Condoleezza Rice was the National Security Advisor from January 2001 to January 2005. In March 2001, the leader of South Korea, Kim Dae-jung visited the United States. As an advisor to President George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice was wrestled with a sentiment common to many diplomats around the world: the question of why the South Korean government was seemingly “unmoved” about the fact that its neighbor to the north was committing brutal human rights violations.
She explains how to understand the South Korean position:
One of the hardest things about diplomacy is to put yourself into someone else’s shoes without compromising your own principles. The United States, sitting on a protected continent away from the monstrous North Korean regime, could be more aggressive in confronting it. For South Korea, a relatively new and prosperous democracy, accommodating the regime was a price worth paying to maintain stability and peace. North Korea has thousands of missiles and artillery pieces that could reach Seoul, only thirty miles from the border. And too much focus on the plight of the North Korean people had another downside: what would happen at the time of unification of the North and South? Many years later a senior South Korean diplomat would tell me that his biggest worry about the North was that Seoul would be saddled with millions of “brain-damaged midgets.” He was not being cruel; he was articulating the special vulnerability that South Korea felt.
Seventeen years later, diplomats still wrestled with the situation. Nikki Haley was the United States ambassador to the United Nations from January 2017 to December 2018, and wrote of “a dictatorship in North Korea that will go down as one of the most repressive and barbaristic in human history.”
During Condoleezza Rice’s time as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, North Korea had been under the rule of Kim Jong-il. He was the son of North Korea’s founding dictator, Kim Il-sung. By the time Nikki Haley was the U.S. Ambassador, the country was under the rule of Kim Jong-un. Three generations of tyranny have oppressed the people of North Korea: father, son, and grandson.
Among other feats, this family of despots started the Korean War in 1950, causing the deaths of several million human beings.
Kim Il-sung ruled from 1945 to 1997. Kim Jong-il ruled from 1997 to 2011. Kim Jong-un took power in 2011. Nikki Haley explains the dynasty’s tactics:
Kim Jong Un inherited his absolute control of North Korea from his father, who had inherited it from his father. Kim was young when he became dictator. He consolidated his power by executing his competitors, including family members. Estimates are that he had well over 300 people killed in his first six years as a leader. No “offense” was too small. Kim reportedly executed one of his generals with an anti-aircraft gun for falling asleep in a meeting.
The human rights situation in North Korea has long been a shocking offense to nations around the world. Yet the cruelty of the reigning family of North Korea is intractable. Negotiations and foreign policy maneuvers of various types have failed to make the North Korean Communist Party — official titled the Workers’ Party of Korea — amenable to acknowledging any form of human rights or civil liberties.
Nikki Haley describes the measures taken by the North Korean communists to control the citizens of the country:
The Kim regime enforces absolute control through complete surveillance and tight restrictions on the North Korean people’s contact with the outside world. Cell phone coverage is blocked and North Korea’s version of the internet is a closed network that few people are allowed to use. The regime uses food as a tool of political control, awarding those who comply and deliberately starving those who don’t. It operates a system of prison camps that torture, starve, and work to death people who say the wrong things or read the wrong books or media. The United Nations found that hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have died in these camps during the Kim dictatorship. Women are subjected to forced abortion and their babies to infanticide. Escapees report that having a Bible is punishable by imprisonment in the camps.
The various nations of the world, individually and sometimes in groups, find that their efforts to persuade North Korea — or more specifically, the dictator family of North Korea — to give up its habit of torturing and starving its citizens are hampered by two facts:
First, North Korea possesses nuclear weapons and the missiles with which to deliver them.
Second, the erratic and deranged nature of the ruling dynasty means that the dictator might actually use the nuclear weapons.
Time and again, starting in 2006, the North Koreans have “tested” nuclear weapons. But the true purpose of these events is not to test the technology, but rather to remind the world that North Korea has the technology, and to show the world the periodic improvements in the technology: “saber-rattling” in the truest sense of the phrase.
The other nations of the world are then compelled to reply, both in diplomatic statements, and in a display of their own weaponry. This cycle has been carried out periodically for almost two decades. In June 2022, for example, Dasl Yoon reported in the Wall Street Journal:
The latest test came Sunday, when North Korea fired eight short-range ballistic missiles — the most it has fired in a day.South Korea and the U.S. quickly responded by firing eight surface-to-surface missiles the following day to show their “ability and readiness to immediately strike with precision,” South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said. On Tuesday, Washington and Seoul staged a show of air power, with 20 warplanes flying in formation off South Korea’s western coast. The exercise came during a visit to Seoul by Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who promised a swift and forceful response if North Korea were to conduct a nuclear test, just as American and South Korean officials have warned of late.
In a rare display of unity, almost every nation in the world has participated in some economic or diplomatic effort to discourage North Korea from this behavior — almost every nation in the world has denounced this warlike activity.
For approximately 75 years, the family of North Korean dictators has made the world a less safe place. Some nations have nuclear weapons; some nations have mentally-ill leaders; only North Korea has both.
