Why Do We Laugh at North Korea But Fear Iran?

[frigidmagi]

The Atlantic

In the United States, we make fun of Kim Jong Un and the North Korean regime's over-the-top propaganda machine. The regime may have launched a massive cyberattack on South Korean banks and TV stations last month, but we were circumspect that they were capable of such a thing. When former basketball player Dennis Rodman visited the country in February we giggled. How silly, we thought. Kim Jong Un is a Dennis Rodman fan - how out of touch! Soon after, a video emerged from North Korean state television showing Kim welcomed by jubilant masses of soldiers sprinting to welcome him as he visited a posting from whence rockets were launched in a brief 2010 skirmish with South Korea.

Again we chuckled at how staged it seemed. Just a week or so previous, a propaganda video came out showing images of Barack Obama and American troops on fire, and just before that, a sleeping Korean dreaming about a rocket destroying an American city. At these, we guffawed. We mocked the use of "We Are the World" and music from the video game Call of Duty as a soundtrack; we called one video " bizarre from start to finish"; " hilarious and disturbing "; "hilariously low-rent"; " cartoonish ." When the United States beefed up its missile defense network in California and Alaska to protect from a possible North Korean attack, we noted they wouldn't have the brains to actually hit us, and asserted that " no one's taking them that seriously." The propaganda, the rhetoric, it's all seen as a grand joke. Desperate, harmless hyperbole from a scorned and neutered country.

A man starves his own people and threatens to start a nuclear war, and Americans laugh. What a bizarre thing to do.

Meanwhile, we shirk in fear at the unhinged other leg of former President George W. Bush's "axis of evil" tripod: Iran. Unlike North Korea, we treat Iran as a legitimate threat. In Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's full-day confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the word "Iran" was mentioned more than 170 times. "North Korea" was mentioned 10. During the foreign policy-focused debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney last October, Iran came up nearly 50 times, and was the subject of multiple questions. North Korea was mentioned just once, as part of a series of other challenges facing the U.S., in the same breath as the trade deficit with China.

It's not that Americans like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or don't actively consider the hermit state a threat. It's actually the country's second least-favored , right after Iran, and equal numbers call North Korean and Iranian developments of nuclear weapons a "critical threat." Of course, North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and Iran doesn't. One might think that the country with a bomb - with whom we are still technically at war, no less -- would be more of a threat than the country without one, but at least judging by the way we talk about them, that's not the case. Why do we consider North Korea to be such a joke?

Partly it's the way they present themselves. North Korea is a relatively small nation with leaders who come across as stereotypically incompetent Bond villains: uniformly dressed, tasteless but expensive cliché obsessions, physically unintimidating, with every major attack blowing up in their face like Wile E. Coyote. The Kim family does not produce tall or physically gifted men, nor exceptionally handsome ones. They are also Asian, which connotes a whole set of racist stereotypes, none of them necessarily terror-inspiring. Iran, meanwhile, is a Muslim nation, and for obvious but unfortunate reasons it's easier to stoke public fears of Muslim fanaticism than Northeast Asian nationalism.

We also know less about the D.P.R.K. and Kim Jong Un. Basic details about his age (probably 30), marital status (he's been seen around with a pretty girl , probably his wife) and children (he may have just had a kid) have only recently become clear. His nuclear policy is even murkier. When the senior Kim died in late 2011, Korea-watchers were hopeful that the country might be entering a new age of governance, maybe under a coalition of leaders who would exert unseen pressure on Kim to open the country more. That didn't happen, obviously. Still, though, we don't quite know what to expect from Kim, who has at least inherited his father's inscrutability. "Nobody knows what he has planned, what he is thinking or contemplating doing or why the North Koreans are tripling down on their rhetoric," an unnamed senior administration official told CNN last month.

That should be scary, yet we're unfazed. A top Google autocomplete option for "North Korea" is "North Korea Unicorn," a reference to a late November story from the regime's state-run media that reported the discovery of an ancient unicorn layer below Pyongyang, which " proves that Pyongyang was a capital city of Ancient Korea..." It's exactly the kind of self-peddled hagiography America loves to laugh at: a childish tale a deluded country tells about its own greatness.

It's also partly matter of geography. Despite claims by the North Korean regime, most experts agree that their rockets probably cannot reach the American mainland. And even if they could, there's a lot of space and time over the Pacific Ocean for the military to shoot it down. Other countries, especially our allies in the region, don't treat the regime so lightly. South Korean and Japanese citizens tend to view the North as an existential threat, as we might if the Kims were sitting in Mexico City or Ottawa.

As for Iran, on the other hand, there's the Israel factor. We might not be directly in Iran's neighborhood, but Israel is, and the particular dynamics of the US-Israel relationship and Israel's oft-stated willingness to preemptively strike Iranian nuclear sites makes that tension seem more urgent. In Jerusalem, Obama reiterated the United States' "unshakeable support" for Israel, and U.S. foreign policy typically regards Israel as the bastion of Western influence in the Middle East.

There's also the fear that Iranian development of a nuclear weapon would inspire Saudi Arabia and other countries in the neighborhood to seek one of their own. South Korea and Japan accept the United States' umbrella of protection as a safeguard against the North; countries in the Middle East are less willing to rely on us to protect them from Iran. Western powers worry about an Iranian nuclear weapon turning into a Middle Eastern arms race.

Meanwhile, North Korea has been a constant threat. When most tyrants die, their legacy dies with them. Usually the people revolt or a new leader is put in power or a war unsettles the regime to push it this way or that. In North Korea, the son carries on just as the father did, and we've come to expect more or less the same behavior. Though the North recently claimed to abandon the armistice treaty, troops on the Korean Peninsula haven't seemed to notice much of a difference. There are still Americans lined up along the Demilitarized Zone- thousands of them. A Defense Department official explained to Foreign Policy, "We are always ready to go to war on the Korean Peninsula within a matter of hours," and the New York Times' David Sanger explained on Face the Nation, "The armistice was signed 60 years ago and it's been an on and off thing ever since with violations and so forth." The constant threat makes the highs and lows much more muted. Unlike Iran, which has lively internal politics and saw massive protests just a few years ago, North Korea is committed to the same track for the foreseeable future. In that context, each new inflammatory remark or island bombardment seems more or less in line with the long-standing behavior. It's just more of the same.

Also, because they've been doing this for a long time, we expect them to know not to cross the ultimate line, for fear of their own survival. Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the Council on Foreign Relations that it was a matter of rationality: "Iran has this patina, at least, of this super-religious extreme folks that might actually not care if they were wiped out in response to one of their attacks. There are some folks in Iran who ... might actually care less ... than the North Koreans do, because the North Koreans care only about regime-serving." Unlike Iran, where leaders value religion more than the state, North Korea cares too much about its own survival to ever actually use its bomb.

Put another way, we mock them because the Kim regime, more than any other, has remained steadfast in its vehement rejection of American hegemony without interruption and longer than any other current regime - and because we know they intend to keep it up. We got used to the North Koreans being awful, but just not awful enough to merit a major military response. We're tired of it. It's hard to tell a new story when nothing changes, and in North Korea not much has changed in years. Despite diplomats' occasional perceptions of openings, it would be charitable to say we're even back to square one in changing their behavior. Because the news isn't new anymore, we forget. They torture their own people, they threaten us, they rattle sabers, and we mock them because they've been threatening and rattling sabers for years. And still nothing changes.

Something to think about.

[Josh]

In this case, it really is straight up about the oil. If Iran uncorks, they're perched over a huge chunk of the world's oil, as well as the Persian Gulf. The tangible consequences to the American mind equals "Gas is gonna go way the fuck up and I can already barely keep up on the bills and credit cards."

Whereas if North Korea uncorks, you can't point to the direct tangible that would immediately impact our way of life. Sure, there'd be effects, huge and horrific ones. But let's be honest- the average citizen is more worried about the price of oil than they are about tens of thousands or more dead Koreans and the ripple effects of the resumption of the Korean War.

There is a lot of truth to the rest of it, though- Kim Jong Il was an easily-mocked figure with a captive media that wrote ridiculous shit about him. On the other hand, the menacing Muslim was scaring us loooooong before 9/11- look at the TV movies we had about terrorist attacks back in the eighties.

[frigidmagi]

I can make some direct connections to if North Korea pops. South Korea, Japan and China would get more than a little singed in the resulting backblast, which means all your electronics? The prices goes up. I don't know how much. That's just for starters. To be blunt the American economy can survive Paris going up in a mushroom cloud better then it can Tokyo or Seoul.

[Josh]

Oh I wholeheartedly agree with you. But that's not the perception of the average American citizen. The price of oil and hence the price of gas has such a direct visible impact on our lives and every time the Middle East rumbles the first thing most people think and hear is 'How will this affect gas prices?'

It's not an entirely unfair view, either- household electronics are far more of a luxury than reliable and affordable transportation is, and household electronics are what most people would connect Korean/Japanese production to. Is it fair to the Koreans or the Japanese? No. But then show me any country where the citizenry en masse truly and sincerely care about all the peoples of the world and bleed emotionally for their suffering.

[General Havoc]

I'm afraid Josh that I don't agree with you at all. The first thing the majority of people think of when discussing Iran is not oil, nor is the fourth, in my experience. Wherever on the political spectrum people fall, the majority of the time I hear people talking about how important the price of oil is, it's so that they can bash their opposition by claiming that all the other side thinks about is some selfish obsession with the price of oil.

No, we're afraid of Iran because there's some belief that Iran will actually cross the red line. North Korea, as the article points out, has been doing the same shit for fifty plus years. Iran meanwhile is both newer and more relevant to geopolitics in general, being in the process of building nukes and believably willing to use or distribute them. They are muslim radicals, which as you pointed out, the US has been afraid of for some time. Nobody believes that Juche holds an appeal to anyone on Earth, but muslim radicalism is popular in large segments of the Middle East and moslem world, and we've reasons both rational and irrational to believe it an imminent danger. People are afraid of Islam in general, but North Korea looks like a bad Bond Villain's evil lair, a comic tinpot dictator whose claims are utterly laughable. It's not that nobody cares that they're cruel, evil bastards. It's that since the prospect of waging a war with them over that is a prospect too far, all most people can do is laugh.

[Josh]

Well we're both running on anecdotal evidence on this one. The first thing I commonly encounter for anything to do with the Middle East is concern over the price of oil. Which is a more prevalent attitude? Can't say.

[LadyTevar]

Let's be honest guys... up til now, the Average American thought we'd "won" the Korean War. That there was a South Korea because we made the Norks back off. Why did we think this? It was under-taught in schools. Vietnam, which we lost, got more discussion. So to the majority of schoolkids, the Koreas were just another country on the geography test, if that. North Korea didn't matter.

Iran, however, got in the media during the 80s. Iran-Contra Affair. Muslim suicide bombers. The first attack on the Twin Towers in the 90s. Iran has been shown over and over the last 30yrs as a danger to the US. Thus, Americans react to what we have been fed.

[Hotfoot]

If tomorrow the Asian electronic market were to utterly disappear, it would suck, but the cost of electronics would not skyrocket. Based on the reports of how much money is saved by using the really horrid labor condition factories versus the ones that treated workers well (i.e. closer to American labor standards, or American production in general), you're looking at anywhere from a 15% to 30% increase in the cost of your electronic devices. Even if we see a jump of 200%, it's not that big a deal. Electronic devices have hit a plateau, and every year they get cheaper to make at the level we're currently used to. On top of that, nobody gives a damn about improvement like they used to. You can do nearly everything you need to do on the internet with the computing power of a cheap smartphone, much less a PC, Laptop, or Tablet. Existing Electronics will last for years, meaning that the cost of getting new devices can be defrayed much more easily than oil, which is needed constantly. So even if every nation in Asia were to stop production of electronics tomorrow, the net effect would be a few years where you don't get a shiny new iPad or what have you and you make do with what you already have, you pay a premium, and then wait for the new factories to start kicking stuff out. Your life is disrupted, but not tremendously.

War starts in the middle east and we're cut off from cheap oil? That's a more pressing concern. If the price of gas goes up, we'll have more trouble on our hands. People in the first world can and do go days without the internet and computers with no major issues. However, vast swathes of the population rely on gas to get to and from work, to survive, and so on. Increasing the cost of transportation and heating will cause more financial ruin to our populace than upping the cost of electronics, because it's immediate and every day. Say you commute every day to work, as does your spouse. Between the two of you, you spend $80 a week in gas. Let's say that due to a war in the middle east, gas prices change upwards in similar amounts that I listed for electronics, we'll say 30%. You start by paying $4,160 a year in gas. With the price hike, you're looking at $5,408, that's an extra thousand plus dollars a year on transportation costs alone. It will also hit heating for many places in the northern united states, as well as delivery costs, which will hike up the prices on basically every single thing you buy.

And let's not forget, in 2001 gas was about $1.70 a gallon, and at its height hit nearly $5 a gallon in some places. I don't think we'll see similar increases should Iran go to war, since a lot of that was bringing US prices to where the rest of the world is, but I think it will be a much more pervasive and immediately relevant set of price increases across the board than a loss of electronics factories would be.

Add to that that China is breathing down North Korea's neck and they don't want a war anymore than we do, and there is...well really nobody doing the same to Iran. Iran going to war also would bring us back to the Middle East fatigue much of the country has. We are wrapping up two huge and massively expensive wars in that region and don't want to go back. We're shown every day what fresh brands of hell were involved in those fights, especially once the proper shooting war was done. North Korea, meanwhile...

Look, North Korea is comical. They've had decades of threats with basically nothing to back them up. The country is such a mess that should the government topple tomorrow, I'm not sure the average person living there would notice. Hell, things might improve for them. They are a real threat to basically one place, and that's South Korea, and the only real reason for that is the Artillery pointed at Seoul, which is a very real concern, but it, to most people, is one city, and while artillery is brutal and the losses inflicted would be huge, the response would be swift and devastating to North Korea, and may in fact come from multiple directions.