In 1830, the not-always-reliable adventure writer Charles Elm recorded the testimony of an English adventurer who had ventured through the Malacca straits to visit a Bugis pirate prince. “Agi Bota is a good looking man, about forty years of age, of no education whatever; he divides his time between gaming, opium and cockfighting; that is in the interval of his more serious and profitable employment, piracy and rapine. He asked me to produce what money I had about me; on seeing only ten rupees, he remarked that it was not worth while to win so small a sum”.
President Donald Trump will be meeting North Korea ruler Kim Jong-un –“Great Successor” to his people, Marshall to his country’s nuclear-armed military, and “Fatty the Third” to politically-incorrect Chinese bloggers – at the charming Capella Hotel on Singapore’s Sentosa Island.
Trump, who previously called Kim “a sick puppy”, a “maniac” and “Little Rocket Man”, now aims to sweet-talk the dictator into giving up his nuclear weapons.
Blackmail & Bribe In Erstwhile Pirate Citadel
It’s improbable that Trump, whose attention span is reported not to last past the end of a double-spaced A4 briefing note, will be spending time reading up on the history of the island he’s going to be visiting. In the event he did, though, he’d learn that the island’s earliest recorded name, in Manuel Godinho de Erédia's 1604 map, was Blacan Matin — “The Island of Death from Behind”, a reference to its roots as a pirate citadel.
The 1830 traveller found, in the local market, five Bibles, in three languages, spy-glasses, ship’s tools, quadrants, clothes, silk stockings, two chemises with the initial ‘SW’, two petticoats with initial ‘SW’ and, not surprisingly, two European women. These had all earlier belonged, his guests cheerfully told him, “to people who had died”.
In the 1940s, as the Bugis left their seafaring roots, they successfully brought up brothels serving Japanese soldiers. In the 1960s, Singapore’s Bugis street acquired an international reputation as a trans hot spot (interestingly, the community’s language identifies five distinct genders, adding calabai, feminine male, calalai, masculine female, and bissu, or androgynous, to the usual two).
Now, the Bugis are among Singapore’s many successful communities: Two of three Singapore Idol winners, contemporary artist Zai Kuning and pop stars Zaina Zain and actress Lisa Surihani all have Bugis blood.
Lesson from Histories Near and Far
The point is that it took time, cash and a little rule-bending to get South-East Asia’s most feared maritime pirates to buy into the system. There’s a lesson there for Trump.
In 2003, Libyan dictator Mu’ammar Qaddafi gave up his designed-in-Pakistan nuclear weapons, in return for diplomatic normalisation with the West — and ended up being sodomised to death by Islamist rebels paid for by his new-found allies. Saddam Hussein, who gave up his own weapons of mass destruction programme, met a similar fate in 2006. Ukraine, which gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994, after receiving security guarantees from the United States, United Kingdom and Russia, has discovered promises are worth even less than post-dated cheques.
There are no prizes, therefore, for guessing why Kim is reluctant to give up his nuclear weapons: They’re a guarantee of survival for the despotic, bizarre regime his family has run for three generations.
North Korea might be an international pariah, but no nation-state is going to risk one of its cities for the cause of getting rid of Kim.
Life Insurance, Not Madness
From the point of view of North Korea’s ruling élite getting a bomb isn’t madness, but life insurance. Kim Jong-un fears an East Germany-style regime collapse, with his citizens choosing to merge into the richer South. The dictator also worries that his neighbours might sponsor an internal insurrection, or that the US might attack.
North Korea’s fears are well-founded: it’s been at the receiving end of United States nuclear threats. In the spring of 1953, with the war in Korea bogged down in a stalemate, hundreds of soldiers dying in battles of no conceivable tactical gain, 16 men gathered in a room at the Pentagon to discuss what might next be done.
“Future Courses of Action in Connection With the Situation in Korea”, prepared by civilian consultants for the National Security Council, proposed to break the military impasse by using nuclear weapons.
General Omar Bradley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, made the case for the use of nuclear bombs, as he had often done during the war. “Because of the casualties that will be involved in any stepped-up ground action”, he argued, “we may find that we will be forced to use every type of weapon that we have”.
In the summer of 1950, nine MK4 fusion bombs were ready to be delivered had General Douglas MacArthur’s brilliant amphibious assault at Inchon not cut North Korea’s supply lines, recaptured Seoul, and rolled on to Pyongyang and the Yalu river. In April 1951, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered nuclear retaliation if Chinese troops or Soviet bombers massed in Mongolia began operating in Korea.
There was just one problem: The Soviet Union’s own nuclear bomb, which it might use if its communist allies were attacked.
“The Commies, scattered over one hundred and fifty miles of front, and well dug in, don’t present nearly as attractive a target to us as we do to them,” cautioned James Lawton, then US army chief.
Bribing North Korea
Efforts to bribe the North Korean regime out of its nuclear pursuit began soon after the country bought off-the-shelf plans from Pakistan. In 1998, South Korean president Kim Dae-jung initiated the reconciliation process that became known as the “Sunshine Policy”, injecting billions of dollars into the North’s economy — and, credible accounts have it, into the personal accounts of Kim Jong-il.
The effort was doomed. Less than a year after the ink dried on Kim Dae-jung’s Nobel Prize citation, North Korean and South Korean troops were clashing, and sanctions tightened.
That didn’t work, either. To use the words of the analyst Andrei Lankov, the élite missed its Henessy cognac — but was willing to make that sacrifice to avoid an appointment with the lamp-post.
Extortion Will Go On
North Korea just won’t denuclearise until there’s more than just economic incentives on the table: Having ridden out sanctions, just like Iran, the country has even seen a modest economic recovery. Neighbour China has no desire to see North Korea implode, unleashing refugees across its borders and allowing the United States to project influence closer to its own borders. The status quo will thus survive.
The best Trump can hope for is a flawed deal — one that caps North Korea’s weapons programme in return for economic incentives, all the while knowing Kim will occasionally use the threat of violence to extort more.
This is the best-case option for Asia as a whole. Protracted instability will, after all, hurt South Korea and Japan — among India’s most important trading partners.
Is this giving in to blackmail? Yes — but the history of the Pirate Princes who built the lush resort island on which Trump and Kim will be staying tells us that’s not always an unwise thing.
(The writer is a senior journalist and author. He can be reached at @praveenswami. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them).
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