Why We Must Prepare for the Coming Collapse of North Korea

By Jamie Metzl,The National Interest

As a member of the U.S. National Security Council staff in the later 1990s, I worked with colleagues on plans for responding to the potential collapse of the North Korean government. As a self-induced famine ravaged the country, we considered what we might do when the regime finally succumbed to the inevitable consequence of its own insanity. Almost twenty years later, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is still there and those predicting its imminent collapse have continually been proven wrong. But today, the North Korean madness may well be nearing its endgame. I predict it will be gone within a decade.

The continued survival of North Korea’s government is based on its ability to harness absolute terror against its population, its possession of nuclear weapons, and its access to economic resources. Although North Korea requires all three of these to survive, contradictions between what it takes to secure each will make the regime’s demise all but inevitable over time.

Terror against its people stands at the core of the North Korean system. The UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK reports “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations” including torture, murder, rape, and mass gulags containing over 120,000 people in what the Commission believes constitute “crimes against humanity.” Without deploying terror to control every aspect of people’s lives, the regime would collapse.

(Recommended: North Korea’s Deadly Chemical Weapons [3])

After witnessing the first Gulf War, where Saddam Hussein was more vulnerable to invasion because Iraq did not possess nuclear weapons, Pyongyang accelerated its own nuclear program. North Korea has now conducted three nuclear tests, fired a ballistic missile from a submarine, and is racing forward with nuclear miniaturization and weaponization.

(This first appeared in 2015.)

The further development of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, however, will ultimately put it at odds with China, its essential benefactor. North Korea’s only meaningful trading partner, China provides [4] Pyongyang with 90 percent of its energy imports and most of the food going to its military. Beijing has carefully struck a balance between gently pressuring North Korea to slow its nuclear program and maintaining the DPRK through aid, primarily because China fears U.S. troops on its border in case of collapse.