A nuclear test, a satellite launch atop a rocket suitable for ballistic missile delivery -- and a creepy video depicting the destruction of an American city set to the 1980s charity anthem We Are the World. Even a world inured to decades of North Korean trash-talk is wondering whether this time the rhetoric really means war will returns to the Korean Peninsula -- with wider echoes around the globe.
But with North Korea, even high-decibel war talk can mask less visible threads that remain in place in spite of the posturing. Case in point: The Kaesong Industrial Complex, six miles north of the DMZ, where more than 100 South Korean companies employ thousands of North Korean workers in a decade-long demonstration of collaborative commerce. Thus far, for all of the escalation, Kaesong remains open, its work undisturbed.
Kaesong is critical for another reason as well. South Korean press reported in mid-2012 that the complex had been the site of several clandestine meetings between senior North Korean officials and South Korea's KORES -- the Korea Resources Corporation. Sources reported at the time that North Korea was developing over 700 mines, including rare earths projects, and that during the Kaesong sessions Pyongyang provided rare earths samples to South Korea for analysis.
In a country where Dennis Rodman arguably knows more about the machinations of the mind of Kim Jong-un than a team of trained U.S. intelligence analysts, somehow South Korean resource agencies have managed to keep their lines of communication open even as Pyongyang has reportedly cut the cord on the DMZ hotline.
The North Korean official who oversaw the metals talks -- National Defense Commission Vice Chairman Jang Sung-taek, a four-star general who also happens to be Kim Jong-un's uncle -- has been promoted to a position that some North Korea watchers say is second in command to Kim. Jang's 2012 visit to China was accorded the same protocol as the previous visits of Kim Jong-il. With no communiqué to announce the outcome of Jang's visit, development of North Korea's rare earths holdings were rumored to be high on the agenda.
Developing resources as a means of jolting North Korea's flatlined economy -- Number 177 of 177 nations on the Index of Economic Freedom, with a GDP 1/17th that of its South Korean kin -- offers the ability to modernize without liberalizing. As Middle East potentates, African kleptocrats and Russian oligarchs would be happy to tell Kim Jong-un, opening up a nation's resource wealth is completely compatible with keeping a closed political system firmly in place.
