Back in 2000, during the final phase of the Clinton administration's ill-fated "peace offensive" toward the North Korean regime, Kim Jong Il personally assured an American secretary of state that the 1998 test-firing of a ballistic rocket "was our first launch--and our last" of the DPRK's long-range Taepodong-1. The ever-magnanimous Dear Leader is still true to his word, as it were. For the long-range rocket launched this week (along with six short-range missiles) was not a Taepodong-1, but rather a Taepodong-2: North Korea's new and improved multistage intercontinental ballistic weapon.

Wendt Scholar Nicholas Eberstadt

Wordplay and semiotics, however, cannot obscure the grim significance of North Korea's latest move. Without warning, it shot off a missile it has been developing for the purpose of striking the U.S. Lest there be any possible ambiguity about the nature of the intended threat, North Korea's National Defense Commission (chaired by Kim Jong Il) timed the launch to coincide with America's Independence Day celebrations.

By this provocation, Pyongyang has done more than simply raise the stakes in its contest of wills with the Bush administration. Much more ominously, the launch reveals that the Dear Leader and his inner circle are ready to ratchet up their confrontation with "the imperialists" to a new and still more dangerous level--and that North Korea's masters are confident that they hold the upper hand in this escalation.

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To appreciate the nature of the new menace now gathering before the U.S. and its allies, we must first understand North Korean objectives. Pundits often observe that Pyongyang is intent, foremost, upon regime survival. While incontestably true, this "insight" is also utterly superficial, insofar as all governments regard their own survival as a paramount priority. What distinguishes North Korea's quest for survival are the peculiar and punitive conditions that must be satisfied in order to prolong Kim Jong Il's rule.

Economically, North Korea is a basket case: It enjoys the dubious distinction of being the only urbanized and literate society in human history to suffer mass famine during peacetime. To relieve the nation's desperate privation, the leadership need do little more than cease enforcing the costly distortions and destructive practices they insist upon maintaining over their closed and repressed economy. But DPRK policy makers have vetoed this option again and again. According to the repeated pronouncements of their state media, they regard the pragmatic reform measures routinely adopted these days in other countries as potentially lethal for their own system. In Pyongyang's telling, "ideological and cultural infiltration"--economic and other contacts with the outside world--brought down Soviet socialism; the masters of Pyongyang have no intention of allowing this bourgeois infection to undo their own gulag paradise.

But if the regime is unwilling to acquiesce in regular commercial intercourse with the world economy, how can it hope to sustain itself financially? Pyongyang's own answers to the question are indicated by the two overarching slogans that have been unfurled in the Kim Jong Il era: the imperatives of building "a powerful and prosperous state" and "military-first politics." Pyongyang spelled out the meaning of the first slogan in 1998, explaining that "defense capabilities are a military guarantee for national political independence and the self-reliant economy," and that "the nation can become prosperous only when the barrel of the gun is strong."

Further official pronouncements about "military-first politics" have elucidated Pyongyang's view of exactly how military might conduces to national wealth. Particularly noteworthy is the following formulation: "Once we lay the foundations for a powerful self-sustaining national defense industry, we will be able to rejuvenate all economic fields, to include light industry and agriculture and enhance the quality of the people's lives." One might well wonder: How could any country's defense sector expect to become "self-sustaining"--much less a vehicle for financing the development of other economic sectors? The only conceivable scenario is one where military expenditures were deployed to earn net profits. This can only mean extracting resources from elsewhere--that is, from other countries.

Plainly put, North Korea's survival strategy is a policy of international military extortion. North Korea's rulers have concluded that it is safest to finance the survival of their state through the international export of strategic insecurity and military menace. Consequently, the leadership, as a matter of course, strives to generate sufficiently grave international tensions, and present sufficiently credible security threats, to wrest a flow of essentially coerced transfers from neighbors and other international targets sufficient in volume to assure the continuation of what Pyongyang describes as "our own style of socialism."

To date, Pyongyang's predatory security strategy has actually worked rather well. After all, the DPRK, unlike so many other communist regimes, has neither vanished from the face of the earth nor compromised its claim to unlimited domestic authority through system-altering economic reforms. Moreover, North Korea has methodically unburdened itself of the various international obligations that had heretofore seemingly constrained its prerogative to amass a nuclear arsenal. Improbable as it may sound, Pyongyang has now come to engage South Korea and the great powers of the Pacific (China, Japan, Russia and the U.S.) in "denuclearization" talks from a position of tactical advantage (with supposed nonproliferation deliberations occurring on a schedule and according to an agenda largely of Pyongyang's own choosing).

No less important: As the perceived killing potential of the North Korean state has waxed, so has the aggregate level of net foreign resources transmitted to the DPRK through "non-commercial" channels (such as aid payments from concerned neighboring states or state-sponsored criminal activities, including drug smuggling and counterfeiting). North Korea's balance of trade deficit has soared during the era of "military-first politics"--and, for the idiosyncratic system they oversee, DPRK leaders view that deficit not as an indicator of economic weakness but as a proxy for political strength.

Although the Bush administration's rhetoric about Kim Jong Il and his regime has sometimes been ferocious ("loathsome dwarf," "axis of evil," etc.), North Korea's leaders seem to have concluded that the Bush North Korea policy consists mainly of empty words--and that oft-repeated admonitions and warnings need not be taken terribly seriously. By more than one criterion, indeed, Pyongyang's strategic successes on the Bush watch outshine those from its brinkmanship during the Clinton years. Apparently unwilling to move against North Korea's nuclear challenges by itself, and evidently incapable of fashioning a practical response involving allies and others, the Bush administration's response to Pyongyang's atomic provocations is today principally characterized by renewed calls for additional rounds of toothless conference diplomacy.

Having taken the measure of his American adversaries, Kim Jong Il and his regime are now embarking on a perilous new high-stakes gamble, one through which they may earn unprecedented economic and strategic benefits. Ballistic missiles are their instrument in this venture. These will be wielded as like a strategic battering ram, with the aim of shattering the U.S. security architecture in the Korean peninsula and throughout northeast Asia.

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI.