Manan Dwivedi

North Korea is a nation which has been castigatively enumerated as a rogue state on the lines of Pakistan and Iraq, coupled with a few non-state actors such as the dreaded Daesh (ISIS) and the awfully nauseating al-Qaeda and its myriad terror affiliates.

The whimsical, idiosyncratic and surreptitious nature of Kim Jong-Un has been well propagated within the confines of the Fourth Estate. The dilemma of the political contest emerges as one of the theoretical motifs running as a substratum upon which most external and internal conflicts are premised upon.

The telltale saga of the Korean Peninsula is pedestalled upon the Political Contest Model. It’s is here within the context of the political contest that two unevenly and unequal nations are pitted against each other. They slug it out in the international arena through the modicum of a “News Byte Blitzkrieg” or a gladiatorial political contest. Ordinarily, a state actor is pitted against a non-state actor in a gladiatorial contest to create a “Spectacle Sport” in order to win the battle off the battlefield of diplomatic long shadows and in the arena of make believe in tandem with the Simulacra effect. No ordinary soul in the global arena in the bevy of global affairs experts expected that US President Donald Trump would get over all the national security and egotist huddles in the “Asia net” and agree to the summitry offer from Pyongyang. Thus, ushering in stabilising roles for the likes of People’s Republic of China, Japan, Russia and adhere to the six-party national setting of five nations which have been traditionally involved in negotiations with the recalcitrant nation-state actor, that is North Korea.

Thus the America-led sequestration might be given a revisitation by Washington after the tempers have cooled between Washington and Pyongyang. The real test of the talks, which are proposed between Trump and Kim Jong Un, will be the capacity of the North Korean actor and others in the “Asiatic space” to live through the proposed military and oceanic exercise between North Korea and the American nation. If President Trump clings adherently to the sine qua non of America-first and Make in America, then both the nations will have to walk a tightrope, given the antecedents to Pyongyang and Washington in the near times to come.

North Korea has also been asked by President Trump as part of his “Tweet Diplomacy” that keeping in view the habitual offence on the part of North Korea, it’s interesting to be noted that North Korea does not test any missile in the time period of the negotiations on disarmament while the talks are going on with the United States. Recently, the North Korean establishment spurned a human rights report emerging out of the heady portals of the United Nations, which does not efficaciously clear the air for the Trump-Kim summit in May, 2018. Ian Watson reproduced texts from Rodong Sinmun — the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea — in the CNN feeds, “The politicisation of human rights and application of double standards have to be rejected at international organisations, including the UN Human Rights Council.”

The citizens of North Korea are to be reminded about the massively scaled up lapses and wanton chains on the freedoms of expression and privacy in the light of torturous food privations which have been felt by Pyongyang since the nineties and the “Rice for Food” agreements. Also, it was way back in 2003 that North Korea initially began its external interlocution with the excuse that it will avoid and negate the development of all weapon systems and withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 under an excessively aggressive the United States. KCNA reported in line with The Guardian report that, “We can no longer remain bound to the NPT, allowing the country’s security and the dignity of our nation to be infringed upon. Though we pull out of the NPT, we have no intention of producing nuclear weapons and our nuclear activities at this stage will be confined only to peaceful purposes such as the production of electricity.”

Similitude with the above assertion still happens to be the diplomatic demarches of North Korea on self defence as opposed to the proposed Quad in the Asiatic Space — led by the United States. It happens to be the bête noire of negotiations leading up to a rapprochement with Washington which promptly includes Pyongyang in its pruning list. One cannot rule out the personalised paranoia in North Korea as elucidated by Paul French in a 2015 book which refers to the fortunes of the company termed as Euro Asia with dealings in North Korea. A corporate was gifted 150 hectares in order to professionally develop the tomb of Kim Jong Il’s father. Thus, an “All-in-the Family/ Royal Clan,” line of growth, progression and doing politics has been a key attribute of the crassly Communist dictatorship in North Korea.

The headlines in the American national daily, New York Times too leave nothing to imagination. The headlines broadly proclaim, “With Snap Yes in the Oval office, Trump gambles on North Korea.” It is disheartening and a very unprofessional behaviour that equates Trump’s diplomacy to be a mere bland and banal, “Gamble”. It can be summarily be comprehended as quintessential diplomatic practice where in the failure of diplomacy ordinarily leads to a military confrontation that is a Battle Royale. Rhetoric and larger-than-life “words of war” are an intrinsic part and parcel of the ordinary sequence of international affairs where blabber follows a crisis and the battlefield resonates if the talks fail. The American President’s tweeting too reflects that it’s a jar half filled as even he realises that one outcome of the proposed summitry might be the walking away of the two leaders in a huff with not even a ordinary agreement in tow, but on the other side of the VIBYOR, peace and stability might be on the platter only to be judiciously and delicately handled by the aggressive war mongering intents.

(The writer teaches International Relations at Indian Institute of Public Administration, Delhi)

Courtesy: Pioneer: Saturday, 17 March 2018