Regime Survival: The Bottom Line to the Kim Jong-Il Dynasty

Monday’s headline-making North Korea nuclear test only emphasized what many experts have echoed about the isolationist regime: The government will survive at all costs.

And those costs, by the best estimates, are $6 billion annually. That’s the amount the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) spends on its military – including the program that led to the apparent nuclear test on Oct. 8. 

“I think that they believe that having nuclear weapons is central to the survival of their regime, politically and militarily,” said Dr. Marcus Nolan, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, and a noted expert on North Korea.

Nolan said best guess estimates put Pyongyang at spending upwards of 30 percent of its annual gross domestic product (GDP – estimated at $20.6 billion in 2004) on military spending. By all accounts, that makes North Korea the most militaristic society on the planet today.

And it’s a policy that has kept the Kim family regime in charge since his father took over in 1948 following the end of World War II, when Japan vacated and the country was divided between the southern half controlled under the protectorate of the U.S. and the U.K., and the northern half, under the umbrella of the USSR. The regime has survived through thick and thin, even a famine during the 1990’s that by all estimates killed one million people.

“This is a regime that has a history of being able to survive a high degree of hardship,” Nolan said.

But could North Korea’s flagrant disregard of international condemnation mean the regime is much more fragile and closer to collapse than expected? Not likely. If anything, nuclear capabilities are one of the fundamental directives of the DPRK foreign policy, a policy which includes the eventual reunification of the Korean peninsula under the influence of the DPRK government, said Nicholas Eberstadt, author of “The End of North Korea.”