Viewed from a distance, the North Korean regime’s actions offer a textbook case of how a country enclosed within a cocoon of paranoid suspicion would behave. The obsessive secrecy is occasionally broken by thunderous proclamations of military achievements, provocative actions designed to trigger anxieties in a region that bristles with old animosities.

It is a pattern of behaviour that fits a precast template of insanity. After the latest series of North Korean ballistic missile tests — followed by declarations that it could strike at will against high-value military targets within the neighbourhood — Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, issued a dire warning. Traditional principles of diplomatic engagement were entirely misplaced in dealing with a leadership that was irrational, she claimed, and it was prudent for the US to keep all options open.

This barely concealed threat of military action fits a recent pattern, when terms such as “all available means” have been interpreted by the US to mean the primacy of the military option over all others. The lack of rational faculties, unreconstructed megalomania and wanton cruelty to his own people — these were all alibis rehearsed against the Iraqi leadership before the idiocy of the 2003 invasion. And the institutional culture that creates these figments is deeply embedded, tending to replicate older tropes as a substitute for serious thinking.

In Debriefing the President , a memoir published late last year, John Nixon, who was assigned the onerous task of interrogating the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during his years in US captivity, records how the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was obsessed in the years before the invasion by the need to construct a threat. Later, as he got direct access to the deposed dictator, Nixon learnt how the stories confected in Washington were weirder than fantasy.

In the years following his reassignment to CIA headquarters, Nixon looked up the files on North Korea and learnt with little surprise, that the intelligence about Kim Il Sung, the founder of the dynasty of dictators now in its third generation, identified him as suffering virtually the same psychiatric disorders as Hussein. It was as if the CIA doctors had settled upon a fixed template to apply to troublesome dictators, which spared them irksome questions and kept the political leadership happy.

The self-serving myths evaporated the moment the rubber hit the road. Fortunately, there is a realistic possibility that such a moment may never come in the North Korean case. Potential salvation comes from South Korea, where a President has just been impeached after a candlelight movement took to the streets protesting rampant abuses of power and a threatened rollback of democratic rights gained after years of struggle.

Park Geun-Hye assumed office as South Korea’s first woman President in 2013 after an election campaign in which the national intelligence agency allegedly sought to influence the outcome through a flood of right-wing propaganda in social media. The years since saw an assault on labour movements and civil society organisations, a hardening of attitudes towards the North, and an effort to rewrite history by substituting privately published school texts with officially authorised versions.

Park Geun-Hye was offended by the manner in which post-war Korean history was represented in school texts and particularly irked by the portrayal of her father Park Chung-Hee, the authoritarian strongman who ruled through most of the ’60s and ’70s. He oversaw the “miracle on the River Han” which transformed South Korea into a manufacturing powerhouse, dominated by the chaebol or homegrown industrial conglomerate. But civil society in South Korea was not about to countenance a reversal of the gains registered by democratic movements following his assassination in 1979.

The democracy movement also fostered a kinder, gentler attitude towards the North. The so-called “sunshine policy” originated with Kim Dae-jung’s inauguration as President in 1999 and was carried forward by his successor Roh Moo-hyun. Kim won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 but earned little favour from the US after the George W Bush administration assumed office the following year.

A restoration of older hardline values followed the end of Roh’s term in 2008. And if North Korea’s provocative nuclear and ballistic missile tests have earned it international opprobrium, less well-publicised have been the military exercises the US and South Korea have carried out annually, ever since the “sunshine policy” was declared dead.

The US has responded to the most recent North Korean provocations by announcing that it will move its anti-missile system, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), into South Korea. This has set off larger ripples, with China fearing the espionage capabilities of the system and an overturning of the strategic balance in the region.

South Korea’s merchandise exports are already feeling the heat with the official Chinese media broadcasting strident calls for a boycott. In just a quarter century since they established formal diplomatic relations, China has emerged as South Korea’s biggest trading partner. Squandering these gains would be a foolhardy manner of marking a significant anniversary.

The most likely successor to the South Korean presidency on current reckoning appears to be a political veteran with deep roots in the democracy movement of the ’90s, and a firm commitment towards the “sunshine policy”. Now that could well transform the engagement between North and South Koreas from the current state of recoil into something more rational.

Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer and researcher based in Delhi NCR

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