While there are times when the conservative man on my shoulder spouts vitriol about the unfairness of a leftist monopoly on higher education, recently I have been wondering if perhaps the political discourse in this nation could benefit from a little academic thought. The benefits of academia, underscored for me in the past three years, usually seem to transcend whatever political bias may exist. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent press coverage of the ongoing nuclear standoff with North Korea.
Some of my best experiences at Dartmouth have involved those last few days of class where government profs have scheduled into the syllabus time to apply the theories taught in the course to current events. On more than one occasion, international relations professors here sat down and solemnly discussed the North Korea situation. Both times, students posed the typical questions: What can we do about a nuclear North Korea? What does this mean for nuclear proliferation? How can we trust Kim Jong-Il? How can North Korea be disarmed? Professors' responses were astounding: They didn't depend on a partisan issue viewpoint by saying that "Clinton screwed it up by giving them everything they wanted" or that "Bush messed up by annulling the Agreed Framework." Those issues were certainly discussed but both those opinions presuppose that a good solution could have somehow been found. I think the most important thing my professors imparted was that this is not necessarily possible in the popular way of viewing the situation.
Essentially, the debate about North Korea has, does and will focus on how to destabilize the regime and reunify the Korean peninsula. It seems like a foregone conclusion; Kim should be out, the DMZ should be abolished, and terms like "North" and "South" and verbose adjectival untruths like "Democratic People's Republic" be thrown into the ash-heap of Cold War history where they belong. The reality is that the drive behind the policies of the five great powers involved in the six-party talks is not how to get rid of Kim, but rather how to keep him.
North Korea is a nation of perhaps 23 million impoverished, starving, subjugated people. Aside from potential brainwashing, what is possibly keeping these people in the North? The men with guns on the borders. Remove those men with guns, and you have millions of refugees fleeing across borders to China, Russia and the South, and probably quite a few finding their way to Japan as well. South Korea was about even with North Korea until the 1970s and 1980s when its economy took off; its rose-colored vision of relations with the North has less to do with concern for their fellow nationals as it does a desire to not touch the North Korean disaster with a 10-foot stick. This past week, in response to the nuclear test and in anticipation of an influx of refugees, China has started building a wall and fence along its border with North Korea.
This quite simple realization is one that largely eludes almost everyone involved. As usual, partisan bickering dominates the debate and the place for rational thought is quickly stomped out by the prepubescent "he-said-she-said" fiasco that is politics. Even when I finally heard mention of this in the news, Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) mentioned a potential refugee crisis in passing during an interview, but quickly moved on to the Agreed Framework vs. Bush debate. The interviewer didn't even ask one question about it. It didn't make for good TV, for good rhetoric or good election rallying, so the issue was forgotten. The inability to soundly analyze one of the largest threats to global stability is a strong condemnation of the current state of political discourse in this country. Professionals whose job it is to describe these situations are ignored by everyone and a fundamental popular misunderstanding of the situation subsequently develops. It's high time for us to stop getting our opinions from Time and popular media and start picking up scholarly journals written by those with actual credentials. We might be able to approach international events better as a nation if we, say, understand them first.
