What Kim Jong-un wants

Kim doesn't want to conquer the world, he wants a peace treaty that will give North Korea a sense of security at last.

What does Kim Jong-un want? One thing: security.

He doesn’t want to conquer the world. It’s impractical: only one out of every 300 people in the world is North Korean. He doesn’t even want to conquer South Korea. It’s twice as populous as North Korea and 10 times richer: eliminate the border and Kim’s regime would crumble in months. And he certainly doesn’t want to attack the United States.

Kim declared last week that North Korea has now completed the task of building a nuclear deterrent to ward off a possible American attack. It will return to the task of building its economy. Indeed, it will “stop nuclear tests and launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles” and even shut down a nuclear test site.

He’s obviously laying out his negotiating position for the summit meetings that are planned for this month with South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in and for next month with US President Donald Trump. He clearly wants a deal, but he has long been afraid of a US attack.

A little story from the Cold War: I only realised how deeply I had been affected by propaganda when I attended my first Nato military exercise in Europe as a journalist. It was the same exercise scenario as always, with Russian tanks surging forward to overrun Western Europe and outnumbered Nato troops struggling to halt the attack.

Then, one day, I was interviewing a senior British army officer and for some reason I asked the obvious question I had never bothered to ask before. What scenario did the Russians use when they ran their military exercises?

Oh, he said airily, their scenarios imagine that we have invaded East Germany but after a few days, they manage to turn it around and start pushing us back west.

Well, of course. Would the Russians tell their troops that they were launching a deliberate attack on the West that would end in a full-scale nuclear war? No. As the weaker side in the long confrontation, would they even consider doing that? Probably not. But I had never considered the fact that the Russians were afraid of us.

Maybe we were “the good guys” in that confrontation, in the sense that our countries were democracies and theirs dictatorships, but in terms of threat perception and overreaction, the two sides were identical. The situation in the Korean peninsula is the same story.

The Kim dynasty inherited a devastated country at the end of the Korean War in 1953. Its cities were levelled and at least a million people had been killed.

The Kims built a very big army as a counter-threat to US nuclear weapons and started working on their own nukes as soon as the economy had been rebuilt to the required level. But that army created a threat to the US and South Korea as real as North Korea’s own fears.

So how might you negotiate your way out of this futile and dangerous confrontation?

Concentrate instead on a peace treaty that gives North Korea a sense of security at last. Demand as a quid pro quo that Pyongyang reduces its army and promise that once those cuts have been made, the US troops in South Korea will go home.

It might work. It’s certainly worth a try.