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WALL
STREET JOURNAL
At Trump-Kim Summit, Host Vietnam
Blazes Trail for North Korea
Economic overhaul by former U.S. adversary Hanoi offers
potential model for dictator By
Niharika Mandhana When
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un meets President Trump in Hanoi next
week, the venue itself will carry a message for the dictator: If you
cooperate with the U.S., you could command an economic transformation
like Vietnam’s. A
once-poor nation constrained for years by hostile post-war relations
with the U.S., Vietnam forged a detente and a fast-growing economy while
its Communist Party kept a tight grip on power. The country’s per capita
gross domestic product today is 10 times what it was before reforms
began in 1986, the benefit in part of investment from U.S. allies Japan
and South Korea. It counts the U.S. among its biggest export markets.
In some ways, Vietnam’s circumstances in the mid-’80s parallel
Pyongyang’s today. Mr. Kim wants to develop his sanctions-hobbled
country, where appetite for economic reform is growing. But an opening
carries risks for his dynastic regime, which wields near-absolute
control and prohibits dissent. The
stakes are higher for President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong
Un to agree on specifics to move forward stalled denuclearization talks
during their planned summit in Vietnam at the end of February, analysts
say, but no major breakthroughs are expected. Photo: AP U.S.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has extolled Vietnam’s approach and
presented it as a model. “In
light of the once-unimaginable prosperity and partnership we have with
Vietnam today, I have a message for Chairman Kim Jong Un: President
Trump believes your country can replicate this path. It’s yours if
you’ll seize the moment,” Mr. Pompeo said in Hanoi last year. If
Pyongyang relinquishes its nuclear weapons and missile programs—the goal
of U.S. negotiators—American investment could pour in to North Korea’s
energy grid and agriculture, he has said.
President Trump this month said North Korea would become an economic
rocket under Mr. Kim’s leadership. China and South Korea are waiting in
the wings, their economic cooperation largely obstructed by sanctions.
“Of
the countries that transitioned to market economies, the Vietnam model
is the closest” for North Korea, said Byung-Yeon Kim, a professor at
Seoul National University. “It restructured
its economy and fixed its problems with the U.S. but in a way that the
incumbent political regime survived.” Mr.
Kim last year took a walk around glitzy Singapore, the venue for June’s
summit with Mr. Trump, where one party has governed uninterrupted for
decades. North Korean officials have toured industrial facilities in
China, run by a Communist Party that embraced capitalism.
“There is a lot of exposure to China,” said Andray Abrahamian, a fellow
at Stanford University who has trained North Koreans on economic policy.
“There is a desire to be more like that, to be successful, more
wealthy.”
North Korea’s position is different from Vietnam’s in key ways. The U.S.
sees Vietnam as part of a strategy to balance Beijing’s influence—a role
that has shaped Washington’s ties with the country and prompted the U.S.
Navy to send an aircraft carrier strike group to Da Nang last year. North
Korea, however, considers the U.S. a present security threat that
requires it to arm itself with nuclear weapons and maintain a close
partnership with China, its longtime patron. The
countries that poured money into Vietnam—Japan and South Korea—have
volatile relationships with Pyongyang.
Vietnam’s position “is the result of a slow, painstaking process that
was carefully watched and cultivated,” said Robert K. Brigham, an expert
on U.S.-Vietnam ties at Vassar College. “It wasn’t a rocket ship—and
North Korea’s trajectory is even more complex.” But
Vietnam’s arc offers lessons for Mr. Kim. Before battle-drained Vietnam
embarked on its economic “renovation,” known as doi moi, it was isolated
by a U.S. trade embargo and hostile border relations with China.
Socialist policies had triggered food shortages and support from a
soon-to-collapse Soviet Union dwindled. In
the following decades, Hanoi allowed private enterprise and repaired
ties with Washington, embraced trade pacts and parlayed an inexpensive
labor force to attract overseas capital.
Vietnam’s leaders took a gradual path that helped them control the
transition’s political consequences, said Le Hong Hiep, a
Singapore-based fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. The
strategy gave them space for a few political changes, he said. Eager to
join the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, for instance, Vietnam
agreed to allow independent trade unions. At
the same time, Hanoi has been deliberately slow to privatize state-owned
enterprises, which the ruling party sees as levers of influence, Mr.
Hiep said. Its military runs its own commercial operations, giving it
economic clout. And Hanoi maintains an authoritarian, single-party
system that suppresses dissent. The government imprisons and harasses
activists and controls the press—though not to the extent of North
Korea, where Mr. Kim’s regime runs one of the world’s most repressive
systems. While
private enterprise is illegal in North Korea Mr. Kim has emphasized
economic development, and economic change has slowly begun. In a
country that once depended on a state distribution system, there are 436
officially sanctioned trading markets for goods, food and medicine,
according to a report last year by the Washington-based Center for
Strategic and International Studies. That is up from zero in the 1990s,
when famine pushed North Koreans to start bartering and trading in black
markets to survive.
Demands for political freedoms typically arise down the road when
countries reach a high per capita income, and China’s growth shows that
even at that stage, democracy doesn’t necessarily follow, Mr. Hiep said.
“There can’t be absolute control, but Vietnam’s example shows Kim Jong
Un can open up and delegate without threatening his position,” Mr. Hiep
said. |