North Korea, Far From Crazy, Is All Too Rational - The New York Times
North Korea, Far From Crazy, Is All Too
Rational
The Interpreter
By MAX FISHER SEPT. 10, 2016
Is North Korea irrational? Or does it just pretend to be?
North Korea has given the world ample reason to ask: threats of war,
occasional attacks against South Korea, eccentric leaders and wildeyed
propaganda. As its nuclear and missile programs have grown, this past week with
a fifth nuclear test, that concern has grown more urgent.
But political scientists have repeatedly investigated this question and, time
and again, emerged with the same answer: North Korea’s behavior, far from
crazy, is all too rational.
Its belligerence, they conclude, appears calculated to maintain a weak,
isolated government that would otherwise succumb to the forces of history. Its
provocations introduce tremendous danger, but stave off what Pyongyang sees as
the even greater threats of invasion or collapse.
Denny Roy, a political scientist, wrote in a stillcited 1994 journal article that
the country’s “reputation as a ‘crazy state’” and for “reckless violence” had
“worked to North Korea’s advantage,” keeping more powerful enemies at bay. But
this image, he concluded, was “largely a product of misunderstanding and
propaganda.”
In some ways, this is more dangerous than irrationality. While the country
does not want war, its calculus leads it to cultivate a permanent risk of one — and
prepare to stave off defeat, should war happen, potentially with nuclear weapons.
That is a subtler danger, but a grave one.
Why scholars believe North Korea is rational
When political scientists call a state rational, they are not saying its leaders
always make the best or most moral choices, or that those leaders are paragons of
mental fitness. Rather, they are saying the state behaves according to its
perceived selfinterests, first of which is selfpreservation.
When a state is rational, it will not always succeed in acting in its best
interests, or in balancing shortterm against longterm gains, but it will try. This
lets the world shape a state’s incentives, steering it in the desired direction.
States are irrational when they do not follow selfinterest. In the “strong” form of
irrationality, leaders are so deranged that they are incapable of judging their own
interests. In the “soft” version, domestic factors — like ideological zeal or internal
power struggles — distort incentives, making states behave in ways that are
counterproductive but at least predictable.
North Korea’s actions, while abhorrent, appear well within its rational selfinterest,
according to a 2003 study by David C. Kang, a political scientist now at
the University of Southern California. At home and abroad, he found, North
Korean leaders shrewdly determined their interests and acted on them. (In an
email, he said his conclusions still applied.)
“All the evidence points to their ability to make sophisticated decisions and
to manage palace, domestic and international politics with extreme precision,”
Mr. Kang wrote. “It is not possible to argue these were irrational leaders, unable
to make meansends calculations.”
Victor Cha, a Georgetown University professor who served as the Asian
affairs director on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, has repeatedly
argued that North Korea’s leadership is rational.
Savage cruelty and cold calculation are not mutually exclusive, after all —
and often go hand in hand.
States are rarely irrational for the simple reason that irrational states can’t
survive for long. The international system is too competitive and the drive for
selfpreservation too powerful. While the North Korean state really is unlike any
other on earth, the behaviors that make it appear irrational are perhaps its most
rational.
North Korea’s rational irrationality
North Korea’s seemingly unhinged behavior begins with the country’s
attempt to solve two problems that it took on with the end of the Cold War and
that it should have been unable to survive.
One was military. The Korean Peninsula, still in a formal state of war, had
gone from a SovietAmerican deadlock to an overwhelming tilt in the South’s
favor. The North was exposed, protected only by a China that was more focused
on improving ties with the West.
The other problem was political. Both Koreas claimed to represent all
Koreans, and for decades had enjoyed similar development levels. By the 1990s,
the South was exponentially freer and more prosperous. The Pyongyang
government had little reason to exist.
The leadership solved both problems with something called the Songun, or
“militaryfirst,” policy. It put the country on a permanent war footing, justifying
the state’s poverty as necessary to maintain its massive military, justifying its
oppression as rooting out internal traitors and propping up its legitimacy with the
rallyaroundtheflag nationalism that often comes during wartime.
Of course, there was no war. Foreign powers believed the government would,
like other Soviet puppets, fall on its own, and barring that wanted peace.
So North Korea created the appearance of permanently imminent war,
issuing flamboyant threats, staging provocations and, sometimes, deadly attacks.
Its nuclear and missile tests, though erratic and often failed, stirred up one crisis
after another.
This militarization kept the North Korean leadership internally stable. It also
kept the country’s enemies at bay.
North Korea may be weaker, but it is willing to tolerate far more risk. By
keeping the peninsula on the edge of conflict, Pyongyang put the onus on South
Korea and the United States to pull things back.
From afar, North Korea’s actions look crazy. Its domestic propaganda
describes a reality that does not exist, and it appears bent on almost provoking a
war it would certainly lose.
But from within North Korea, these actions make perfect sense. And over
time, the government’s reputation for irrationality has become an asset as well.
Scholars ascribe this behavior to the “madman theory” — a strategy, coined
by no less a proponent than Richard M. Nixon, in which leaders cultivate an
image of belligerence and unpredictability to force adversaries to tread more
carefully.
Dr. Roy, in an interview, said North Korea “intentionally employs a posture
of seemingly hyperrisk acceptance and willingness to go to war as a means of
trying to intimidate its adversaries.”
But this strategy works only because, even if the belligerence is for show, the
danger it creates is very real.
Is a rational North Korea more dangerous?
In this way, it is North Korea’s rationality that makes it so dangerous.
Because it believes it can survive only by keeping the Korean Peninsula near war,
it creates a risk of sparking just that, perhaps through some accident or
miscalculation.
North Korea is aware of this risk but seems to believe it has no choice. For
this reason, and perhaps because of the United Statesled invasion of Iraq and the
NATO intervention in Libya against Col. Muammar elQaddafi, it appears to
earnestly fear an American invasion. And this is rational: Weak states that face
more powerful enemies must either make peace — which North Korea cannot do
without sacrificing its political legitimacy — or find a way to make any conflict
survivable.
North Korea’s nuclear program, some analysts believe, is designed to halt an
American invasion by first striking nearby United States military bases and South
Korean ports, then by threatening a missile launch against the American
mainland. While North Korea does not yet have this ability, analysts believe it will
within the next decade.
This is the culmination of North Korea’s rationality, in something known as
desperation theory.
Under this theory, when states face two terrible choices, they will pick the
least bad option — even if that choice would, under normal conditions, be too
costly to consider.
In North Korea’s case, that means creating the conditions for a war it would
most likely lose. And it could mean preparing a lastditch effort to survive that
war by launching multiple nuclear strikes, chancing a nuclear retaliation for the
slim chance to survive.
North Korea’s leaders tolerate this danger because, in their calculus, they
have no other choice. The rest of us share in that risk — vanishingly small, but
nonzero — whether we want to or not.
A version of this article appears in print on September 11, 2016, on page A6 of the
New York edition with the headline: North Korea Crazy? Worse. It’s Calculating.
© 2016 The New York Times Company
