1997 prediction on Norks does not come true

NY Times:

A team of government and outside experts convened by the Central Intelligence Agency concluded in 1997 that North Korea’s economy was deteriorating so rapidly that the government of Kim Jong-il was likely to collapse within five years, according to declassified documents made public on Thursday.

The panel described the isolated and impoverished country as being on the brink of economic ruin and said that “political implosion stemming from irreversible economic degradation seems the most plausible endgame for North Korea.” The majority among the group argued that the North’s government “cannot remain viable for the long term” and could fall within five years.

Nearly a decade later, the assessment has not been borne out, and its disclosure is evidence of past American misjudgments about the internal dynamics of North Korea’s closed society. American intelligence agencies still regard North Korea as among the toughest of intelligence targets and have made little progress inserting human spies into the country to steal secrets about the government.

The assessment was produced by a group that included senior intelligence analysts, Pentagon war gamers and independent academic experts. It was made public on Thursday by the National Security Archive, a research group.

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The belief that the North Korean economy was collapsing helped shaped White House thinking in 1994 when it promised to deliver light-water nuclear reactors to North Korea by 2003 in exchange for Pyongyang’s halting its covert nuclear weapons program. Senior Clinton administration officials said privately at the time that they did not expect Mr. Kim’s government to be in power by the time the United States had to make good on its pledge.

By early 1997, according to another document released Thursday, the C.I.A. had concluded that North Korea “cannot reverse its economic fortunes without sweeping reform that would take time to produce results that could unleash destabilizing forces.”

The documents disclosed a misjudgment by the C.I.A. that is the mirror image of an earlier one: while it was predicting an imminent North Korean collapse, the agency was still being criticized for failing in the 1980s to anticipate the speed with which the Soviet Union would eventually fall.

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The misjudgment was based on a failure to see how much aid South Korea, China and Japan would give the North in order to prevent the collapse. That is why the six party talks are critical to putting enough pressure on North Korea to make them stop producing nukes. The two party talks pushed by the Norks and the Democrats would only be about what goodies the US would give them to stop their bad conduct, instead of the six party talks on what goodies they will lose if they do not stop their bad conduct. This is just another example of why Democrats should not be trusted with national security.

The failure of past predictions has not stopped current predictions of the demise of the North Korean regime.