The North Korean obsession Washington fails to see

Aug. 31 (UPI) — The author prefers to use the lowercase “n” to challenge the Kim family regime’s legitimacy.

In the mid 1980s, computers made their very first appearance in north Korean middle and high schools.

There was only one machine per school, but to us, it was a magic box. My older sister was one of only three students selected for the school’s elite “Computer Group.” In those days, even a plastic keyboard for practice was an impossible luxury in north Korea.

To help her, my father handmade a mockup keyboard from a block of wood as a gift for my sister. He meticulously cut the wood into the exact dimensions of a real keyboard and glued small, plastic paint tubes — each matching the size of a key — onto the wooden board so she could practice at home.

Every single night, she practiced by pounding away on that wooden artifact, memorizing the layout.

I will never forget the sheer shock when I visited her computer room one day. As my sister feverishly typed away on a real keyboard, the north Korea flag suddenly began to flutter across the bulky, dim computer monitor.

That was the first computer program I ever witnessed. We learned programming with that terrifying level of obsession. By high school, we were writing our own code during mathematics class.

I must ask the foreign policy elites in Washington: Have you ever truly looked into the depths of this frightening north Korean obsession?

The sophisticated cyber-hacking, the multi-million-dollar cryptocurrency thefts, and the dozens of nuclear missiles that threaten the world today did not simply fall from the sky.

They are the monsters birthed by a ruthless, decades-long survival strategy of a regime that starved its people of basic food while forcing young students to learn coding on wooden planks.

Yet, a former White House NSC director for north Korea, recently presented a disastrous capitulation disguised as pragmatism in his op-ed for The Hill.

He argues that the next U.S. administration should tacitly accept north Korea’s nuclear weapons status, limit only its long-range missiles, permanently end U.S.-ROK joint military exercises, and sign a peace treaty.

To an escapee who survived the tyrant’s lies and crossed the border at the risk of death, this proposal is a betrayal wrapped in realism. Sitting in comfortable Washington armchairs, these analysts ignore several fatal truths.

First, the real fuel for north Korea’s nuclear weapons is the blood and starvation that my family and neighbors left behind.

Every time Kim Jong Un presses a missile launch button, the food and human rights of millions of north Koreans evaporate into thin air.

By accepting north Korea as a nuclear state, Washington would hand Kim Jong Un a historic victory.

It legitimizes his cruellest calculus: that a dictator can starve millions to build nukes and still force the United States to its knees.

Second, those who know the true nature of the Kim regime are not White House bureaucrats, but us, the escapees.

The north Korean regime has never kept a single international promise in its entire history.

To them, a peace treaty is nothing more than a shield to prevent a U.S. counteroffensive and a political warfare tool to demand the dissolution of the UN Command and the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Offering concessions to a wolf and expecting it to become a vegetarian is a display of Western diplomatic naivety that leaves me utterly speechless.

Third, the former NSC official’s proposal defiles the historical sanctity of the U.S.-ROK alliance forged in blood during the Korean War.

American soldiers marched to the Yalu River, shedding blood to liberate north Koreans from totalitarian shackles.

Though the intervention of Chinese forces saved only half the peninsula, South Korea’s founding president, Syngman Rhee, never forgot the unfulfilled promise of liberation. He secured the U.S.-ROK Mutual Defense Treaty precisely to preserve the ultimate goal of a free, unified Korea.

The U.S. military does not guard the DMZ merely to freeze a tragic status quo; they stand there to honor the soul of an alliance that promises freedom to the entire peninsula.

Fourth, we have survived this exact existential crisis before and know how to overcome it.

In the late 1970s, the Jimmy Carter administration pushed for a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea, driving the alliance into its darkest hour.

Carter’s attempt to resolve the crisis through naive compromises with a dictatorship mirrors the former official’s arguments today with chilling accuracy.

However, when Former President Chun Doo-hwan and Former President Ronald Reagan took office, he discarded Carter’s weak policy and enforced “Peace through Strength.” Reagan’s unwavering principles halted north Korean miscalculation and secured the ultimate victory in the Cold War.

Fifth, and most painfully, we remember Donald Trump’s historic speech before the South Korean National Assembly during his first term.

Back then, President Trump masterfully exposed the fatal vulnerabilities of the communist regime.

His words brought tears to the eyes of escapees, making us believe that the liberation of our brothers in the North was finally within reach.

Yet, through his subsequent summits with Kim Jong Un, he became the president who abandoned the North Korean people for a photo-op.

For a Trump 2.0 administration to grovel before a brutal dictator once again for a superficial deal would slam 250 years of American constitutional history and exceptionalism straight into the mud.

Sixth, the former NSC official is blinded by a fatal arrogance, utterly failing to read the massive geopolitical shifts reshaping the Eurasian continent.

He boldly claims that U.S. sanctions on Chinese banks could force Kim Jong Un to rip up his military alliance with Russia.

This is a naive fantasy of a desk-bound elite.

Today, Beijing is fiercely pressuring Pyongyang and Moscow to secure its maritime rights to exit directly into the East Sea through the Tumen River mouth.

In return, north Korea and Russia are leveraging this to build a massive economic and geopolitical compensation network spanning Beijing and Moscow.

The most undeniable proof of this is the newly completed and fully operational Khasan-Tumangang Road Bridge, which is now on the verge of its grand opening next month. This first-ever vehicular bridge linking north Korea and Russia has already seen its spans connected and customs facilities finished.

With the primary cargo access roads completely paved, it is counting down to its first traffic launch.

This land artery allows Kim Jong Un to bypass railroad bottlenecks and constantly receive military supplies, black-market goods, and personnel, completely unhindered by weather or maritime blockades.

Kim Jong Un will never abandon the massive survival backing of China and Russia just to trade for a few sheets of Washington paper and a fake peace treaty.

Seventh, accepting north Korea’s nuclear status is not a matter of distant political rhetoric; it is a live, existential catastrophe killing citizens across the Korean Peninsula right now.

Detailed medical screenings of escapees from the Kilju area — near the Punggye-ri nuclear test site — revealed that a staggering 30% showed clear genetic damage and chromosomal abnormalities caused by radiation leaks.

Furthermore, just last month, dangerous levels of uranium exceeding safe drinking water standards were detected in the tap water of Seogeom Island in Incheon, right on the border, sending shockwaves of panic through the local population.

Nuclear wastewater and radioactive runoff from north Korea are already crossing borders and suffocating our people.

To Washington elites, Panmunjom may look like nothing more than a glitzy stage for reality-TV diplomacy.

To us, it is a precipice between life and death. President Donald Trump once stepped over the border into north Korean territory with a smile, completely unhindered.

To him, it was just a single step. But to cross that concrete border marker – measuring just 48 centimeters wide and 5 centimeters high – countless north Koreans have had to take bullets and sacrifice their lives.

What makes it even more agonizing is the historical irony.

In November 2019 — the very same year Trump was begging for smiles from Kim Jong Un in Panmunjom — two young north Korean fishermen who desperately sought asylum in the South were bound in ropes, blindfolded, and forcefully dragged back to hell across that exact 48-centimeter Panmunjom marker to face immediate execution.

While the American president shook hands with a dictator to stage a fake peace, those who truly yearned for freedom were pushed to their deaths on that exact spot.

History warns us with brutal clarity.

In 1938, Britain and France fell for Hitler’s lies and signed the cowardly Munich Agreement, carving up Czechoslovakia. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a piece of paper as he stepped off the plane, infamously declaring, “Peace for our time.” The cost of that cowardly appeasement was World War II – the most catastrophic disaster in human history.

The U.S.-north Korea summits of 2018 and 2019 were the cruel deja vu of that Munich Agreement, and the starting point of the tragedy we face today.

While Washington’s elites were intoxicated by show-window diplomacy, assuming north Korea was pausing its provocations, Pyongyang used that time to enshrine its nuclear-weapons state status into its very constitution.

Ultimately, early this year, Kim Jong Un officially declared South Korea a hostile enemy state in a ruling party meeting, formally announcing a doctrine of preemptive nuclear strikes.

Today, the historical distortions and provocations of the Axis of Dictators defy imagination.

Last year, Xi Jinping shamelessly elevated north Korea – which contributed absolutely nothing to the war effort- to the status of a “World War II Victorious Nation,” perverting history.

To make matters worse, north Korea now boldly exhibits seized Western and American weaponry from the war in Ukraine inside a Pyongyang museum, mocking the world by calling it a “Joint Victory” with Vladimir Putin.

The bitter, chilling reality is that the very weapons of the United States, meant to defend global freedom, have now degenerated into “live combat test subjects” to accelerate Kim Jong Un’s nuclear and missile capabilities, now aimed straight at America’s throat.

The peace the former NSC official seeks to secure for Washington is a “blood-stained peace,” purchased by begging for a deal at the cost of trapping my people in eternal slavery.

It is a second Munich Agreement that will drag humanity into war. Washington may contemplate selling out human rights for a piece of paper, but we, the escapees who risked our lives for freedom, will never remain silent.

We will scream the truth about Kim Jong Un’s regime until every single north Korean is truly liberated.

Today, the Axis of China, Russia, and north Korea is desperately clawing to reclaim the totalitarian ideology they failed to consolidate during the Korean War.

The United States, which once brought down the Soviet Union during the Cold War, must fulfill the unfinished obligation it left on the battlefields of 1950.

If Washington fails to do so now, not only East Asia but the entire Western world will once again fall prey to totalitarian slavery – and 250 years of American history will be remembered as nothing more than a falsely packaged illusion.

Is this truly the legacy and the history that the former NSC official and Donald Trump wish to write?

Jihyun Park, a British Korean Conservative politician and regular contributor to the Korea Regional Review, is a North Korean escapee who fled twice from the country — in 1998, which resulted in a forced repatriation, and in 2008, which was successful. She is a senior fellow for human security at the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy.