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49 Camps or no camps, the North Korean regime endures. Op- tions for dealing with it, Lankov says, are very limited, and he does not envy those who have to make those decisions now. While he would like to see the South engage more with the North, he un- derstands that in the current political climate, it’s not viable. How- ever, he cautions that the rest of the world, especially the United States, cannot simply ignore North Korea. “The Americans are pretending North Korea doesn’t exist,” Lan- kov says. “The problem is North Koreans are not going to just be idle and do nothing. If they are ignored, they will work to further improve their nuclear intentions. They will, sooner or later … de- velop a full-scale nuclear missile potential.” Lankov predicts that eventually, without deterrence, North Korea will build an arsenal of several dozen nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles. He is skeptical the U.S. will do anything to stop them. Lankov foresees three possibilities for North Korea’s future. The least likely possibility is that the regime will become a “develop- mental dictatorship” like Vietnam or China, “but much more re- pressive.” More likely, he says, is that the North Korean regime will col- lapse internally, which could lead to one of two scenarios. The first is incorporating it into South Korea over what will be “a very troublesome transition period, which will take a long time.” He bets against another inter-Korean war or “gradual, manageable unifi- cation,” and predicts plenty of tension between the two Korean societies, saying it is all part of growing pains. “As time goes by, this level of disagreement will disappear, and it will merge again into a unified society.” The final possibility is that North Korea becomes a pro-Chinese puppet state. This would also come about with a collapse of the North Korean regime, but in this scenario, “the Chinese decide that it cannot afford to have an unstable North Korea or, alterna- tively, cannot afford to live next to a unified Korea, which will be democratic, nationalist and at least partially pro-American,” Lankov says. “So, Chinese tanks roll over the border.” Lankov’s biggest regret is that he didn’t make more copies of the declassified Soviet documents when they were available — the new Russian government reclassified most of them in the mid- ’90s. Otherwise, he supposes that he wishes he worked harder, but doesn’t appear terribly concerned about it. Regarding his own future, he doesn’t see much change. “When you are 50 years old, and like what you are doing, dramatic chang- es are both unlikely and unwelcome,” he says. “So I hope that the remaining 20 to 25 years of my active life will be, essentially, more of the same.” He would not rule out a move, though. “If North Korea changes dramatically, I would like to relocate to Pyongyang, of course.” And with that, the Tasmanian Devil clears the teacups, wipes up the cookie crumbs and spins out of the office for his next ap- pointment. North Korean state, Lankov asserts it certainly began that way, and much of the rhetoric still exists. “When Kim Il-sung (North Korea’s first leader) took power, he did not say that ‘following the will of the heavens we are establishing a new state, and I am chosen by whomever and God almighty,’” Lankov says. Like every other communist regime, “the North Ko- rean government says, basically, ‘We know how to scientifically build a better society. And we have the right to run this country and also ideally to convert the entire world into our ideology, because this Juche idea is the best way, the fastest shortcut to building a brilliant, wonderful future society.’” That communism, Juche and the rest of North Korea’s policies have categorically failed to create this utopia is not lost on Lankov or the North Korean regime. The state’s failure “is clear, and this makes them very, very vulnerable. Of course they don’t believe this message anymore,” Lankov says. “North Korea says, ‘We know how to make a better world.’ And they do not. And this is a major problem.” Rabid nationalism is now the ideology most often fed to North Koreans to keep them in line, a method not unique to North Korea, the professor notes. “As time went by, communism was growing more and more nationalistic, because nationalism is a wonderful drug, a wonderful narcotic, which makes running large groups of people far easier. Communists began to make very active use of this substance, and it led to a lot of distortions.” There was a reason the Soviets called World War II “the great patriotic war” and not the great proletarian or great workers’ war — it is the same reason the Kim family sees itself as the essential guide of the Korean people, not the workers of the world. The regime has lost a large amount of control of the North Kore- an economy through a process Lankov has tracked since the mid- ’90s. Lankov calls it “de-Stalinization.” The North Korean economy adopted a mix of regular private enterprise — food stalls, small shops, warehouses producing consumer goods — and larger, hy- brid operations. The Stalinist, state-owned and state-run economy, “without admitting it, without accepting it … was dismantled from below,” Lankov says. “In terms of ideology, you have all this old stuff. But if you look at how the system is really, actually operating, the old system is dead, because we have a flourishing private economy.” A coal mine, for instance, is officially registered as state property, but is actually run by a private investor who hires and fires, gets equipment and chooses who gets the high salaries, according to Lankov. Even though they maintain a “legal fiction” of the mine being state-owned, “the manager has probably more freedom than a Western manager, because they don’t have labor laws, trade unions and these sorts of things.” Political control in North Korea is also diminishing, Lankov claims. He says Yodok No. 15, North Korea’s biggest prison camp, has closed, though media reports suggest a new camp is being built to house its former guests. The future: Breaking the cage