Responding to North Korean provocation

By Brian Kernan

Imagine an unruly and reclusive neighbor that lives across the street from you in a house that most people generally avoid.

For whatever reason, this neighbor occasionally attempts to throw glass bottles at your house from across the street; bottles which, so far, have barely made it past their own lawn.

Despite a series of strong warnings from the local homeowners' association, this neighbor continues to throw things and makes everyone in the neighborhood uncomfortable in the process.

Korea, and now North Korea, has been making the West uncomfortable since before American Orientalist William Elliot Griffis disapprovingly labeled it a "hermit kingdom" in 1882.

It seems Westerners don't take kindly to communities that willfully isolate themselves, which is essentially the definition of a hermit kingdom.

Since the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, the United States has technically been at conflict with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea.

Though North and South Korea agreed to cease open hostilities in 1953, no actual peace treaty has ever been signed. Today, the two countries still keep troops stationed along the 38th parallel, the demilitarized division zone described by former President Bill Clinton in 1993 as "the scariest place on earth."

Economic sanctions, coupled with the bizarre policies of North Korea's "Great Leader" Kim Jong-Il, who CNN characterizes as "one of the most mysterious leaders in the world," have effectively kept this country isolated from the rest of the world.

Like the reclusive bottle throwing neighbor, North Korea under Kim Jong-Il has done its fair share of things to make its relationship with the United States and its allies about as awkward as things get in the international community.

However, instead of glass bottles, it's Taepodong-2 missiles that North Korea has recently been throwing, or at least attempting to throw, around the global neighborhood. But, while North Korea's Taepodong-2 missiles are thought to have a range of 4,600 miles, so they've only made it as far as the Sea of Japan.

With North Korea's most recent missile launch on April 5 -- which the nation's government claims was necessary to put a communication satellite into orbit -- Western leaders have once again been spooked into offering up words of condemnation for North Korea.

President Barack Obama was quick to respond to the launch. On April 5 he said, "With this provocative act, North Korea has ignored its international obligations, rejected unequivocal calls for restraint and further isolated itself from the community of nations."

Though none of the world's leaders have yet mentioned the dangerous potential North Korea's missile launches have to awaken the monster Godzilla from its slumber deep beneath the Sea of Japan, Kim Jong-Il likely doesn't care what anyone outside of North Korea says.

B. R. Myers, a researcher of North Korean ideology and propaganda, writes in a recent New York Times article that with this latest launch, Kim John-Il "is not trying to get Mr. Obama's attention so much as his own people's."

According to Myers, this latest launch is simply a move designed to make North Korea's leadership look powerful within North Korea itself.

This is a country in which state-sponsored cults honor Kim Jong-Il and the memory of his now deified father, Kim Il-Sung.

It is a country on the brink of economic collapse, where many lack access to basic needs and nearly all information is heavily filtered, where an estimated 2 million people have starved to death since the mid-nineties according to the BBC, and where the few foreigners who make it in are not allowed to stray from the sight of their government tour guides.

In the case of North Korea, expressing outrage over a missile launch may not be the best tactic. Attention is exactly what a leader like Kim Jong-Il wants, although it is the last thing we should be giving him.

Obama's clear-headed response to the missile launch on April 5 is exactly what American foreign policy needs right now. Though it included its share of traditional scolding, there was none of the cowboy, guns-blazing rhetoric many of us have come to expect.

We should leave it at that. Further sanctions will, more likely than not, only make matters worse. Meanwhile, reprimanding North Korea's "Great Leader" and its government too harshly will only legitimize Kim Jong-Il's failing police-state within the circles of the ruling elite by justifying the nation's defensive stance.

Refusing to play along will likely do more damage to North Korea's increasingly weak dictatorship than any sanction or resolution could ever accomplish.

Brian Kernan is a senior economics and history major and the opinion editor of The Santa Clara.