Below is an interesting read from a ROK Drop favorite, Professor B.R. Myers who criticizes a fellow professor, John Delury who has long been a go to quote person for the New York Times in regards to North Korea issues:
Let me say straight off that I like Professor John Delury very much on a personal level. I defy anyone to spend time in his company (as I did recently at a conference in Macao) and not like him. But I’m losing patience with this sort of thing:
“The key to understanding Kim Jong-un’s long-term strategy has to do with ‘byungjin,’ ” said John Delury, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul. Byungjin, or parallel advance, is Mr. Kim’s policy of developing the economy alongside the nuclear program.
“Ideally, from his perspective, he could replicate the Chinese model by normalizing foreign relations, from the U.S. down, on the basis of a nuclear deterrent,” Mr. Delury said. Only then, with its economy, in theory, allowed to catch up to its neighbors’ and its leadership accepted abroad, could North Korea feel secure.
Make that: Ideally, from the West’s perspective. There is no basis in North Korea’s domestic discourse for such an interpretation of Kim Jong Un’s vision. None whatsoever.
The Yonsei professor belongs to a group of frequent Air Koryo flyers whose usual response to such criticism is to allude pregnantly to discussions they had with North Korean officials just the other day, on their fortieth or fiftieth trip to Pyongyang.
And a fat lot of good all that inside info has done them. No faction of the commentariat has been so spectacularly wrong so often. A list of the alleged breakthroughs, game-changing reforms and historic agreements these people have rushed to herald over the past 25 years would make for sobering reading. [Sthele Press]
You can read the rest at the link, but Myers believes the engagement crowd is now attempting to use a new term “byungjin” to essentially make excuses for Kim Jong-un’s provocations as being part of larger strategy to develop the economy much like the term “juche” was thrown around during Kim Jong-il’s reign over North Korea.
I just find it amazing that after all these decades the engagement crowd still thinks the Kim regime wants Chinese style reforms when clearly opening the economy would put the regime at risk.
