Kim Jong Il, “glorious leader” of North Korea, may be in ill health. What does that mean for us?

Leaders of dictatorships/terrorist groups/rogue democracies provide analysts with an interesting challenge. On one hand, you really hate to be happy about anyone dying; on the other hand, the world might be a bit better, well, without them. Luckily, Kim Jong Il doesn’t provide much of an ethical dilemna; the death of the North Korean leader would be a pragmatic disaster.

Of course, North Korea will continue to be a sore spot for the US and South Korea should Jong Il recover. But his death would result in far worse consequences than a thorn in the side of the United States.

Chief among them is the risk of nuclear terrorism. With all the nations that currently possess atomic weaponry, it’s easy to forget that North Korea may have enough weapons-grade plutonium to make a possible 6 bombs. That’s bad. But far worse would be a Korea without a strong hand maintaining the safety of nuclear facilities. A suicidal group could gain access to the material and cause some big problems for the world -Israel, the United States, Iraq, and many other nations would be in big trouble.

And the trouble wouldn’t stop there, as Jong Il doesn’t have an appointed successor. Given that the most obvious choice (his first son) fell out of favor through a trip to Disneyland (yes, really), and given the inherent instability of dictatorships, North Korea could end up being the next Kenya. Jong Il may be bad, but for the Koreans, he’s definitely the better option.

All this might seem rather paradoxical -isn’t it better to have a world with fewer dictatorships? Of course, less authoritarianism is a good thing. But the whole point of democracy is to allow the freedom and safety of the populace -something that you don’t get with power vacuums and nuclear terrorism.

Thankfully, it seems that Il is recovering -we probably won’t have to worry about any of this yet. But in the future, we must hope for some successor to be chosen -and hope that he leads North Korea away from the authoritarianism of Jong Il towards a modern democracy. Alternately, the Koreans themselves could take steps toward retaking control of their government. We must hope that it happens soon.

Samuel’s Comments: This is quite an insightful article. It balances the perspective of both sides, and presents the monkey wrench that people might want dictatorships in this situation. As we can probably see the paradox, we have to be careful to still separate that these dictatorships are generally bad, and hurt the people.