The Black Box
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Next on The Impossible State, I turn the tables on normal host Victor Cha because he's now the guest for his book Black Box: Demystifying the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea. North Korea is the impossible state. It's a place that stumped leaders and policymakers for more than three decades. It has a complex history and it has become the United States top national security priority.

Each week on this show, we'll talk with the people who know the most about North Korea. Welcome to The Impossible State. I'm Andrew Schwartz. So honored to be here with my great colleague, Victor Cha, who has now published his seventh book. It's called The Black Box, Demystifying the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea. Victor, welcome to your podcast, The Impossible State. Thank you.

You know, the last time we talked about a book, it was about a year ago, it was last summer, and it was the book you did with Ramon Pardo, The Pink Book. Everybody knows it as The Pink Book. The Pink Book. Which we discussed. And so what's different about this book?

Well, thanks, Andrew, for being on the podcast. It's always great to do these with you. So this book, The Black Box, is different. I mean, the book we did last year, the pink book, was really a general history of Korea.

appealing to a much broader readership. This is a book that looks at unification, as you said, in North Korea, and really is sort of a, it really sort of aggregates a lot of the research that we've done at CSIS over the past 10 years or so.

I'm using all these different methods for studying the Korean Peninsula. So using satellite imagery, using statistical methods, using surveys, microsurveys, you know, really ethnographic work. You're scraping data. Scraping data. So, I mean, it's one of the great things about being at CSIS is that I am able to use research methods that I didn't use in my own work as an individual scholar.

with your ideas lab, with our imagery people. There are many things that I could do. And so we wanted to put this all together in one place for people to look at, read, to peruse, both policy-interested folks as well as academics. And that's how we wrote the book. So before we get to talk about unification, there is some news. Yes. Amid all that's going on in the world, Ukraine, Gaza, the U.S. election,

strife around the world in Africa and flooding in Europe. It looks like North Korea is ramping up missile tests again. There have been two in the last week. What are we to make of that?

Well, it's certainly very concerning. I mean, we've seen two missile tests, more probably on the way. And then he did this very unusual thing, the North Korean leader, where he actually went and inspected a centrifuge facility, which had thousands of centrifuges in it, which spin uranium, which provide fissile material for a more modern form of nuclear weapon than North Korea's sort of older plutonium-based program.

So, I mean, this was big news. It was quite bold. They even put out video and photos of the dear leader doing that in the centrifuges. Yes, standing among thousands of sort of centrifuges. The only time that we've seen that before, and we didn't really see it, the only time we've heard about this or anybody has seen it before was when the North Koreans invited former Los Alamos scientist Siegfried Hecker.

um to to visit um so this was a pretty bold move and i think all of it is it is related to our election in the sense that all of our data shows that north korea tends to be more belligerent in u.s election years whether it's midterm elections or particularly presidential elections

And a number of experts have talked about a possible October surprise in advance of our elections where North Korea does something really to rattle the cages, to get attention, to put themselves on the front burner, and also to just demonstrate strength, which is what I think they're doing with these tests, as well as with this visit to the centrifuge facility. So they're hyper aware of our election.

And, you know, even yesterday, we're talking on, you know, Wednesday, September 18th right now. Yesterday, former President Trump at a town hall meeting was talking about the nuclear landscape. And he talked about North Korea, of course, and he said they've got a lot of stuff. And, you know, so they're heavily monitoring what's going on here, aren't they?

I think they are. I think they have a new relationship that they're cultivating very deeply, and that is with Putin and Russia.

But at the same time, they are watching very closely what happens in our election. I think it's fair to say that depending on who wins that election, we could have very different North Korea policies. With Harris, you know, I think a focus really on continuing to press for allied coordination, exercising sanctions, but staying open to diplomacy.

But with Trump, as we saw, we had wild swings. We went from fire and fury, you know, rocket man, possibly a war with North Korea, bloody nose strategy, all the way to love letters and summit diplomacy. So I think they are watching very closely our election.

All right. Let's go back to the topic of Black Box. It's a fascinating book. I'm calling it the yellow book because it's got this great yellow cover, just like the pink book. But let's talk, you know, you're like the band Weezer. They have the green album, the red album, et cetera, the blue album. The pink book, the yellow book. Right, exactly. Yeah.

The book is about unification, and there's an absence of other books about unification. So tell me what some of the findings are with this. What surprised you? What doesn't surprise you? And why do you think, well, do you think we're remotely any closer to unification? Sure. So just in terms of the landscape, you know, I think

unification as a topic is not really very well studied. Yet, I do believe it is inevitable, right? I mean, the division of Korea was an aberration. It was a country that was united for thousands of years.

and then as a result of Cold War politics, it was divided at the end of the Second World War. And the system in North Korea right now, by any metric, should not be continuing to survive. Like this very autocratic system where they treat their people horribly, they have food problems, they have economic problems, it shouldn't be around. So I think that unification is something that will eventually happen, and yet the range of

plausibility is so wide that it's not really something that governments can devote time and resources and attention to because they're dealing with yesterday's crisis and today's crisis and tomorrow's crisis, not a hypothetical years from now. The only hypotheticals that we really plan for are military contingencies, but not something like unification. And in the scholarly world,

there's a lot of work on North Korea, there's a lot of work on the U.S.-Korea alliance, but there isn't a lot of work on unification. And so I always thought it was important that there be a book in English about the topic of unification. There's more work on it in Korean, but on the topic of unification, that was independent scholarship, not tied to some government-affiliated think tank. There are government-affiliated think tanks in Korea on unification. So they produce a lot of stuff, but it's government, right?

And so we thought it was important to do independent work on that. So that's what we tried to do with this project. The other thing is that if readers open the table of contents, they will see that I'm the primary author, but we have many co-authors on the book. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. You've got a stable of experts on...

who have co-authored parts of the book. What drove you to that? - So there again, I think it's sort of a culmination of the work that we've done at CSIS 'cause each of the chapters has a co-author that was a fellow, an associate fellow, a research associate, a research assistant who was involved in the work we did on the project. So it's an opportunity for them too. I mean, for many of them, it's their first publication.

And their work was integral to what we've done. And it was people at CSIS, people at Georgetown, a student at Stanford as well that have been part of this project. So that was a lot of work.

fun to do. So, yeah, that's why we wrote the book. There's not a lot of literature out on it, and we tried to take all these different approaches at looking at something that we largely see as a black box. We think of unification, we see the word on the box, but really don't know what's in it. And so we tried to think of ways to

you know, create some transparency about how to think about the problem. Tell me about some of the methods. I mean, you actually spoke to people in North Korea. You, you know, as we talked about before, you scraped data.

You've learned a lot from some of these methods. Explain some of the things that you did and your co-authors did in order to create this book. Yeah. So one example would be that on North Korea, they always claim that U.S. has a hostile policy towards North Korea.

But they never really defined what that was. So what we did was we did a data scraping exercise where we looked at North Korean behavior, U.S.-North Korea diplomacy, and looked at cross tab that cross tabulated that with.

what might be considered an element of U.S. hostile policy, and that is U.S.-South Korea military exercises. And what we actually found was that there was actually no correlation, no statistically significant correlation between U.S.-ROK military exercises and downturns in U.S.-DPRK diplomacy. So in other words,

north korea talks about a hostile policy but if we're in negotiations with them um and their ex and we're exercising they don't really respond negatively to it they don't walk away from negotiation those sorts of things so that was one example the other example as you said is um we looked at the impact of markets in north korea

how economic markets, the black market, the official markets have changed the way North Korean people think. And that was an ethnographic study that we did. And we found that North Korean people in general rely much more on the market now today than they do on government handouts. They believe information they get from the market more than they believe what they hear from the government.

And that the market has caused them to have a little bit more freedom of thought from what the government is telling them. And, you know, these are really important things in a country where they try to control everything that a person thinks about their country and about the world. Victor, tell me about what some of the other chapters discuss. You know, I see there's chapters on the alliance, there's chapters on cyber threats,

Of course, I really dove into the cyber threat one. But tell me about these. Really, each chapter has a treasure in it. Yeah, so the one on cyber threats was interesting because...

Again, this was all done on... All the work in the book is unclassified. But at the same time, we thought that something like cyber threats and cybersecurity, it's been in the news a bit. North Korea is very active in this regard. Probably they really came on the stage as a real concern when they hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment a while ago. After the film came out. Yeah, after that film came out.

And then during the pandemic, there was a lot of activity because they were shut down in the COVID lockdown and they weren't trading. There was a lot of activity, really theft, going after cash reserves in different banks around the world and things.

But again, it's one of these shadowy things where there's not a lot of information. There's an assumption that all the information is classified. But we did an open source literature search on this and were able to do things like map all of North Korea's reported cyber thefts and cyber activity from the Sony hack up until today. We're able to bring together some experts and build some arguments as to why they're doing this.

how their strategy may have changed over time. When they did the Sony hack, for example, everybody thought that they would use this as a terrorist weapon. Yeah. Right? Going after soft targets like water supply, civil nuclear plants, things of that nature. But what we found when we pulled together all this information about what they've attacked, it's moved like from that into the direction of just money. Right. Like just getting hard currency.

which is related to the success of sanctions, international sanctions, and of course the COVID lockdown. And so they've moved more into the direction of really, it's also in cryptocurrency and other sorts of areas they've been doing this. So there's a lot, this chapter was designed to show that there was a lot you can learn about a very shadowy topic

with good open source information and searches. I mean, they're like electronic gangsters trying to steal money. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's essentially what's happening. And they go and they're able to and their means are not as sophisticated as people think. It's a lot of it is phishing.

A lot of it is going through different forms of entrapment, like trying to bring somebody in through a fake employment inquiry, a headhunting inquiry, getting them to click on a link, and then they're in the system. But it is one of the most active things that they're doing, and the Biden White House...

I think last year, about a year and a half ago, made very clear that the concern is that the revenues being generated by this cyber activity is also going to support the weapons of mass destruction program, proliferation and weapons of mass destruction program. So it's not just petty theft, it's petty theft to acquire hard currency that have strategic consequences.

Victor, do you find any instances of North Korea having tendencies to try to interfere in our election? We know China, Russia, Iran are, but what about North Korea in that regard? There I don't think we have, we certainly don't cover it in the book. We don't have clear information about that. It would certainly be a concern if I were somebody, and I'm not, but if I were somebody working on cybersecurity, cyber threat issues in our elections,

I would be concerned about North Korea just because they're so active in this space. They have a larger core of cyber warriors, which is what they call them. I think it's larger than our whole cyber force.

And, you know, they collude very much with Russia, China, Iran, as we see these days, very much in the open. That's incredible that they have a larger cyber force than we do. Yeah, they've devoted a lot of time to it. There are two particular agencies that have been involved in it. Those are actually the agencies that also have been involved in their terrorist activities in the past.

which raised the initial concern about terrorism. But it's something that they consider very important. It's an asymmetric strategy for them.

You know, they cannot match the outside world in terms of economic power, even in terms of conventional military power, even though they have a huge military. It's very under equipped and under trained. And so they go for asymmetric strategies, WMD, cyber, like these are two of the big ones. And let's not forget, I mean, fortunately, they don't have a lot of experience actually fighting wars.

No, they don't. They don't have a lot of experience fighting wars. They talk a lot about war. They say they do a lot of exercising. But of course, this becomes strategically very dangerous because if their conventional capabilities are large but not very good,

and there's ever a conflict of some sort, then immediately they have to shoot up the escalation ladder to weapons of mass destruction. Let's go to the USROK alliance for a second. And how are you seeing that impacting

the North right now. I know military exercises you mentioned before, but the closeness and the growing closeness between the United States and the ROK is quite evident. How is North Korea responding to that? Yeah, I think over the past four years of the Biden administration with the government, current government in Korea, the relationship really has not only broadened

into areas like economic security, global health, but it has deepened militarily a great deal. One element of that has been on extended nuclear deterrence.

where the Washington Declaration, the NCG, the Nuclear Consultative Group has really been focused on trying to meld U.S. strategic capabilities and South Korean conventional capabilities to make for a much stronger deterrent.

And then, of course, the tempo of exercising has increased dramatically, both with South Korea and with Japan trilaterally on everything from missile defense to intelligence sharing. So I think there's no doubt that the North Koreans see this as a much stronger alliance than it's been in the past.

Right now, they seem to be not interested in any sort of dialogue with the administration or with South Korea. And they really, again, as I said, put their focus on building this new relationship with Russia, which is largely, you know, it's largely derivative of the war in Ukraine because it's been Putin's need for ammunition that has led to a blossoming, and that word is in quotation marks,

a blossoming of this relationship. The North Korean leader just met with the former national security official Shoigu from Russia, and they talk openly about their military alliance today. So the fact that the alliance is strong, I do not think that the fact that the U.S.-Korea alliance is strong has pushed North Korea into the arms of Russia. I don't think it's been a reaction.

North Korea has been pursuing this idea of improving the relationship with Russia the day that Putin invaded Ukraine.

the day that he invaded Ukraine. They knew they had something to offer. They knew they had something to offer. They were initially one of the few that were openly supportive of Putin's initial gains in eastern Ukraine. One of the few that voted against the UN resolutions condemning Russia. So they knew there was an opportunity there. And for North Korea,

The timing was very fortunate because it was happening just as they were coming out of a three and a half year, three and a half year COVID lockdown. Right. And we talked about that. We weren't even sure where they were with COVID. Yeah. Yeah. It was a very bad situation for them. And this was like a lifeline for them. So right now, not a lot of interest in talking to the U.S.,

And they're putting all their marbles in the Russia basket right now. So how does that impact a potential future unification? And what's your message on unification? Will it happen anytime soon? Well, what I always say about unification is it could happen tomorrow and we wouldn't be surprised.

Because we then say the North Korean regime was brittle, right? They never recovered from COVID. Levels of trade with China are still not up to pre-pandemic levels. You know, the leader was overweight, had all sorts of problems, you know, health problems.

you know, we could be sitting here 10 years, 20 years from now having the same conversation and unification will not have happened. And we'd be like, I'm not surprised. Right. Right. That's sort of the range of possibility. So, you know, it's impossible to say. Having said that, the responsible thing to do is still to prepare for it in some way. And so, like, one of the things we did with this project was we actually

surveyed South Korean and U.S. officials to try to understand what was important to them in unification. What were they concerned about? What was important to them? What did they feel they had enough information about? What did they feel they had no information about? Because we not need to start a conversation about how the United States and South Korea, the two key allies, think about unification because we don't really do that right now.

So you talk about unification and you talk about blind spots to unification. What are those? Yeah, so this was sort of the interesting thing we did with the chapter on the surveys is we went to like,

200 US experts and 200 Korean experts and gave them a list of like 10 things that are important with unification you know and these are things like the disposition of the nuclear weapons what happens to North Korean conventional forces the environmental cleanup

right? Labor, demobilization, right? We went through all of these things and then we asked these experts to tell us, like, how important is this from like a U.S. security interest? Like, how would you rank this? And then how much information do you think we have on it? Like, how much do we know about it in the open source literature, in the intelligence

information like how much do we know about time and the blind spot was defined as an area that we think is really important but the experts also say it's important but we don't have a lot of information right those were the because those are the spot those are the ones that you really want to focus on and just that exercise alone was useful because it showed us like what the united states thinks

Are the blind spots on unification? What do the Koreans think are the blind spots on unification? We also asked them to extrapolate about what they thought China's blind spots are. Like, what does the U.S. and Iraq think are China's blind spots? Because if we can agree on what we think are China's blind spots, then maybe we can start a conversation with China about unification. Like, we think

Refugees, for example, is a big problem for you, right? Or things of that. So it was a, you know, admittedly, it was an academic exercise, but it's on a topic where we don't have a lot of information and we need to start somewhere. And if the U.S. and the South Korean government tomorrow were to start a conversation about unification, where would they start?

um you know this kind of work gives them some places to start like let's see what our blind spots are right and let's see if we can exchange information coordinate policy um things of that nature well it makes a lot of sense and this book is so timely because just this past august

South Korea announced a new unification policy. What are your thoughts about that in the context of this book? Yeah, I mean, the timing of that and the book were great. They were clearly not coordinated that way. But we do have a chapter in the book that talks about so-called unification theories, the way unification has been talked about on the Korean Peninsula for the past 50 years. And so we tried to induce from all of that

several different theories of unification. I won't go through all of them, but during the Cold War there was only one theory of unification, which is to win. The only way unification happens is "I beat you", and that was it.

And then, you know, one other theory was sunshine policy. Remember during the progressive governments in Korea where it wasn't so much about unification was seen as dirty, dangerous and difficult. And so the priority should be not on unification, but on reconciliation, inter-Korean reconciliation, hence the engagement policy, all that. What's interesting about the current

view of unification as espoused by the South Korean president in August is it's the first, at least in my mind, it's the first vision of unification that doesn't talk about it in sovereign terms, in state-to-state terms.

either inter-Korean state reconciliation or one state winning or absorbing the other. It doesn't talk about it that way. It talks about it in terms of, it's an ideational view of unification that talks about it in terms of values, right? And

what unification will do in terms of freedom for the North Korean people. So it's almost a cross between a unification policy and a human rights statement about how, not that unification will bring North Koreans lots of money and you know, all that, but it's about how unification will mean that you don't have to be afraid anymore.

Right. You don't have to be afraid of somebody knocking on your door in the middle of the night. Right. And taking you away. You don't have to be afraid of listening to Korean pop music. Right. Or saying the wrong thing in public. Or saying the wrong thing in public. Or...

or humming a tune, like a BTS tune or something like that, and then being caught and then put on a public trial to be flogged in public in front of all your classmates, things like that. So it was unusual because it was a different vision of unification that really spoke to values and freedom from fear. And in that sense, I think

it wasn't really appealing to the government. It was appealing to the people, right, of North Korea, which in many ways is probably more threatening to the North Korean government than anything else. Sure, because if they're all into it, then they're not necessarily thinking about the dear leader as much. That's a problem for the dear leader. Yeah, and I think also the timing of it, given that they've come out of three and a half years of the COVID lockdown,

Andrew, as you know, we're doing we're currently doing research on looking at what happened in North Korea during the COVID lockdown. And one of the things that was very clear from it, we haven't produced the findings yet, but one of the things that's become very clear from the research is North Korean people were pissed off at their government. That's right. They're pissed off at their government. Like nobody got a vaccination. Nobody got a mask.

Nobody was getting information about what was going on. They were just locked up for three and a half years. Yeah, and people were afraid to say they were sick because they didn't want to get locked up. They didn't want to get locked down for months.

So, you know, I think there's a lot of pent up anger at the government. And then you have this new unification policy that's announced that's about the unification will help you as an individual. Right. Not your government, your state or anything like that. So I think so. It's interesting. It's interesting. And I think.

In my personal view, I think the North Korean government was aware that this was coming in some form or fashion. And that is why they preemptively, you remember like about a year ago, they preemptively said unification is off the table. We now consider South Korea an enemy state. There were some analysts who looked at that and said North Korea was preparing for war. You know, we weren't one of those people who said that. But I think now it's more clear that they saw this possibility

policy coming from the South Koreans on unification, and they wanted to preempt it by saying, yeah, we're not talking about unification anymore. So I think that's what was driving that decision more than some strategic decision to go to war. The book is called The Black Box, Demystifying the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea. Victor, thanks so much for coming on The Impossible State and having me on to interview you about this terrific book.

Well, Andrew, thanks so much for being on The Possible State. You're always welcome. The door is always open to you, as you know very well. And thanks for the discussion about the book.