Today’s visit by the “Supreme Leader” to Panmunjom is unprecedented. Perhaps the North Korean communist monarchy hasn’t had Marx and Engels turning in their graves, but at least they have been scratching their heads. And now this. Kim Jung Un has accomplished what his father and grandfather couldn’t—a straight-up, even-Steven meeting with the other side. The real prize, a meeting with a sitting American president, isn’t too far off.
It was General Douglas MacArthur who said that, “The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.” Today, those of us who have served there pray for peace on the Korean peninsula. I’ve predicted recently on this website that the North Korean government is about ready to implode. I suppose that doesn’t have to be violent. That is the main thought that inhabits my prayers today. Maybe, just maybe, this is what is looks like when a communist monarchy begins to implode. No one knows what that looks like. That, too, is unprecedented.
But today’s pomp and circumstance contradict the visit of another recent North Korean visitor to Panmunjom. He was a North Korean soldier, his body riddled with maggots and disease, who was met with gunfire—from his own side—as he defected to the South. This is the face of a country imploding. When famine and starvation rule the country of North Korea, and the only people being fed are members of the fourth largest standing army in the world, and a representative from that army is infected with maggots and disease, how desperate must be the rest of the nation? We can pray for North Korea but no group of people have prayed for them more than their displaced family members and countrymen in the South. I’ve heard how they pray and it’s deafening.
I, too, have visited Panmunjom where those two leaders stood today. I’ve looked into the faces of North Korean soldiers who were always primed to propagandize any movement or statement I could make. We were even told not to scratch our noses. I have been moved emotionally many times in my life, but that visit remains clear in my memory. Here in this hottest of cold war confrontations, where American blood has been shed over the trimming of a poplar tree in 1976, we learned a couple of lessons we must never forget: “[T]he North Koreans will negotiate when threatened or when they hope to gain important concessions not available by other means. North Korea seeks the appearance of legitimacy and respects power and force more than law and international norms of conduct.”[1]
I have read commentaries today that express hope and cautious optimism. I, too, pray for a peaceful end to the Korean War and mercy for the entire peninsula. But, the only analogy I can find is when the Berlin Wall was dismantled circa 1989. At that time, it took those of us who were serving some seven or eight years to finally settle on the reality that the former Soviet Union was indeed no more. In the case of a communist monarchy, we may need a little more time before we know the truth.
[1] See https://web.archive.org/web/20051024105914/http://www.nautilus.org/foia/NegotiatingwithNK.pdf as referenced by Matt Riemann at https://timeline.com/north-korea-poplar-tree-bcee4d72332f