The J Curve: How to Deal with Rogue States

In December 2006, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad banned Western music from state-run television and radio. In May 2007, his government unveiled plans to increase the number of jamming stations capable of disrupting satellite broadcasts from abroad from 50 to 300 within two years. Two weeks later, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice threatened Iran with “isolation from the international community.” Who can isolate Iran faster: the U.S. State Department or The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps? This question goes to the heart of failed U.S. policies toward a number of repressive states - failures as old as the embargo of Castro’s Cuba.

  Washington also threatens to deepen the isolation of North Korea. Yet, threatening Kim Jong-Il with isolation is life threatening a drowning man with a lifeboat. He needs to isolate his people - from the outside world and from one another - to maintain his grip on their lives.

  But according to a March 2005 report in The New York Times, when DVD players became widely available in China in 2003, Chinese merchants sold discarded VCRs to North Koreans living along the border. For the first time, North Koreans got a glimpse of videotaped South Korean soap operas. The tapes became so popular in some areas that Kim’s regime warned citizens not to adopt South Korean slang and hairstyles. Cellular relay stations along the border have allowed some North Koreans to use Chinese-made cell phones to call family members (and journalists) in South Korea - and to ask for phones that take photographs. Kim reportedly ordered the creation of a special prosecutor’s office in November 2004 to deal with the problem.

  Trends like these, not threats of isolation from Washington, pose the greatest long-term threat to Kim’s regime. We need a new framework with which to understand the behavior of authoritarian regimes, one that reveals how autocrats define their interests and how U.S. policymakers can harness the energies of globalization to open these states to the outside world. The J curve offers just such a framework.

  Imagine a graph on which the vertical axis measures a country’s stability and the horizontal axis measures its social and economic openness to the outside world. Each nation appears as a data point on the graph. These data points, taken together, produce a pattern very much like the letter J. Nations to the left of the dip in the J are less open; nations to the right are more open. Nations higher on the graph are more stable; those that are lower are less stable.

  “Openness” is a measure of the extent to which a state allows people, ideas, information, goods, and services to freely cross its borders in both directions. How many books written in another language are translated into the local language? What percentage of a nation’s citizens have access to media outlets whose signals originate abroad? How many are able to make an international phone call? Openness also refers to the flow of information and ideas within a country’s borders. Are citizens able to communicate freely with one another? Do they have access to accurate information about events in other parts of the country? Are freedoms of speech and assembly legally established? How transparent are the processes of local and national government? Do citizens have access to, and influence in, these processes?

  A state’s “stability” has two crucial components: its capacity to withstand shocks and its ability to avoid producing them. A nation is only unstable if neither is present. Some states - North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Burma - are stable precisely because a small governing elite has isolated them from the political, economic, and cultural forces now reshaping the global landscape. Greater public exposure to information from the outside world will, over time, push the most rigid of these states toward dangerous instability. Other states - Canada, Spain, Sweden - are stable because they are continually reinvigorated by political and social change. These states are able to withstand domestic political conflict, because their citizens - and international investors - know that such a conflict will be peacefully resolved by institutions that are independent of one another. Institutions, not individuals, are the guarantors of stability in these states.

  For a country that is stable because it is closed to become a country that is stable because it is open, it must pass through the dip in the J curve - a transitional period of dangerous instability. Some states, like South Africa, survive the passage. Others, like Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, do not. These transitions are now more treacherous than ever - and not just for the countries that experience them. In a world of lightning-fast capital flight, social unrest, weapons of mass destruction, and transnational terrorism, the potential for state failure is everybody’s business.

  Countries on the right side of the J curve have a collective interest in helping to move left-side states through instability to the right side of the curve. But they must recognize that the most powerful agents for constructive, sustainable change in any society are the people who live within it. Strategies that empower citizens to challenge the authoritarian status quo can create strong momentum for democratic change.

  Multilateral institutions charged with serving the interests of global stability should certainly work for the democratization of autocratic states. But it is the gradual infiltration of the Internet, cell phones, VCRs, and text-messaging equipment into North Korea that is far more likely over time to undermine authoritarian rule there. The French firm Alcatel recently upgraded Iran’s telecom network and provided the country with its first high-speed DSL Internet connections. But when the company began merger talks with Lucent, an American firm, some U.S. lawmakers criticized Alcatel’s “ties with Iran.” Wiring the country makes it easier for Iranians to communicate with one another and with the outside world. Instead of condemning the effort, Washington should find ways to imitate it. Fortunately, common sense prevailed and the Alcatel-Lucent merger was completed in December 2006.

  Yet, globalization can also be tremendously destabilizing. There is pressure for change within every society. But, in the short term, a concerted push for far-reaching political reform should be made only in those states that have a fighting chance of surviving the depths of the J curve. If a country unprepared for such instability falls (or is pushed) into the dip in the curve, the outcome can be calamitous. The daily challenges facing U.S. troops in Iraq make the point.

  But the governments of right-side-of-the-curve countries should support incremental progress toward the opening of isolated states, and this support should extend beyond rhetoric. Democracy can only come to an authoritarian state when its people demand it. Western policymakers should find every way possible to feed this demand - to press authoritarians like Kim Jong-Il and Iran’s clerics by empowering their captive peoples.