As Iran teeters either on the brink of a war with a vastly superior power or the risk of making a peace deal on extremely unfavorable terms, it is worth looking for comparison’s sake at the comparatively strong position of Kim Jong Un and other so-called hermit kingdoms with that of the more interventionist and even global approval–seeking government in Tehran.
Winding back the clock from the present moment might be a helpful framing device here. Japan once experienced two and a half centuries of comparative withdrawal, peace, and stability from the rest of the world under the Tokugawa Shogunate; a government that dedicated itself to the combatting of European missionaries as well as stalwartly resisting the pretense of a Sinocentric order that came from the neighboring Ming and later Qing Dynasties in China. This closed-country period oversaw massive gains in public infrastructure and literacy, with Edo becoming the largest city in the world. This supposed isolationism eventually became archaic, but in geopolitics a generation, much less two centuries, is an eternity. It is quite likely that this government is what spared Japan from colonization and destabilization, making its eventual modernization all the easier once circumstances changed. Opting out of dominant global or regional trends is a tale as old as time. For every action there will inevitably be counterreactions.
Looking at the world today, with neoliberal globalization clearly entering a period of restructuring, if not outright decline, the once triumphant predictions of past foreign policy observers regarding the inevitable miserable fate of “rogue states” and societies that opted out of past globalist euphoria seem to not have come true. While many of the smaller countries that stood against the United States at the height of the “unipolar moment” have been undermined or toppled through force, the process of regime change as carried in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and others have been disruptive to their respective regions and unpopular among the general public of the U.S. Often, what replaces the targeted regime is worse, due to state failure or the new elite holding a new odious form of extremism. If anything, this has caused the remaining opponents of forced globalization to harden their shells.
From the relatively benign example of Bhutan, whose Himalayan geography and borders with the most remote regions of its two giant neighbors enable it to engage in its own unique political experiment, to the refugee-disgorging and highly mobilized Eritrea, there are still smaller countries out in the world obsessed with going their own path. Just recently, the famously eccentric Turkmenistan celebrated 30 years of being an officially neutral state. While regime survival is no doubt the primary consideration of these ruling elites (as it is in all states), it is telling not only that these once-reviled societies continue to exist, but that the logic of their actions, regardless of if one agrees with how they are governed, has been validated by time.
The most famous and arguably most important of these hermit kingdoms today is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, more commonly known as North Korea. High on the list of governments in need of toppling for U.S. regime-change fanatics, the northern half of the Korean Peninsula has so far remained remarkably resistant to outside influence despite sharing borders with both Russia and China. A large military coupled with the cultivation of a select few relationships carried out in such a way as to prevent any one country from being a primary patron has allowed Pyongyang to avoid the vassalization to outside interests that compromised the sovereignty of other smaller and diplomatically embattled states. Cognizant that its long rivalries with the Republic of Korea and the United States could be taken advantage of by stronger neighbors, the Kim regime has long been adept at pivoting between Russia and China while asserting its own potential power in order to carve out more autonomy of action in its near abroad. When combined with its successful development of nuclear deterrence—perhaps the ultimate sovereignty guarantor—a country that was once bombed to oblivion and then sanctioned for generations by the world’s pre-eminent power has managed to achieve more success at survival than most ever could have realistically expected.
By contrast, it is interesting how some of the Warsaw Pact nations have also seen a surge in nostalgia for the communist period. Less a direct endorsement of every aspect of those societies, the pining for a country with safer streets and less rapacious international corporations is a natural outgrowth of the increasingly recognizable failures of present day globalization—a nostalgia-tinged opposition to the borderless world ruled by financial elites who are practically stateless and largely uninterested in the improvement of a specifically rooted place from which they could be based.
These types of hermit kingdoms are hardly new in history. Nor do they have much in common with each other aside from a shared disdain for the dominant global trends of the rapidly fading “unipolar moment” of unquestioned American dominance. From the perspective of the scholar of humanities or the strategic analyst, however, they have immense value. They show that even at the height of globalization the human trend towards differentiation and distinction remains powerful enough to keep even dysfunctional states afloat. This trend will only increase as powers other than the United States begin to flex their muscles at the global level, opening a diplomatic space for smaller countries to navigate between the spheres of influence of the great powers, rather than simply aligning with or against them in an archaic Cold War binary. In so doing they can explore greater opportunities for trade and dealmaking with each other. Over time, they will inevitably lose their reputation as outliers lingering in isolation.
The hermit kingdom itself may simply be a temporary stage, one that enabled any kind of alternative system to make its way through the wringer of the era of peak globalization without joining the trends of others. But now that we are in a time when many of the denizens of even the “Global North” find themselves questioning the wisdom of the policy priorities of that time, it seems likely that governmental policies will diversify, rather than converge. Such will be a boon for those who study politics and statecraft. There will no doubt be huge experimental failures, but there will also probably be successes that would be impossible to learn from in a more homogenized world. And if there is to be any hope of overcoming the malaise of a declining order, it will have to be found in selective learning from the greater array of experiences had around the world.
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