Would the Last Peasant Out of the DPRK Please Blow Out the Candle

In September of 1989, the government of Hungary, then a Soviet client state, stopped prohibiting citizens of other iron curtain countries from fleeing to the west. Within the next month thirteen thousand East Germans made their way to western Europe via Hungary. The next month saw Erich Honecker deposed in East Germany followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall the following month. And thus the world witnessed forty years of Stalinist tyranny in Europe abruptly end without so much as a whimper.

I believe that this experience exposes a fatal weakness in the Stalinist paradigm. We now know that these regimes imprison their subjects within their borders for a very important reason: like a Roman Galley, if the slaves become unchained from their oars and slip overboard, the Stalinist ship of state stops dead in the water.

The North Koreans have for years depended upon the kindness of their northern neighbors, the communist Chinese, to stay afloat under the weight of their own despotism. But with North Korea's behavior becoming still more erratic even as the Chinese regime grows more liberal, the Chinese may indeed be questioning whether supporting the madness in Pyongang has become more costly than any strategic benefit it represents for China is worth.

Perhaps the time has come to seek the help of the Chinese in taking down the North Korean regime. All it would require of them is to throw open their border with North Korea and then coordinate with South Korea for repatriating all defectors. With no real defensive posture on their northern border, in this manner North Korea could be virtually emptied within days, and the leadership in Pyongang would find themselves masters of a vacant nation. The North Korean regime could be disolved and the peninsula then reunified, all without anyone firing a single shot.