Unpredictable Dictators

One of the most surprising paradoxes of the contemporary international situation is that the familiar hierarchy of interrelations among nations has been irretrievably overturned. That hierarchy was the framework that enabled strong nations to constrain -- by either economic or military means -- the ambitions of weaker nations. Until very recently -- remember Desert Storm and Panama -- that system seemed to be working as usual. But now, countries like Haiti, Libya, and North Korea have managed to compel the great powers to play a new game by completely new rules. This would virtually seem to be a new world order, with a sort of equality in relations between governments.The explanation to this paradox lies in the fact that weaker countries have brought a new commodity to the world market: their own unpredictability. Of course, the unrivaled master of this specific racket is North Korea's Kim Il-sung. The announcement of renewed negotiations between North Korea and the United States, as well as the planned historic meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea, are clearly victories for this racket.Despite the emphatic restraint with which official Washington greeted the results of former American President Jimmy Carter's recent mediating mission to the Korean peninusla, there was definitely a sense of relief. After all, during the period of escalating mutual threats, the situation was increasingly in danger of getting out of control.Many were already beginning to lose their nerve. Take, for example, the Japanese prime minister's strange announcement that his country has all the necessary materials to create its own atomic weapons. The idea of sanctions appeared to have lost steam due to the positions of China and, to some extent, Russia. No one was calling for a military resolution of the crisis, though there have been discussions of various ways of responding to any possible aggression against South Korea.And now, if North Korea allows inspections of its nuclear facilities and, at the same time, achieves even some of its proposals, it will be a clear victory for Pyongyang. If you judge diplomacy in purely Machiavellian terms, then you have to admit that the North Koreans played their hand masterfully. By escalating the crisis to its limit, they were able to offer to sacrifice their nuclear program -- the danger of which has not really been confirmed -- for the real acknowledgment of North Korea as an equal partner in the world community. We can be certain that, for at least the next few years, no one is going to try to put pressure on North Korea with regard to human rights or any other issue. Politicians around the world will constantly be thinking: Don't mess with North Korea; the situation could be worse.In this game, Pyongyang's main trump was not its nuclear program in itself. After all, at least a dozen countries in the world are suspected of the same sort of activity. However, their relations with the rest of the world can, to a large extent, be predicted. In the eyes of the West, however, the leaders of North Korea are completely unpredictable: No one knows what they might do if sanctions were imposed. And when they announced that they would consider sanctions to be a declaration of war, there was no way to tell if they were simply bluffing. Unpredictability has become Kim's main weapon.Of course, we do not want to exaggerate the abilities of North Korea's diplomats. They simply made the most of the situation that confronted them. And that situation was the product of the belief, held by the United States and other countries, that threats might actually have an influence on Pyongyang. Even though it was clear to everyone, including the leaders of North Korea, that no one was capable of making good on those threats.Democratic countries, unlike dictatorships, are acutely sensitive to the costs of any military action, or even of such weapons as economic sanctions. The leaders of these countries know that their people will hold them accountable for any losses incurred. And dictators understand this perfectly well. The result is that dictators know exactly how high democrats are willing to bet, but no one can be sure how high a dictator might bet.Of course, this is not a completely new situation. The leaders of the old Soviet Union played successfully with the knowledge that Western leaders considered them monsters, capable of destroying the world for the sake of their ideological dogma. The game was over, however, as soon as the West realized that Mikhail Gorbachev was no monster, but a normal person. At that moment, Soviet concessions in the area of disarmament become significantly less valuable.It would seem that for now, other dictators do not intend to turn a human face to the rest of the world. So, what is to be done?No matter how strange it may sound, I believe that the answer is simply for the West to reconcile itself with the madness of these dictators, as it reconciled itself to the madness of the Soviet Union. If the world community cannot make good on its threats, then of course it would be best not to make threats at all, in order to avoid absurd situations. Isolating such countries is no solution: In fact, isolation is just what these dictators dream of. On the contrary, it is better to develop trade and cultural ties in order to stimulate the internal development of these societies. Otherwise, totalitarian governments will continue to be able to blackmail the rest of us with their unpredictability. Alexander Golz is a political observer for Krasnaya Zvezda. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.