Does any of this matter? No one knows. Kim Jong Il's regime seemingly has a tight hold on power and has been willing to imprison even minor critics. But dictatorial regimes have fallen, suddenly, when ordinary people refuse to follow orders. Washington lawyer Michael Horowitz, who helped construct the alliance of evangelical Christian and Jewish organizations that lobbied for the North Korea Liberation Act, has predicted that the North Korean government will fall before the end of this year. Many others regard this prediction as unduly optimistic. The truth is that when tyrannical regimes fall peacefully, they do so with great suddenness and against the predictions of almost all area experts and foreign policy elites. George W. Bush has accelerated that outcome in the Middle East: It's impossible to imagine the peaceful uprising in Lebanon and the swift departure of Syrian forces from the country they had ruled for decades without the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime and the holding of free elections in Iraq last January 30. Now it seems that Bush is pursuing a policy designed less to accommodate the North Korean regime than to create the conditions in which it may fall.
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If that analysis is correct, the administration also needs to give serious thought to what will happen afterward. The South Korean government is wary of reunification for very good reasons: North Korea's primitive economic condition and the fact that its people have been utterly isolated from outside media and information about the rest of the world mean that reunification will be very much more costly and difficult than the reunification of Germany—and that has had negative economic consequences that persist today after 15 years. If George W. Bush seriously envisions the peaceful end of the Pyongyang regime, as his championing of Aquariums of Pyongyang suggests, his administration needs to think seriously about what comes next.
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