Why did the South Korea and the West help North Korea during the 90s famine by donating food instead of trying to dismantle the crippled country or forcing it to rejoin with the South Korea?

by Count_Archon

During the 90s, North Korea was a country on the verge of breaking due to the famine, Russia was effectively reduced to a status of a minor power due to the collapse of the USSR and incompetent Yeltsin administration, China was nowhere near as strong as today and the US public was reinvigorated by the decisive victory in the Gulf War in 1991 after a period of mild defeatism following the Vietnam War failure. Why didn't the US and South Korea attempt to pressure (or invade) North Korea to rejoin it the the South at the time they were weak and the US was the sole global superpower?

Cenodoxus

TL:DR: North Korea is a prize that no one wants to win.

Much longer version: You're correct that North Korea was terribly weak during the 1994-1998 famine (or "Arduous March," as it's known within the country), and seemingly more vulnerable to attack than it had been in decades. However, the mere fact of an enemy's weakness isn't enough for modern states to justify an invasion.

I think I can break an answer to your question down into the following parts:

  • What actually led to North Korea's weakness?
  • What would happen if the Kim regime fell?
  • And (because you've mentioned the post-Gulf War U.S. military) as an additional consideration: Could an invasion of North Korea have been justified by then-current U.S. military doctrine?

What actually led to North Korea's weakness? The lazy answer: "The famine."

The more complex and interesting answer: "Everything that made the famine possible in the first place."

Let's start off here: There's no such thing as a famine that just "happens." Periods of food and resource instability occur just about everywhere, and you can see the mechanics behind this even in the well-fed West (e.g., Norway's butter shortage in 2011, periodic avocado shortages in the U.S. in the 2010s, and -- for a very recent example -- toilet paper and chicken wing shortages during the COVID-19 quarantine). However, famine is created by politics, as the economist Amartya Sen observes. Societies fall into the trap of blaming whatever started a famine -- often a shock like a natural disaster, crop failure, or price panic -- without asking what actually caused it. And what causes a famine is usually a lot less politically palatable than what starts it. The most famous example I can probably cite for Western readers is Ireland's Great Famine. The Irish famine started because of the potato blight, but was actually caused by the U.K.'s Corn Laws and the landlord system in Ireland that created and sustained widespread poverty.

Okay, so what's the difference between the start and the cause of the famine in North Korea? The actual cause of the famine was decades of bad agricultural policy and atrociously bad economic policy. Kim il-Sung's emphasis on self-reliance (the juche or chu'che doctrine) saw NK attempting to do any number of things that it frankly wasn't positioned to do well, and to continue doing it in total defiance of all reason or sense.

A total accounting of this is way beyond the scope of the comment, but some quick bullet points:

  • Inefficient farms: NK's collectivized farms weren't particularly productive. Farming is back-breaking work even under the best of circumstances, and in NK, farmers saw no economic or material return for exceeding their quotas. They put in the bare minimum to satisfy the state's demands, and reserved whatever time and energy they could for the tiny allotments they were allowed for the private production of things like vegetables and eggs. (These allotments would later become a reliable source of produce for the private markets that sprang up during the famine.)
  • NK's reputation as a debtor state: NK got into the habit of never repaying any country that lent it money or sold it anything of value. Unsurprisingly, the number of countries willing to do so dwindled quickly. (Fun fact: NK's debt to Sweden is the reason that Sweden maintains an embassy and ambassadorship in the country, and why Sweden became the protecting power for Western interests in NK after geopolitics' shortest-ever game of Not It.)
  • Total reliance on the Soviets and the Chinese to patch the holes: The most immediately relevant example was a Soviet-run program called Friendship Prices, which allowed states within the Soviet sphere of influence to purchase commodities at a fraction of their actual cost on the world market. Nearly all of NK's oil, gas, and fertilizer came from this program because they were unaffordable outside of it. Remember this, because we'll get back to Friendship Prices in a moment.
  • Agriculture didn't receive the state assistance it needed: Kim prioritized the needs of heavy industry and the prestige of cities like Pyongyang over agriculture, and was slow to adopt newer and better farming technology. As one example, the first tractor natively produced by NK in the 1950s (the Chollima 28, a copy of a small tractor imported from the USSR) is a lot closer in horsepower and productivity to a lawnmower in the West. It took three decades for NK to start producing more powerful tractors, but the aging Chollima remained a common sight on farms.
  • Not a lot of great land: NK is a fairly mountainous country without much in the way of arable land. The southern portion of the Korean peninsula had always been the breadbasket.
  • A smaller labor pool: The manpower demands of NK's military saw the vast majority of its male population between the ages of ~18 and ~30 out of the civilian work force. (Though food insecurity eventually grew to the point where the military started running its own farms using soldiers' labor in an effort to keep itself fed.)
  • Terrible leadership: Kim had next to no experience with agriculture or land conservation, and his suggestions (often doled out at on-site visits that were central to the regime's propaganda) were often disastrously bad. One example that continues to haunt the country is his recommendation that farmers terrace hillsides in order to plant more rice. NK chopped down a bunch of trees to enable this and paid little attention to drainage needs. During heavy rains, floods and mudslides were the inevitable result.
  • Few exports to generate hard currency: NK's other industries weren't much better off, and the country didn't export much that could generate hard currency to address its deficiencies. Of the little hard currency it did have, an entire government division called Room 39 was created to make use of it for the Kims, largely for obtaining luxuries like champagne, clothes, cars, etc., for themselves and to bribe the political elite.
  • Few to no opportunities for ordinary people to try alternative approaches: The regime's grip on NK's education and media was absolute. There was no possibility of anyone getting a foreign book to try to see how other countries did things, or finding a foreign magazine or TV/radio broadcast for the same reason. NK imported almost no foreign media and translated even less of it. As one example of many, copies of How to Win Friends and Influence People existed in a few state and university libraries in NK, and the only people permitted to read them were advanced students who were considered ideologically reliable. NK had no interest in publicizing a book written by an American that said you should be nice to people.

So. Let's leave aside the famine for a moment and pretend it never happened. Absent the famine, NK was still a totalitarian state with a deeply inefficient economy, dysfunctional leadership, and a population exposed to heavy propaganda at all hours of the day. And -- again, totally absent the famine -- NK still wasn't producing enough food for everyone.