Posted on 06/08/2018 3:57:55 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
With a population about twice the size of North Korea’s capital Pyongyang, Singapore has a GDP per capita that is 38 times larger than North Korea’s. Kim might just be taking notes when he heads to his summit with Donald Trump.
Did President Trump choose Singapore as the site for next Tuesday’s summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un by accident? No way. One of Trump’s wildest cards in his unorthodox path to this meeting with Kim Jong Un is his vision of a prosperous North Korea. As Trump put it last week, “I truly believe North Korea has brilliant potential and will be a great economic and financial nation one day.” Trump’s tweet concluded: “Kim Jong Un agrees with me on this. It will happen!”
If the objective were to excite the imagination of the leader of one of the most impoverished, isolated nations on earth, it is difficult to imagine a more captivating picture than Singapore. This modern megapolis is one of the wonders of the modern world.
With a population about twice the size of North Korea’s capital Pyongyang, Singapore has a GDP per capita that is 38 times larger than North Korea’s. Indeed, today Singaporeans are richer on average than Americans and twice as rich as South Koreans.
Fifty three years ago when Singapore became an independent country under its founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, the poor, notoriously corrupt port could have reminded one of North Korea today. But thanks to extraordinary leadership, a full embrace of the magic of market economics, and integration into the global economy, Singapore has soared. If one compares its record with that of its neighbor the Philippines, on the one hand, or Zimbabwe (an African analogue that declared independence just a few years after Singapore), on the other, the results are stunning.
Of every thousand children born in Singapore today, only 2.2 die in infancy. The United States’ infant mortality rate is three times that level. In the Philippines, the number is 21 out of 1,000, and in Zimbabwe, 40. In the Bloomberg Rankings, Singapore was judged the world’s healthiest country.
Each year the World Bank produces Governance Indicators metrics on government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. Singapore leads the United States by a significant margin on each of these measures, and is not even on the same page with the Philippines and Zimbabwe. Scores on prevention of graft and crime show similar results.
While Freedom House’s annual report on democratic participation and personal liberties ranks the US close to the top of the international league chart and puts Singapore in the bottom half, behind South Korea and the Philippines, Lee Kuan Yew made no apologies for his nation’s political leadership. As Lee, who died in 2015, put it provocatively: hundreds of thousands of people who live in the democratic Philippines want to come to Singapore; how many Singaporeans want to move to the Philippines?
Undoubtedly, Kim Jong Un has no plans for North Korea adopting American-style democracy. His paramount objective is to remain, like his father and grandfather, Supreme Leader for life. But he could find a form of governance closer to that of Singapore, or more likely China, appealing.
Indeed, he may hope that by opening up North Korea’s economy, he can strengthen, rather than diminish, his hold on power. Both Lee Kuan Yew and China’s Xi Jinping have argued that political legitimacy depends, first and foremost, on performance. As Lee put it, “the ultimate test of the value of a political system is whether it helps that society establish conditions that improve the standard of living for the majority of its people.” To Western ears, the claim that an autocratic state can govern more effectively than a democratic one sounds heretical. But in the case of Singapore, it is hard to deny that the nation Lee built has for the past five decades produced more wealth per capita, more health, and more security for ordinary citizens than any of his competitors.
Today, Lee Kuan Yew is remembered, as Barack Obama put it, as “one of the legendary figures of Asia in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is somebody who helped to trigger the Asian economic miracle.” Can the legendary salesman who is now America’s president seduce Kim Jong Un with the prospect that he could lead a North Korean economic miracle? As Trump wrote in his Art of the Deal, “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do.”
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Graham T. Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former director of Harvard’s Belfer Center and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?
The East Germans at least had the advantage of some exposure to the West. The Norks however have been living in just about complete isolation from the outside.
I’ve often wondered about these ‘ghost cities” that China has built and the use of them.
I was going to say the Syrian ‘refugees’ could be sent there, since the Europeans are finally starting to getting sick of them. But no. I wouldn’t even wish that Trojan Horse onto China.
Great analogy. The NORKS have generations of deprivation. You just cannot 'turn on' a stunted people.
Too ambitious. I think they'd be thrilled to climb to the Venezuela rung.
They hustle - like Americans used to
“I have heard about people so hungry that they ate tree bark and grass, just like the livestock does. People stunted in both physical and mental growth.”
They suffered a lot from famine under this guy’s father (Kim Jong Il). When this guy (Kim Jong Un) took over four years ago, he made very successful agricultural reforms (basically allowed farm families to sharecrop). There is a lot more food for most everyone now. He has been expanding more profit-sharing incentives to other industries, especially in the last year. He views himself as a reformer, focused on raising the standard of living.
The first two Kims were educated by communists (Kim Il Sung in the Soviet Union, Kim Jong Il in China) but this Kim went to school in Switzerland, speaks English, and played in his High School theater’s production of Grease. He loves American music and basketball, and considers Dennis Rodman a close friend.
North Koreans have been allowed to work for some South Korean companies in some special industrial parks near the DMZ. They have earned a reputation as the hardest working employees you could hope for. North Korea also has a load of undeveloped mineral wealth, a lot of coastline and a border directly with Russia, as well as China.
Not only could South Korea move in rapidly with some world class investment, technology and expertise; but President Trump is bringing the world’s biggest and most advanced economy (the USA) and the most advanced economy in Asia (Japan) along; as well as American-dominated International resources like the IMF, as potential sweeteners. It is the absolute best dream team that a North Korea wanting development could hope for.
Japanese Prime Minister Abe has been in constant contact with President Trump and the South Korean President about this deal. He was in the White House today, before the President and he went to the G-7 meeting. He made a public commitment that Japan was ready to support North Korean development (in exchange for the return of abductees, and dismantling of the ballistic missile threat). That lays a big bargaining chip on the table.
There are some huge incentives on the table for the North Koreans. They have never before been offered such a good deal, and might not ever again, if Trump and Moon (in S. Korea) are no longer in office.
This is a very thorough and helpful analysis. Much I didn’t know.
If NOKO plays its cards right it will be sitting at the table of plenty.
Miracles happen.
ya, I’m well aware, but it hadn’t been reduced to starvation and ruin like NK.
I was a photo nut back in the day. When the first Chinese trade ship entered Eliot bay in Seattle, a friend of mine and I went to magnolia bluff and took tons of pictures of it on its way in.
Kinda funny. Before that day, there were no Chinese goods in the US. I can tell you that our standard of living has drasticaly increased since then regarding goods bought from China. And those industries have collapsed in the US.
We didn’t realize just how historic that event was.
BTW, that was around 1980.
I believe South Korea has the biggest Christian churches in the world. The norks don’t have any, though.
Thing is, pre-and post-natal care matter. The current population of NK is stunted mentally and physically. They really will not be able to compete until they produce a “clean” generation. They’re kinda like the citizenry of so many African countries. You could clean them up and send them to school, and there is just not enough “raw material” there to really bring them up to the equivalent of the populations of the world that were properly fed in their early years.
The Saudis built a nice big mosque on a hill in Seoul before I got there, but I don’t think the congregation is that big. Probably used by the Muslim embassies staff.
I agree, but when they came here that had a dynamic business community to step into - there they are building from scratch. The advantage they will have is the US CHINA SK and Japan will put in a lot of cash
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>> “Could North Korea Become the Next Singapore?” <<
NO!
Singapore is tropical, Korea is an icebox.
Only in the winter. Korea can get hot in the summer.
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