The night before his historic summit with US President Donald Trump last June, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un took a surprise stroll in downtown Singapore to see the sights of the wealthy capitalist city.
Experts believe the Trump administration plans to sell North Korea on a model such as communist Vietnam, highlighting its relationship with Washington as well as its economic boom since adopting market reforms. And all the North Koreans have to do, Washington is expected to say, is give up their nukes.
Yet analysts are wary such a sales pitch will produce any tangible outcome. North Korea knows how capitalism and market economies work: it’s just chosen not to embrace them.
China has for years been prodding the North to embrace economic reform, dragging former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il on tours of capitalist enterprises whenever he visited.
The same tactic has also been used within the United States, said Van Jackson, a former Defense Department official in the Obama administration.
„Historically, there have been many — I know of half a dozen instances myself personally — where senior North Korean officials were brought around and shown what capitalist industrialism looks like. They were shown what the stock market floor looks like on the New York Stock Exchange, or they were brought out to some tech lab in Silicon Valley,“ said Jackson, author of „On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War.“
„We’ve shown them what capitalism looks like… the idea that they will see something in Vietnam physically that triggers something different than what we’ve shown them before is kind of nonsense.“
‚From a mortal enemy to a friendly partner‘
There’s something for both Washington and Pyongyang to like when studying the US-Vietnam relationship.
For North Korea, it’s an example of a single-party communist country that reformed its economy without democratizing. For the United States, it’s an example of how to redefine a relationship and make a buck at the same time.
In 1995 — the year Hanoi and Washington normalized relations — US exports to and imports from Vietnam were worth just $252 million and $199 million respectively. However in the first 11 months of 2018, the US exported more than $8 billion worth of goods to Vietnam and imported goods worth $45 billion, according to US Census figures.
„Vietnam’s path from a mortal enemy to a friendly partner of the United States is particularly appealing to North Korea, who believes a good relationship with the United States can help create the right environment and necessary conditions for achieving North Korea’s new strategic drive toward economic development,“ said Tong Zhao, a fellow at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing.
