Page 50 - NKHR Hawaii Conference 2023

CLOSING REMARKS

DR. RALPH COSSA
President Emeritus and WSD-Handa Chair, Pacif c Forum, Honolulu

Aloha!
T is has been a fantastic program. And those of you familiar with Korean conferences
know that at the end, some wise old professor comes out and spends about 20 minutes
telling you what you’ve already heard. I promise you I am not going to do that.

I want to just give a couple of closing thoughts, keeping in mind that I believe that the
term “North Korea expert” is an oxymoron. And anyone who claims to be one is about
half of that. So I’m going to try to just share some thoughts with you, understanding
that when it comes to North Korea we are all guessing. But I think the one thing that
is very clear about North Korea: we hear many people describing the North Korean
leadership as crazy, evil dictators. T ey’re only partially right. Kim Jong Un and his father
and grandfather before him are textbook dictators. T ere’s no question about that. If you
don’t believe they’re evil, you haven’t been paying attention to the last couple of hours of
presentations.

But they are not crazy.

One thing I’ve learned from many years in the intelligence community was that you
should never call a leader “irrational.” What that means is that you don’t understand why
what they did is something that they believe was rational. No leader does anything that
they think is irrational. So you have to ask yourself,

“Why does North Korea believe, why does Kim Jong Un believe, that what
he is doing is rational?”

T e unfortunate reason is that it works. T e North Koreans for three generations now
have played the Soviet Union of against China, China against the United States. Once
South Korea became democratic, they played South Koreans against other South Koreans.
Now the Russians are back in the game. So Kim Jong Un has a whole group that he can
play against one another and he’s doing that very ef ectively. We’ve seen there’s an old
saying,

“You can judge a man by the company he keeps.”

You can double that when you see Putin together with Kim Jong Un and you can triple it