North Korea’s leadership in the aftermath of World War II left the country embarking upon policies isolating it from the modern world. Accordingly, that is why it is known as “The Hermit Kingdom.” It is the only communist state in history to successfully entrench a family dynasty in power to rule it. And, despite the Kim family dynasty operating as a brutal police state, North Korean propagandists have succeeded in promoting its leaders as deities who care for the very people they unabashedly brutalize. One would therefore think there is nothing to be learned from the Hermit Kingdom. Ironically, there is – conceptually at least.
In 1948, Kim Il-sung became North Korea’s founding member of the dynasty. He announced shortly after the country was established, implementation of the “juche idea.” The word juche means “self-reliance,” and while it is an ideology for which the country constantly praises itself for achieving, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, its lack of success in implementing juche has turned North Korea into an economic basket case.
Supposedly, Kim sought to make his country totally self-reliant so as not to have to depend upon other countries for basic needs, such as food. Juche’s failure is evident every time Western nations have to send food to the North in times of famine. Famines have plagued the country, self-inflicted for the most part by ill-advised domestic deforestation and erosion policies, claiming millions of lives. Juche has left the citizenry earning only 4% of what their South Korean brothers earn annually while famines have left North Koreans, on average, several inches/pounds shorter/lighter than Southerners.
North Korea’s juche failure does not, however, mean the ideology itself is invalid. Especially now, as tensions between the U.S. and China heat up, we are recognizing there are important goods the production of which we have allowed to slip out of our hands and into those of outside sources upon whom we have now become reliant.
President Joe Biden’s domestic policies have made us become alarmingly aware of our need for self-reliance in various areas if we are not to allow our enemies to manipulate markets upon which we are dependent.
Take, for example, the manufacturing of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) – the actual drugs formulated into tablets, capsules, injections, etc. “As of August 2019, only 28% of the manufacturing facilities making APIs to supply the U.S. market were in our country. By contrast, the remaining 72% of the API manufacturers supplying the U.S. market were overseas, and 13% are in China. … The number of registered facilities making APIs in China more than doubled between 2010 and 2019.”
Additionally, with the Biden administration’s push to transition the U.S. from gas-driven to electric-driven vehicles (EVs), a component for batteries, lithium, is becoming more important. U.S. lithium production is currently very limited. While we have large lithium reserves, we are responsible for only 2% of the world’s production.
And lithium is not even the largest component of EV batteries – it is graphite. We are warned by experts we are in store for a massive shortfall of graphite as North America does not have a single operating graphite mine. Graphite has not been in production here since the 1950s.
Two types of juche exist – idealistic and realistic juche. North Korea champions the former and, absent a fundamental change in its government, will never experience the latter. While America embraces the latter in a number of important markets, the fear is Biden’s race to push production of products like EVs disjointedly puts the cart before the horse. Doing so has the potential to place our entire economy at great risk as we face the realistic impact of accessing these raw materials upon which he will be making us dependent.
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