’t think that you can see it as a strategic reorientation of the sort, pitting off Beijing against Moscow, Beijing against Washington, and sometimes Seoul against Washington. They are very expert at doing this. They are tactical in nature. I don’t think that it suggests that they’re thinking of North–South relations as on the verge of reunification or something like that. So I think the U.S. administration at the moment is in a quandary over how to interpret these events that are happening before their very eyes. Obviously, they’re following them very closely to see where they lead.

Q: There is a lot of a commentary within the United States that sees this as kind of North Korean grand strategy to split South Korea from the U.S. alliance, so you would suggest that’s overplayed?

A: I think so. I don’t think it’s anything like splitting the alliance. Again, it’s a chess move to put the pressure on the U.S. to come to the table. And this is a little known fact that the U.S. has been extending the olive branch almost unilaterally for many months now, with the North Koreans refusing to come to the table. So, this can be seen as part of that strategy of not responding in order to put pressure on the United States and to get the U.S. to clarify its position. All these different things that different people are saying reminds me of one of the negotiators saying that, when they negotiated with the South, the South would come with the National Intelligence Agency, Foreign Ministry, Defense Ministry, Blue House,22 The Blue House, in Seoul, is the official residence of the head of state of the Republic of Korea.View all notes military, and in the middle of the night, they would all come to him in different groups saying, “Don’t pay any attention to what you heard today across the table, this is our real position.” So, they need clarity on what is the position before they can respond.

Q: What do you see as the potential for inter-Korean cooperation? Because I can think of several barriers, one is the climate of the international sanctions at the moment, which may raise questions about whether things like the Kaesong Complex 33 The Kaesong Industrial Zone is a special administrative region of the DPRK established by the North Korean government in 2002. It is located approximately ten kilometers north of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), the official boundary between the two Koreas. At the core of the zone is the Kaesong Industrial Park, designed to attract private investment from South Korean companies. By 2013, approximately 53,000 DPRK citizens were employed in the park by 123 South Korean companies. On February 10, 2016, the ROK government of Park Geun-hye ordered all South Korean firms to cease operations and withdraw from Kaesong.View all notes can be restarted. There is also the issue of the domestic politics of South Korea as well, which hindered inter-Korean cooperation under Roh Moo-hyun. 44 Roh Moo-hyun (1946–2009) served as President of South Korea from 2003 until 2008.View all notes So what are the possibilities for renewed inter-Korean cooperation?

A: Well, to the extent that this is a ploy to get the United States to clarify its position and make concessions of the kind that they want, I see this going in several possible different directions. If the U.S. will come on board to discuss serious issues like the military exercises55 The United States and South Korean forces conduct annual joint military exercises in South Korea.View all notes and the removal of the policy of hostility and so on, I don’t see this inter-Korean relationship blooming into some magnificent display of reunification hopes, but more as a means to what is going on between themselves and Washington. And that is always the name of the game. They understand that if you can get Washington, all the others will fall into place. It doesn’t make any sense to start up something with the South or Japan or anybody else if you don’t have Washington.

Q: So just to come back to Washington’s perspective at the recent UN Command meeting in Vancouver there was this message being given by [U.S. Secretary of Defense James] Mattis and [former U.S. Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson that if negotiation doesn’t work, then the military option is still on the table. How realistic do you think that is? Is that just bluster or do you think this is something that is seriously being considered by the U.S.?

A: Different parties have different thoughts on that, and that’s part of the current problem that we face. But I don’t think people like Mattis or Tillerson actually believe that this is anything more than a negotiating ploy. But there are others, possibly people like [U.S. National Security Advisor H.R.] McMaster, that think otherwise, and so it’s very hard to know which ways things are going to go.

Q: How do you think that North Koreans respond to this? Because it’s difficult for us to know even in Washington what’s really going on. In the Trump administration, there are different conflicting messages. Do you have any sense of how North Koreans are understanding or responding to this?

A: Their responses range all over the map. For example, “This guy is pretty easy and all we need to do is let him build a Trump Tower in downtown Pyongyang,” to “What is he talking about?” Or, “One day he says one thing and the next day says something else” to “Maybe we can do a deal with this guy. He seems to be a different sort. Doesn’t have all the Cold War hang ups, and to the extent that he’s America first, he’s not talking about human rights.” So maybe there is a deal to be had there. But as I say, the current situation is of utter confusion and frustration. Not knowing what to believe.

Q: With regards to U.S. strategy itself, how likely do you think that is, that North Korea can be persuaded to abandon its nuclear weapons program through the current approach?

A: With the current approach, I don’t think there is any hope of that. None whatsoever. But the approach is I say, up to now, officially has been much more forward leaning. I can’t go into the details, but there are many, many concessions that the U.S. is prepared to make. So, the ball is really in the U.S.’s court in some ways, that if it can achieve clarity, if Tillerson has Trump squarely behind him, I mean Tillerson and Mattis together, I think that we will see a number of things breaking in 2018.

Q: Part of what we are interested in is, you have got these three or four decades of just trying to understand this place that most Americans don’t seem eager at all to think about. And you have made the point about thinking of North Koreans as just subjects and not these objects and, that’s something that we don’t hear in the American media.

A: Historical materialism has no place in North Korean thinking. You ask young North Koreans, “Have you ever read Das Kapital?” and they will stare at you and say, “Well, what is that?” This is a completely different kind of system. It’s not an ideology-based system. It’s one that is based on the notion of a messiah who’s come to free the children of Israel from their bondage in Egypt and take them to the promised land flowing with milk and honey. They are eternally grateful to this man [Kim Il Sung] who came and appeared out of nowhere, as the Bible might prophesize, in the last days to lead his people out of bondage to Japan and into national salvation. And so, they think.

They’re thinking subjects and masters of their own fate. There are no stages in human history that we have to go through. It’s not that kind of thing. This is a drama about how Korea was enslaved by Japan. A lot of people collaborated with the Japanese, who ended up in the South. A lot of people resisted, who ended up in the North. And that’s the story. It calls for “thinking subjects.” You see this all the time. So when you see individual North Koreans and their behavior, obviously they are operating under something from on high, all of them within that framework. But they all seem to have individually a kind of self-assurance, self-knowledge, and self-assuredness that you don’t always see in the South. You see more obsequious serf-like behavior in the South, people switching loyalties very easily. That’s what they [North Koreans] mean by “self-reliance.” The concept of self-reliance is very important to them. I’m just saying, as a humanist myself, although I was trained in the social sciences to some extent, we need more people who understand how others are thinking about their world, rather than just being acted upon by the U.S.

Q: So much of the discourse here in Washington is U.S.–North Korea and U.S.–South Korea. But North Korea has relations with a lot of other countries, and it is very active with international organizations. So how do North Koreans see themselves as international subjects, more broadly than within the context of Northeast Asia?

A: I think that there was a time under Kim Il Sung in the 1950s and 1960s, nonaligned nations, they sent droves of people to places like Africa and taught them how to grow food, believe it or not. They trained them in military hardware and exported a lot of arms to a lot of troubled countries when they thought they had a role to play internationally. But I think with the collapse of communism and their inability to play off Beijing and Moscow against each other, they were left with nothing but the option of reaching out to the U.S. Not to become friends. They’ve never been interested in friendship. But to make sure that the U.S. doesn’t pose a military threat to them. And so all of the best and the brightest people in the Foreign Ministry they gravitated towards the American Affairs Bureau. Basically you can think of the entire [DPRK] Foreign Ministry as kind of an American operation, because if they can’t resolve this, then there’s nothing else left. And this includes international organizations or their relations with a bunch of other countries that they still have. This is it. This is called the “seed theory.” If you look at Kim Jong Il’s On the Art of the Cinema,66 In this book released in 1973, Kim Jong Il, son of Kim Il Sung and father of current DPRK President Kim Jong Un, described in detail his “seed” theory.View all notes you know he was a movie director in his early years, there’s this notion of the seed theory that in all the spheres of life, if you can grasp the essence of something, and of the seed, then everything else will fall into place. So don’t bother with multilateral this and that. America is the sole superpower, and if you can get America, everything else will follow. You see that in agriculture, you have just the right seed that guarantees you a bountiful harvest. You see it in biological succession. If you have just the right seed you can be assured of good governance for decades to come. So this notion is very deeply implanted in them. If you want to get to the core of the thing, the essence of the thing, and bring it under control, then you’re in good shape.

Q: You hae just alluded to something else there which is interesting, which is that the view outside of North Korea is that the country is a very unified state with a single leader at the top in a very totalitarian system, whereas you are alluding to differences in opinion in different parts of the state. I have always thought that the outside view tends to reproduce the view you get in the North Korean media, which is that Kim Jong Un is the center of everything. Could you talk a bit more about that?

A: It doesn’t make any sense. You have a country of twenty-five million people. If you could control people the way that most people think they’re under control, you’d need half of the population just doing nothing but monitoring the other half. This is not a huge society by any means, but it’s a substantial society of twenty-five million people. You would expect there to be regional variations. Just look at the South. You see the southwestern provinces versus the southeast. This has defined South Korean politics for the past thirty years. You might expect to see the same regional tensions in the North, and tensions between the military on the one hand and the Party and government apparatus, on the other, sometimes corresponding to those regional variations. Some people say that enhanced border guard security explains the decline in people coming to the South [from the North]. But if you stretched out the border between North Korea and China, it would extend from New York to North Dakota. You just cannot control and monitor that distance. The other way to think about this is: how do you get 30,000 people into the South? It is really easy to get away, anyone can do it.

Q: How does that heterogeneity of the state relate to the way that the United States and other powers deal with the nuclear issue? There were arguments in the 2000s that said that if you take a hardline approach to North Korea then that strengthens the militaristic interests in the country and undermines the position of reformers. Do you agree with that view?

A: No, I do not think so. That’s a kind of Latin America politics textbook approach. I don’t think that is the kind of situation that we face in North Korea. To be sure, there are people, especially in the government ministries, who are more open and more interested in more realistic solutions vis-à-vis South Korea and the United States. To the extent that we continue to threaten, that may strengthen the hand of the more militaristically minded. But they are all militarists as far as I am concerned. The entire place is an armed camp. I’m not sure that that policy of threatening this or that makes much difference.

Q: A further question is about the way that a lack of understanding of North Korea feeds into policy about North Korea. Under the Obama administration, it was based on this implicit notion that North Korea will collapse soon. Intelligence coming from South Korea under the conservative governments played into that. Could you give your views on this collapsist scenario? How realistic is that?

A: This idea of Korean revolution has been around for nearly a century now. I may be missing something there but if a system hangs around for a long period of time, I tend to think it is pretty stable. Do I approve of the system? That is a whole different matter. As academics, we have to understand that any system that has been around that long, I mean it has been thirty years since the Soviet Union collapsed and yet the North Koreans are still going at full force, that there is something going on there that we have no idea about.

Q: And one last question about North Korea’s relations with other powers, it seems there’s been a shift in how China relates to international sanctions towards North Korea. Do you think this is a genuine shift? Or is it just for show?

A: Yes, it is for real. You could see this building up even twenty or thirty years ago. Younger Chinese were getting really fed up with North Korea. I mean really fed up. And the young people today, they just have no interest. There are depictions of Kim Jong Un as a madman and so on all over the social media. But I heard a North Korean diplomat say just the other day, “With all of these sanctions coming from China, we might retarget our missiles.”

Q: Going back to the Vancouver meeting, there is this idea that, in the American imaginary, China plays a key role in solving the North Korea issue. How likely do you think it is that China can really play any particular role in solving the North Korean issue?

A: I do not see the North Koreans allowing them to play a role. That is the simple fact. And if they want to cut off their oil, so be it. They don’t want to buy our metals, so be it. I just don’t see any interest in looking to China as a positive force. All of the attention is focused on Washington. All of it. So we face in 2018 what could be very interesting. We had a full year of bluster and fire and fury and military options and so on. We still have those, but things are calming down a little bit. And the message is more mixed, the signals are more mixed. And depending on what happens in South Korea in February, given the business-like nature of our fearless leader, we might see something happen. I don’t think he’s kidding when he says, “Sure, I’ll sit down and talk to him. Maybe we can become friends!” It is bizarre, but stranger things have happened.

Q: A further question I have which is about forms of engagement with North Korea. Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland argued recently that it is true that sanctions have not really worked against North Korea but neither has engagement. By engagement, they are talking about quid pro quos in terms of previous negotiations about nuclear weapons but they are also talking about Chinese trade and investment which they say has not had much of an impact on the investment environment within North Korea. And the Sunshine Policy is also held up as being a failure of engagement.

A: I do not know what North Koreans think of the industrial complex or tourism or any of these projects or trade investment from China as anything more than just that. I think they are not political issues. They’re something less than that. So, I don’t think they think of those as forms of engagement. When you start talking about a peace treaty and ending the armistice and those kind of things, and possibly normalization of relations, although they have toned that down quite bit for the last five years, then you’re talking business. And that is engagement to them, not this other stuff. The other stuff is money you have to pay for the privilege of working with them.

Q: I am assuming this happens a lot when the history of human rights comes up, you face a kind of a hostile audience, e.g. “North Korea is this pariah state, and it’s a human rights violator and it has to be held to account.” How do you respond to that activist argument? And particularly in the context of South Korea when you add the evangelical Christian element to this too?

A: Now that you mentioned the evangelical Christian element, I was awakened one morning about two years ago in Pyongyang to the strings of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” So I got dressed quickly and went out to see what was going on, and found twelve American Christians, evangelicals, having their morning devotional, reading from the Bible and praying together and so on, and singing.

And what was really shocking was that after singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” in English, they sang it in Korean, for the entire hotel staff to hear. There are evangelical Christians and there are evangelical Christians. And if you’re out to try to undermine that system, you’re not the kind of evangelical that they like. But if you’re there to help, as the earliest missionaries who were so active in the North found out, when they built leprosaria and hospitals, took care of the poor and the downtrodden, which is why Pyongyang was called the “Jerusalem of the East” at that time, they respond when you’re nice to them. And if you have ulterior motives, they’ll lock you up. So I think I strayed a little bit from your question. It’s the political issues that have to be resolved. If they’re resolved, then we can get the International Red Cross to come in right away, to monitor and we can get the place to open up a little bit.

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Kevin Gray http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8456-8562

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Young Noh Jung, who transcribed this interview, and Linda Yarr, Director of Partnerships for International Strategies in Asia (https://pisa.elliott.gwu.edu/), who arranged this event.
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Notes on contributors

K.A. “Tony” Namkung was born in 1945 into a Korean family active in the Korean independence movement while politically exiled in Shanghai during the last decade of the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea. His grandfather, Dr. Namkung Hyuk, was Korea’s first Western-trained theologian, studying at Princeton Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary in the United States. He also was the first Korean faculty member at Pyongyang Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Tony Namkung grew up in Tokyo, Japan, where he attended private American schools. He holds a B.A. in history from Calvin College and a Ph.D. in Japanese history from the University of California at Berkeley. He taught in the History Department at UC-Berkeley and served for many years as the Deputy Director and Acting Director of Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies. After a three-year residence in Seoul in the mid-1980s, Dr. Namkung served as the Executive Director of the Asia Society in New York, President of the Shearman & Sterling Institute, Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Seton Hall University, and Senior Scholar at the Atlantic Council of the United States. For a decade he also served as Senior Advisor to Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, enabling the latter’s many visits to North Korea.

Kevin Gray is a Reader in International Relations at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. He has researched widely on the political economy of both North and South Korea. His current project focuses on economic development in North Korea. His research has been published in in Review of International Political Economy, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Pacific Review, North Korean Review, Globalizations, New Political Economy, the Third World Quarterly, and the New Left Review. His is also the author of Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalization (Routledge 2008) and Labor and Development in East Asia: Social Forces and Passive Revolution (Routledge 2015). He has co-edited, with Barry Gillis, People Power in an Era of Global Crisis: Rebellion, Resistance and Liberation (Routledge 2012) and Rising Powers and South-South Cooperation (Routledge 2017), as well as, with Craig Murphy, Rising Powers and the Future of Global Governance (Routledge 2013).
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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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Notes


1 Established by Mercy Corps in 2004, the National Committee on North Korea works to build trust between the United States and the DPRK, improve cooperation and exchanges between the two sides, and promote peace on the Korean Peninsula. For more information, see: https://www.ncnk.org/who-we-are/mission.

2 The Blue House, in Seoul, is the official residence of the head of state of the Republic of Korea.

3 The Kaesong Industrial Zone is a special administrative region of the DPRK established by the North Korean government in 2002. It is located approximately ten kilometers north of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), the official boundary between the two Koreas. At the core of the zone is the Kaesong Industrial Park, designed to attract private investment from South Korean companies. By 2013, approximately 53,000 DPRK citizens were employed in the park by 123 South Korean companies. On February 10, 2016, the ROK government of Park Geun-hye ordered all South Korean firms to cease operations and withdraw from Kaesong.

4 Roh Moo-hyun (1946–2009) served as President of South Korea from 2003 until 2008.

5 The United States and South Korean forces conduct annual joint military exercises in South Korea.

6 In this book released in 1973, Kim Jong Il, son of Kim Il Sung and father of current DPRK President Kim Jong Un, described in detail his “seed” theory.