Washington officials have long found Pyongyang a bedeviling problem. Much of their frustration has come from a lack of information on a country that Donald Gregg—a Korea expert who served in Seoul as US ambassador and before then as chief of the CIA station there—called Washington’s “longest-running intelligence failure”. Without information, as Gregg argued in his 2014 autobiography Pot Shards, “we fill our gaps of ignorance with prejudice, and the result is hostility fueled by demagoguery, and damage done to all concerned.”
American scholars, for their part, have put forth studies to provide data and approaches to understanding North Korea. The latest is Victor Cha, a prolific author, professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and a Korea expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Outside the ivory tower, Cha has served on the White House National Security Council, the Department of Defense Advisory Board, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
In Black Box, the author offers new sources of information to aid in understanding Pyongyang and the issues involved in reuniting a Korea divided by Washington and Moscow at the end of the Second World War into respective southern and northern zones of occupation. The US zone, with its capital in Seoul, became in 1948 the Republic of Korea (ROK). The Soviet zone, with its capital in Pyongyang, became that same year the rival Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
Cha produced his latest book on the DPRK with funding from the Academy of Korean Studies and assistance from several young researchers at CSIS. The book’s seven chapters cover the “black box” that hides the inner workings of the DPRK and issues around reunification; US-ROK military exercises as an issue in dialogue with the DPRK; Pyongyang’s cybersecurity activities; the development of markets and civil society in North Korea; theories and data on Korean reunification; and a call to tackle “the hardest of hard targets”.
The author’s book complements an earlier “box” work on North Korea. Patrick McEachern, a Korea hand whose career as a foreign service officer of the US State Department has included postings to State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) as well as to the embassy in Seoul, wrote Inside the Red Box: North Korea’s Post-totalitarian Politics (Columbia University Press, 2010). The similar titles suggest that Cha’s new book is a tip of the hat to McEachern’s earlier one.
The two books are complementary. Each author proposes a different approach to looking inside the metaphorical box that hides the inner workings of Pyongyang politics and the steps toward reunification.
McEachern sees Pyongyang as a grouping of party, government, and military actors rather than a regime run by a single dictator’s fiat. He recommends making use of Pyongyang’s “controlled media” and using other “untapped scholarly resources” to enter the “red box”.
Perhaps seeking to cover new ground, Cha references McEachern but makes no substantial reference to exploiting media or scholarly resources of the Koreas or of the major powers—Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, and Washington—that will likely exert influence over any future reunification of Korea. His most interesting offering, in my view, is polling. Cha used covert polling conducted inside North Korea in 2016 and 2017 to write the chapter on DPRK markets and civil society. CSIS discretely polled Koreans in various DPRK provinces regarding their views on the informal markets that have grown in North Korea since the 1990s, the nation’s ongoing development of nuclear weapons, Korean reunification, and the United States. Cha sees such polling, dangerous for those asking the questions as well as for those answering them, yielding insights in addition to those gained in asking such questions of Koreans who have left the DPRK for the ROK.
The author also polled “top Asia/Korea experts, government officials, scholars, and opinion leaders in the United States,” as well as Korean counterparts in Seoul, for their views on Korean reunification. In doing so, Cha produces information on areas of agreement and divergence between Seoul and Washington on reunification, as well as their perceptions of how Beijing, Moscow, and Tokyo view the issue.
Cha’s new data, particularly information derived from the covert and overt polling, may prove of some value to policymakers or others to understand what they see when peering into the “black box.” His recommendation in the book’s last chapter to harness the growing powers of commercial satellite imagery as a tool for gathering information is entirely on target. His suggestion that American media report facts on North Korea and not “ridicule the regime nor dismiss it as unpredictable or irrational” is constructive but insufficient. Cha would have been justified in writing an entire chapter detailing the deplorable record of the US mass media’s reporting on the DPRK.
The book falls short, in my view, in not producing a chapter seconding and further developing McEachern’s approach of reading Pyongyang’s controlled media—newspapers, scholarly journals, television, radio, and internet—for insights.
A more serious blind spot is the apparent assumption that Seoul and Washington, with Tokyo toeing the line, will reunite the Korean Peninsula on their terms. Cha writes of reunification as “inevitable,” but the longstanding aim of each Korean regime to rule the entire peninsula in absorbing or subduing the other side suggests continued division. The author’s surveying only notable figures of the ROK and United States on reunification, ignoring even those of allied Japan, never mind those of China and Russia, suggests that he foresees Seoul and Washington driving an “inevitable” reunification by themselves from the front seat. This seems overly optimistic. Pyongyang enjoys the backing of Beijing and Moscow, now united in their opposition to Washington across a range of international issues. It is entirely conceivable that a future Korean reunification, should it take place, will proceed in line with the interests of the two countries that share a land border with the peninsula: the world’s largest economy (China) and the country with the foremost battle-hardened military (Russia).
Such caveats aside, I recommend reading The Black Box for the author’s attempts to introduce new data and methods to shed light on aspects of the DPRK and issues in Korean reunification. Readers will also find in the extensive bibliography and notes a guide to the collective thinking of the ROK and US mass media, think tanks, and governments on these issues. I also commend Columbia University Press for following McEachern’s excellent 2010 Inside the Red Box with this interesting second “box” book.