North Korea: The Geopolitics of Blackmail

Forbes columnist Gady Epstein writes, (bold emphasis mine)

North Korea’s shelling today of a South Korean island has reminded the world again of the perennial problem of what to do about the nuclear-armed state. This comes just days after we hear that North Korea has shown off an advanced uranium-enrichment facility, a reminder, too, of how dangerously resourceful this regime can be even as its people face another winter of food and electricity shortages.

In totalitarian states where society have been enslaved by the ruling political class and the bureaucracy, the state can only survive by predation.

Lacking the resources to plunder from its own, totalitarian states resort to expanding the sphere of the politics of predation, through belligerent actions, with its more prosperous neighbors.

As libertarian journalist Frank Chodorov once wrote,

But, since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production that it induces by its avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus, in pulling Society down it pulls itself down. Its ultimate collapse is usually occasioned by a disastrous war, but preceding that event is a history of increasing and discouraging levies on the marketplace, causing a decline in the aspirations, hopes, and self-esteem of its victims.

North Korea simply fits the bill. She simply wants to live off on a free lunch through the politics of blackmail even if the desperately poor nation knowingly can’t win a full scale war.

And only through poltical brinkmanship can she be able to extract concessions.

As the Wall Street Journal writes,

The purpose is transparently to frighten the West into concluding that there is no alternative to paying off Pyongyang, lest it sell a bomb to al Qaeda or Iran. A far better policy would be a united international effort to further isolate the Kim dynasty with a goal of regime change. Only changing the government will end the North's nuclear threat and liberate its citizens from that prison state.

Of course desperate situations can lead to desperate outcomes, something which Mr. Chodorov predicted.

Nonetheless, Bastiat was right, if goods don’t cross borders armies will. Totalitarian (or despotic) states who do not respect property rights and the rule of law will eventually collapse either from internal political strife (as a consequence of economic cataclysm) or through war.

Bottom line: North Korea is a great example how closed economies (protectionism and mercantilism) through an absolutist predatory state (totalitarianism, communism and fascism) can lead to societal failure or dystopia.