Kim Jung Ill Advised

Like many of you, I have been mystified and awed by the reckless behavior of the North Koreans over the past few weeks. What are these people thinking? Now, even The Peoples Republic of China, the number one benefactor of Kim's wacky regime, is openly rebuking this oppressive state. Well, the simple answer to my question is, no one really knows. Perhaps the visibly ailing Kim Jung Ill is in an internal power struggle at home and he is reasserting his domestic political power. Perhaps, the leader of this chronically paranoid police state actually believes he is about to be attacked by untold enemies. Or maybe, just maybe, this is the very predictable response of a wanna-be nation-state lacking true sovereignty.

Over the years I have become convinced that the real threats to international peace and stability lie not in the ramblings and impulses of puffed up autocrats, but instead in the very nature of true national sovereignty. If you will indulge me, let me try to make my case.

The United Nations recognizes 192 nations as member states, and deals with a handful of others, like North Korea, as rogue states. But I would argue that many of the entities labeled "sovereign" by the UN, are anything but nations and are instead the breeding ground for much of the turmoil in the world.

First, a truly sovereign state must occupy a specific piece of geography. By that I mean that the boundaries of a state must be recognized and respected by other states. As of yet, Palestine has not qualified under this first criteria to be a nation, as no one can agree to a common set of geographical boundaries, not even the Palestinians themselves. Until real borders can be established, Palestine will remain more of an abstract idea, rather than a physical reality, and thus a hotbed for turmoil.

Secondly, and much more important than merely establishing international borders, is that these boundaries must be defendable from outside invasion. The history of the world is replete with stories of one nation making war on and conquering another. But the truly sovereign states make such imperialistic actions by an outside aggressor incredibly risky. Many of the so-called nation states recognized by the UN as sovereign, are completely incapable of defending themselves from their acquisitive neighbors. The Republic of Georgia for example has been undergoing one geo-revision after another over the past decade by the military incursions of the Russians. And it has only been because other truly sovereign nations have stepped in that Georgia exists at all. Consider the Korean peninsula again. The boundary between North and South has never been definitively established, creating a great deal of instability in East Asia.

Third, and this may in fact be the most important element of guaranteeing defendable borders, is population. You know, people who identify with the nation-state. Every truly sovereign state has enough people to actually get out there and fight if their borders are in jeopardy. Granted, not every sovereign state can always guarantee its security, but the sovereign state can put up such a fight that it makes invasion by an outside aggressor a very risky proposition. The question is, how many people are needed? The simple answer is. . . enough to deter aggression. Enough to make an expansion-minded neighbor really think twice before launching a war of conquest. Both Kuwait and Georgia fell short in this area and were easily overwhelmed by large aggressive neighbors, Iraq and Russia respectively. On the other hand, Vietnam and Afghanistan, barely out of the stone age, had enough people and were able to put up ferocious defenses against major first world powers to render conquest far too costly for even the greatest of super powers.

But human numbers alone are not enough to guarantee lasting sovereignty. For the glue that holds a nation's people together is the voluntary incorporation of a common culture. With all due respect to the Ronald Reaganophiles out there, the real death blow to the Soviet Union was not American resolve, but rather the lack of a unifying identity. While Lenin, Stalin, and the rest of those geriatric Russian bureaucrats were consolidating the Soviet empire of the early 20th century, they paid no attention to the cultural traps they were setting for themselves. Under the banner of the Hammer and Sickle, there were dozens of ethnic nationalities with their own unique cultural patterns. Perhaps believing their own sloganeering of "workers of the world unite," The Soviet communists failed to realize that Latvians, Armenians, Uzbeckis, Turkestanis, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Chechens had no idea what they were talking about. After the better part of a century, the Soviet Union was so financially exhausted trying to create a Soviet culture in a geographic expanse where over fifty different languages were spoken, they just gave up. One can only wonder what might have happened if the Bolsheviks had limited their revolution to Czarist Russia. A "Soviet" Russian Union would have been a more formidable rival on the world stage than the bloated entity that emerged after World War One.

We are now down to the final two elements necessary for the long-term establishment of national sovereignty. And it is in these last areas where North Korea most miserably fails as a truly sovereign state. The first of these is the creation of a viable national economy. For true sovereignty to exist, a nation must have and economic system that does two things reasonably well. First, it must be able to create and maintain an expanding national prosperity. Whatever system a nation devises or adopts to distribute wealth: capitalism, socialism, mixed-market, or command economy, it must actually have some wealth to distribute. No matter how strong the culture, if one's nation state is not blessed with critical natural resources and the technological skills to exploit them, true sovereignty will never be achieved. Further, those resources and technical skills need to be diverse as well as abundant. Anyone care to take bets on how long Saudi Arabia lasts as a nation-state when the last drop of crude is pumped out of the Persian Gulf?

But there is another element to a viable economy, beyond technical skills and abundant resources. In order for a nation state to remain, or even become sovereign, its people must perceive of its economy as being fair. Not since Eden, has any human community provided infinite resources to its inhabitants. So the primary task of a stable national economy is not to provide everyone with all that they desire, but rather to instill in them a belief that the manner in which goods and services are distributed is fundamentally just. The most violent revolutionary movements in history: the French, Russian, and Chinese began in countries with abundant resources that were criminally mismanaged. National wealth alone is not enough to guarantee lasting sovereignty, it must be accompanied by an allocation system deemed fair by its citizenry.

The final element found in every truly sovereign country is the establishment of a legitimate national government. By legitimate I do not refer to the type of government employed, but rather whether the citizens of a given nation state believe that their particular political system is just. Simply put, if a government spends more of its resources aiming guns inward at its own citizens, than outward, in protection of its borders, it is not legitimate! In a truly sovereign state, the citizens obey the laws because they believe it is right to do so. Whenever a government has to use coercion to achieve compliance, sovereignty is at best an illusion. Remember Sadam Hussein? His Iraq, like Kim's North Korea, was a repressive police state, always one coup attempt away from a complete meltdown.

So what does all this mean? Using this somewhat simplistic method of determining actual sovereignty, one can see that there are not all that many truly sovereign states on planet Earth. And a lack of true sovereignty makes most political entities quite dangerous. For instance, looking at North Korea, we see a country with defendable borders alright, and a huge army to make sure the borders remain intact. But without any kind of a sustainable and viable economy, and with perhaps the most repressive government anywhere, it is only a matter of time before this dangerous pseudo-nation begins to come apart.

For the truly sovereign states along the Pacific Rim there are only two viable choices: hasten the demise of the North Korean regime, or find ways to move the "Dear Leader" (as Kim demands to be called) toward legitimacy. The former choice would most assuredly mean engaging a lunatic with nuclear arms in open combat, while that latter will take a level of diplomacy light years beyond anything attempted so far. My advice is for the entrepreneurial spirited among my readers is to go into the bomb shelter business in Tokyo and Seoul.