Stardate 20020630.1745

(On Screen): North Korea is a foreign-policy dilemma. Its economy is a basket case; its agriculture is a disaster; its government is the last remaining instance of a failed political system that the rest of the world has discarded. Unfortunately, it's also armed to the teeth and may well have the largest military per GDP of any nation on earth, with a huge stockpile of heavy equipment left over from the Cold War.

And its government seems to show symptoms that it is clinically paranoid, and seriously delusional. They sort of turn the old joke on its head: just because they're out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid. Nobody wants another war in Korea, but how do you deal with a nation whose government foams at the mouth?

It appears that what they're trying to do is to feed just enough aid into North Korea to prevent a total humanitarian catastrophe from taking place, without so much as to encourage aggression, and otherwise wait and hope that eventually the North Korean government implodes or evolves to a more sane condition. Every couple of years they attempt again to open discussions to see whether it's happened; so far it hasn't.

Usually the result of any serious attempt to deal with Korea is for them to look at you and say, with a dangerous voice, "You talking to me?"

It's a long tradition among desperately incompetent rulers when things are totally falling apart to try to deflect popular discontent by finding outsiders to declare as enemies and to blame for the problems. You see this again and again, such as with the attempt by Argentina's military junta to pick a fight with the UK over the Falklands as a way of trying to inspire patriotism and popular support at home. North Korea does far more of that than perhaps any other nation.

If North Korea were cut off from all international supplies of food, which are needed to make up for the disastrous failure of North Korea's farm policies, which wouldn't be able to feed the nation even if they weren't suffering from a terrible drought, the North Korean government might decide to attack the South as a last ditch way for the rulers to keep power and avoid a revolution. On the other hand, when food is shipped in, the government uses that food to keep control by giving it only to supporters (and especially to members of the Army) and, by all reports, letting a lot of people starve anyway. Some reports are that more than a million people may have starved in North Korea in the last ten years, and it's only going to get worse.

Quite frankly, I don't see what else can be done. Fighting another war in Korea is out of the question, and all attempts at reconciliation and negotiations have failed. The government of North Korea cannot let its own people actually see what life is like in the South, because then they will discover just how thoroughly incompetent the North's government has been.

So it will be necessary to continue to send in food to keep the situation from exploding, and to simply wait until it collapses under its own weight, no matter how many decades that might take. The ideal outcome is what happened in the USSR; a slow but rising recognition by its own people that its policies were an abject failure and that they couldn't be fixed. But in the USSR they hadn't made the ruler a living god, as the Kims have effectively been in North Korea.

Sometimes there are problems for which there are no good solutions at all.