Unravelling the North Korea Enigma - part one

Speaker 1: Welcome to The World of Intelligence, a podcast for you to discover the latest analysis of global military and security trends within the open source defense intelligence community. Now onto the episode with your host, Harry Kemsley.

Harry Kemsley: Hello, before we start this podcast episode, just a quick explanation that we're going to split it into two parts. So the first part, we'll play now, and then we'll invite you back to join us for the second part very shortly. Welcome to this edition of Janes World of Intelligence, Harry Kemsley, your host, and as ever my co- host, Sean Corbett. Hello, Sean.

Sean Corbett: Hi Harry. Good to be back.

Harry Kemsley: Now for those inaudible I'm in a different part of the world to Sean and Sean's in the room with our guests, more of whom in a moment. Sean, you're probably going to end up doing most of the moderating and the driving of this podcast, which will be fun to watch. I'll do my best to do that from my remote seat. Sean, we've had the conversation more than once about Korea, North Korea in particular, how difficult that is from an open source perspective to understand what's going on. However, we've proven in previous conversations with a couple of guests who are in the room again that that is possible, but with some care. So what I'd like to try and do today is to revisit North Korea. It has been in the news for a variety of reasons, all of which we'll discuss shortly, a lot. So it's probably appropriate that we should get back to talking about North Korea. To help us do that, Sean, we've invited some guests that have been with us before from 38 North. For those listeners who are not familiar with 38 North, I'd strongly suggest you go onto the internet, type in 38north. org and you'll find a thousand resources there that will be of interest to you if you're interested in North Korea. And from that organization, I'm delighted to welcome the co- founder and the director of 38 North Jenny Town. Hello, Jenny.

Jenny Town: Hi, Harry. Thanks for having me.

Harry Kemsley: My pleasure. I'm delighted to welcome back Rachel Minyoung Lee as a senior fellow at 38 North. Hello Rachel.

Rachel Minyoung Lee: Hi Harry. Good to be back.

Harry Kemsley: Yeah, thank you for coming back for a second time. Second Helpings. And not least, and last, Martin. Martin Williams, senior fellow, also at 38 North.

Martin Williams: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Harry Kemsley: Pleasure. Finally delighted to welcome back our friend and colleague at Janes, Christina Varriale, who is the Janes principal analyst, covering among other things, Korea. Welcome back Christina.

Cristina Varriale: Hi Harry. Thanks.

Harry Kemsley: And I think Christina, this might be your third dose of the podcast so you get special gold star for being so good to come back on a third occasion. All right, so to get us started, as I mentioned in my introduction, huge amount of interest in North Korea for a variety of reasons, been in the news a great deal. And I think probably appropriate that we might start among the various news stories to look at the situation in South Korea, the ongoing situation in South Korea, and how that may be affecting the perspectives of the relationship with North Korea and what the leader of North Korea might be doing about that. Could I come to you, Rachel, first, in terms of your view of A, what is going on in the South and how that might be affecting the world of North Korea?

Rachel Minyoung Lee: I think this is one of those rare moments in my career where more people have taken an interest in South Korea's domestic stability rather than North Korea's. Obviously, a lot has happened since December 3, I think, when President Yoon declared martial law, which to say the least, was shocking for everyone. Unlike my, I don't know, preliminary assessment, I guess, I had hoped that we would see more of a stable situation in South Korea by now, as it has been more than a month since the enactment of the martial law and the lifting of the martial law after a few hours. The turmoil still continues. The South Korean president was just arrested overnight our time, I think, and there's still, despite his arrest, I don't see... I think this is just maybe the beginning of another phase of this ongoing turmoil. My initial assessment was that this will end in six months. And my preliminary assessment was based on what we saw in 2016 and 2017 when then President Park Geun-hye was impeached, first by the National Assembly and then the ruling, the decision was upheld by the constitutional court. And all of that from start to finish for about six months, around six months. I think we expected maybe something similar along those lines, even though the cause of the impeachment at the time and the cause of the impeachment now are vastly different, but the situation has had a lot more twists and turns and I think-

Harry Kemsley: Jenny, can I come across to you with that same question? Is there any precedent for this? Is there any previous similarities, any previous events that we could try and use to extrapolate what's going on now from previously? Or is this completely a unique situation in South Korea?

Jenny Town: This is a pretty unique situation. There hasn't been martial law in South Korea since 1979.

Harry Kemsley: Right.

Jenny Town: And the last time, during the last impeachment, it was a much more convoluted case that was made against Park Geun-hye as to why she needed to be impeached. I think if you look at the situation now, there's two different processes going on. There is the impeachment process itself, and it did take two weeks in order for the National Assembly to agree to impeachment, because there was a lot of partisan in- fighting between the ruling PPP and the opposition DP, Democratic Party, about how to move forward. And so they had one impeachment vote a week after the martial law was enacted and overturned, and that failed. And it failed by a small margin because the opposition party has the majority in the National Assembly, so they could carry most of it themselves. And what we saw, and I agree with Rachel, when this first happened, I think the swift bipartisan support to overturn martial law gave us a sense that, hey, this was so egregious in terms of abuse of power and overreach of power, that there was only one path forward and that it would move quickly, it would be a hiccup and the country would move on. But what you saw then was the ruling party try to figure out how not to lose power while still trying to diminish the power of the president. So the PPP agreed that he had to go, that he was unfit for duty, but they disagreed on how to make that happen. And so in that first impeachment vote, the ruling party boycotted the vote, minus three people who ended up staying to vote, but it wasn't enough to carry two thirds of the National Assembly in order to enact impeachment. And the ruling party tried to come up with this weird, unconstitutional, illegal plan of how to sort of share power with him, take over his duties without formally dismissing him from office in order to buy time. Because one of the reasons why all of this happened is that there's been intense movement by the opposition party is because they have such a vast majority in the National Assembly, that the ruling party has seen them as being obstructionist in the National Assembly, in passing laws, in passing the budget and opposing the president's agenda. And so the leader of the opposition party has a lot of political baggage, is very known, is very polarizing, but it also has his own legal battles of which is waiting for a ruling on his own legal convictions as to the ruling of it will determine whether or not he's even eligible to run for president in any future election. So I think the ruling party was trying to game out how do we buy ourselves time for that court case to be resolved, so that the ruling party would have a better chance in runoff elections and that the party wouldn't lose power just because of what Yoon did.

Harry Kemsley: inaudible

Jenny Town: But by the time they unveiled this plan, there was no agreement on it, there's no legal precedent for it, it didn't go through. And by the second week then they had another impeachment vote and enough of the ruling party members agreed to impeachment. So you have the impeachment process that's now moving forward, but then there's also criminal charges that are being brought against President Yoon for treason and insurrection, which is sort of an unprecedented move as well. So there's a lot of questions about the legal jurisdiction that have led to a lot of controversy and Yoon resisting arrest, because does the body that's actually investigating him on the criminal charges, do they actually have jurisdiction to do so, and nobody quite knows. But then you also had problems with the impeachment process itself because the constitutional courts didn't have enough court justices to actually make a ruling. So they had just enough to start the case, but not enough to actually rule on the case. But the president has to appoint the justices. But the president had been impeached. Then there was questions about does the acting president have the authority to actually appoint the justices? And so what you had was when the Prime Minister took over the acting presidential duties, he decided he wasn't going to appoint the justices. Well, so then the constitutional court can't do its due diligence and move forward with the ruling on the impeachment. Then the opposition party impeached the acting president, and then now we're down to the... it was the deputy prime minister who's also the finance minister who is now the acting president. He advised to say that he was willing to appoint two of the three nominated justices and then he would wait for the third justice to have bipartisan support before he would move forward with that one. It was a decision to be able to move forward that was protested by both sides, but actually gave them a chance to move forward. Now at least the impeachment process is moving forward, but the criminal process is still in a lot of political turmoil and there's still a lot of political infighting going on between both parties.

Harry Kemsley: Jenny and Rachel, thank you both for that. That's an incredible situation. As you say, probably unprecedented. Martin, if I come to you first and then I'll come to you, Christina in a second, is there any reflection of this in terms of what we're seeing or hearing from North Korea? Have they reacted to this in any way? Is there any discernible signs that North Korea is interested, making capital out of this situation?

Martin Williams: Yeah, the North Korean response I think has been interesting. The first thing we should remember is that North Korea has reset its relationships with South Korea.

Harry Kemsley: Sure.

Martin Williams: South Korea is no longer viewed as part of the same country. It is now viewed as not just a foreign country, but a hostile country. I think the reaction that we have seen is probably different now than it would've been a few years ago. Rachel has been tracking this as well, and I should credit Rachel with a lot of the research that we've been doing on this. I think that North Korea has not been afraid to criticize South Korean politics and criticize President Yoon. When the declaration of martial law happened though, North Korean media became very silent. Rachel, you've been watching some of this as well, it hasn't been spending a lot of time covering this, but there has been a little bit of coverage as the protests in Seoul have started to develop and as things have moved along. I don't know if initially it was either that the North Korean media either didn't know what to say about all of this, just as actually none of us knew what to say because it was so unprecedented.

Harry Kemsley: Unprecedented. Yeah.

Martin Williams: But also the idea that you're in a system like North Korea, you don't necessarily want to be giving your citizens the idea that you can all go out onto the street and march and change politics and things like that. But yeah, Rachel I think has some more views on this.

Rachel Minyoung Lee: I would say that North Korea's reaction to the South Korean situation has been interesting in that since May 2023, North Korea very diligently reported on anti- Yoon protests, like almost every day. But the moment Yoon declared martial law, it became quiet. North Korea became quiet. But it did eventually react. I believe it took them several days to react, which was very slow compared to 2016 when Park was impeached by the National Assembly. I think we had a total of maybe two or three, three, I think, media reports, and then complete silence. Even in the latest party plenary meeting at the end of December, there was maybe one mention of South Korea in North Korea's readout of the plenary meeting, but only in connection to the US, but nothing about the South Korean political situation. Although based on the pictures you can gather that they've talked about South Korea at great length. We just don't know what it is because they haven't really offered the details. Martin does have a good point in that North Korea now has a very different policy on South Korea in terms of dividing South Korea as a completely different state, a hostile state. But that there was not that shortage of interest in South Korea. But certainly the reaction has been muted. And I think this is in line with how North Korea reacted to the drones incident in October where it issued some angry official statements and Kim Jong- un made a few military visits, but that was really about it. It was almost like they didn't really want to escalate. And I say this because in the course of all of these revelations coming out about Yoon and some of the actions that the then South Korean defense minister took just before the martial law, one of the things that the South Korean media reported on was that then South Korean defense minister was trying to, or attempted to, draw North Korea into a limited conflict by shooting down the trash balloons from North Korea and possibly even in the Yellow Sea. But there was no reaction from North Korea.

Jenny Town: Yeah, it's been uncovered or at least alleged that part of the plan was to try and bait North Korea into some kind of limited conflict in order to justify martial law, because otherwise how do you justify martial law? But I think this is one area where there is a little bit of precedent from the 2016 impeachment of Park Geun-hye, since it is a conservative president, it is one who has been very muscular and very vocal against North Korea. Instead of trying to take advantage of the situation and try and manipulate the situation in some way, what you see is North Korea kind of sitting back and saying, there's no reason to disrupt this process. There's no reason for us to get involved, because whatever outcome happens, it's going to be better than what we have now. Whether we want to have a relationship or not there's no incentive right now for North Korea to inject itself into that process.

Martin Williams: The other thing that comes to mind as well is just a week or two weeks before this all happened, it wasn't just the North Korean media coverage, but North Korea was dropping leaflets over Seoul that were all very, very critical of President Yoon. And have there been any leaflets since?

Jenny Town: No.

Martin Williams: I don't think there have. Yeah. But it was taken that message directly to the South Korean citizens as well, and then Yoon kind of finish the job for them.

Harry Kemsley: Christina, in the past we've talked about looking at North Korea from an open source perspective is as much about what they say and how they say it or indeed what they don't say. Has there been any shift at all, the limited amount of response that you've seen? Has there been any change to the tone or the content of the discourse from North Korea?

Cristina Varriale: Well, I think what's been most interesting to me has been actually, as Rachel alluded to, the lack of content. Even looking at things like the party plenary meeting that was held at the end of December. I was anticipating coming back from Christmas leave and having at least four or five reports to go through on that, sifting through all the different narratives and things that they were setting out for the year, maybe having a slight update on their new policy as was just mentioned, vis-a-vis South Korea because again, they've gone a little bit quiet on what that looks like. And we got, I think one report in KCNA that was a little bit bland to be quite honest. So it's quite difficult. I'm personally finding it quite difficult at the moment as an analyst looking at the country to look at those, like you said, the narrative changes, the tone changes, because it does feel like there is just a reduction in content at the moment. And I think that also makes sense. If you think about the topic we've just discussed, time is on North Korea's side. As Jenny said, they can kind of just sit and wait out and watch what's happening in South Korea. They don't need to necessarily be proactive about trying to influence one way or another. From the perspective of the leadership in Pyongyang, they're not at risk of... or it doesn't seem like there's much indication of that they're at risk of something similar happening in their country. There's a very, very, very, very low risk of a protest. All these things that have influenced where South Korea is now isn't something North Korea is giving us any indication that they are immediately concerned of in terms of their own domestic stability. So where's the incentive, as Jenny said, to get involved in that process in any way? So they have time on their side

Jenny Town: And especially because they also don't want to do anything that would give you any justification. So if they get too involved, if they're too boisterous in this process, it's just going to build support for why Yoon did what he did, rather than again, just being quiet, being risk- averse, sitting back and watching the process and watching the party implode.

Rachel Minyoung Lee: And I think also this speaks to North Korea's ability to control escalation. Their hesitation, reluctance, to at least for the moment, escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula, because now is the time to sit back and watch rather than trying to incite South Korea in any way. There's just no need to.

Cristina Varriale: I think that's a really good learning point that any analyst looking at North Korea, there's that assumption that I think sometimes exists, that North Korea are always the ones that are bolshy, provocative, and I think what we're talking about here really challenges that assumption. And I'm sure as analysts that watch the country quite closely would challenge that anyway. So I think this is a really good case in point to remind everybody that assumption maybe needs checking more often than it is.

Harry Kemsley: Could be a thinly disguised segue then to take us on to the next topic in terms of bolshy and provocative.

Martin Williams: I know what's coming.

Harry Kemsley: We have the arrival of a new executive in the US and that executive has engaged in a fairly unusual way with North Koreans. President Trump has been seen with the leader of North Korea. What do we think about the arrival of Trump? Clearly when he last spoke, I think North Korea probably viewed itself slightly differently, to the way it views itself today? I think there is probably a feeling in North Korea that they're on a slightly bigger place on the world stage, for example. But before I spend too long talking about that, let me hand over to the experts. What do we think the implications of the return of the President Trump to the executive of the US is likely to be?

Jenny Town: Well, good question. At least this time, while Trump is unpredictable, he's more predictable about the things he cares about, the things he is interested in. And this time he actually has somewhat of an agenda and a plan and people around him who know how to make that happen. So we didn't have that last time. We have that this time. We know he does care about North Korea. We know at some point he wants to get back to negotiations. I think he still thinks he can do something to move the agenda forward. I don't know that he has really taken into consideration how different the geopolitical environment is right now and how that's going to affect any kind of potential negotiations with North Korea. But it's also not his first priority. And I think if we are looking at what Trump is likely to focus on early on, it's going to be Russia, first of all. And that negotiation, how the war in Russia ends, I think will have pretty consequential implications for everything else also. So I think that is a really important focal point in this first six months to a year, however long it takes to settle this, that will have spillover effects in the rest of Trump's foreign policy. But I want to point out too, is that in terms of the alliance, there's been lots of talk about the US- ROK Alliance, and we know that Trump was very antagonistic towards South Korea the first time around, and the South Koreans are certainly bracing for that. And they had a plan to get in early to try and speak Trumpian speak, Can Yoon and Trump get along? And people really expected their personalities to mesh better than what for instance President Moon did back in the first term. But it's interesting because now you have a situation where when Trump was first elected, South Korea had just impeached a president. And so they had to wait until a new president was elected before they could get in, where everyone else came in early to try and kiss the ring. And this time now in a second term, the same thing has happened. There's been an impeachment of the president and it's unclear if, again, he will make South Korea wait until a new president is elected before having any kind of substantive negotiations. My guess is I think this is an area where it might go either way because this time he does actually have an agenda and there are certain things that he does want to decide, such as tariffs for instance, even on friendly countries such as South Korea, where there may be a little bit more willingness to have those discussions to get some early wins while he is dealing with more difficult issues like Russia. But it's unclear, right? Because the only president we have is what we saw in 2016. And in that case he said, not until elections happen.

Harry Kemsley: Do we think the situation of North Korean troops engaged in the conflict in Ukraine is likely to be something that the North Koreans will consider themselves to be important enough to demand a space at the table when the US get involved in that conversation in a different way, perhaps with the new executive? Is that likely to be something that the North Koreans will feel they have a place at the table for?

Jenny Town: Not in the negotiations between US and Russia and a settlement US- Russia- Ukraine. That isn't what North Korea would expect. I think there is a question of whether the US will have on the agenda with Russia, its relationship with North Korea. And if it does, that's likely to have negative impacts on the potential for US- North Korea negotiations in the future. But Trump has already said North Korea's direct involvement in the war in Russia has really complicated the situation.

Rachel Minyoung Lee: Which I thought was interesting. He said complicated. But that's not negative.

Jenny Town: It's not negative. And I think there has been a lot of talk in Washington that Russia's relationship with North Korea was likely to be on that negotiation agenda. And this statement makes me think that their rethinking that, as to whether it's worth it or not to try and push that issue.

Rachel Minyoung Lee: And it makes me wonder why the Russians would accept that right now when they're basically winning the war and they get to call the shots.

Cristina Varriale: You'd also need Russia and North Korea possibly to acknowledge the presence of inaudible Korean.

Rachel Minyoung Lee: inaudible normally. They've formally never done that.

Cristina Varriale: Yeah, so that could be another big sticking point there.

Harry Kemsley: Okay, we'll take just a short pause there. That's the end of part one. Please do join us for part two very soon. And thank you for listening.

Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us this week on The World of Intelligence. Make sure to visit our website, janes. com/ podcast, where you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts, so you'll never miss an episode.

Harry Kemsley: Hello and welcome back. For those of you who listened to part one of this podcast, you'll know that we're about to pick up the second part now. Thank you for listening. Stop.