By Ines Min
Contributing Writer
Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, said Thursday that the international community needs to rethink its approach to the North Korean regime, which he believes could endure for the next 20 to 40 years.
Gingrich, invited to express his opinions on present and future relationships between the two Koreas and the United States, spoke to a crowd of roughly 100 that included National Assemblymen, ambassadors to Korea, professors and doctors.
At a lecture in Seoul hosted by the Korea Foundation Forum, he said in the past 60 years, South Korea has become ``one of the great human achievements,'' adding that the gap between the two Koreas has significantly widened.
``As late as 1960, the average income of a (South) Korean was $100,'' whereas now the country makes 10 times than that of its northern half, he said.
``It helps explain why the dictatorship turned to nuclear weapons,'' Gingrich said. ``As it's the only possible device for getting people's attention.''
``It is a dictatorship so incapable of change, so incapable of productivity that it has shrunk the height of the average North Korean due to malnutrition,'' he said. He added that there are hundreds of thousands of others in concentration camps and many have died from starvation.
However, he said, ``it is a regime with an ideology and a belief system of enormous tenacity that has been in charge of North Korea for 64 years.''
Gingrich said that the pure strength of the country's philosophy has changed the standards of rationale for the country. ``They live in a totally different world that is so isolated that they think what they live in is normal.''
The North's continual race for nuclear weapons also needs to be handled, he said, noting that the nation has spent the past decade developing research, using scarce resources and efforts for their endeavor.
``So when we ask them to give (nuclear weapons) up, they have a huge disinterest in doing so and enormous internal pressure,'' he said. ``This is a very fundamental problem and it's not obvious to me that there's a solution.''
Gingrich does believe that further isolation of the country through trade restrictions could help bring the north to a weak point ― although that could result in a ``last act of survival'' that could lead to an ``attack on Seoul as the only thing they see left.''
``The truth is, we don't know what they would do if we coerced them,'' Gingrich said about removing the North's weapons by force. He later added that Seoul is ``relatively safe in a world where you can't guarantee anyone's 100 percent safety.''
The former speaker also focused on three main points that he says will define the world in the coming years. Two of the factors are the development of catastrophic weapons and the rising powers of China and India, which have quickly increasing populations.
``The challenge for the rest of us,'' he said, ``is how are we going to respond to legitimate competitiveness in a world market?''
The last of the factors, according to Gingrich, is the ``explosion of new science.'' He said there could be ``four to seven times as much new science in the next 25 years, as there was in the past 25 years.''
Gingrich's lecture is part of the monthly series started by the Korea Foundation Forum, which has hosted speeches from figures such as former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Ko?chiro Matsuura, director-general of UNESCO. The next lecture will be given by John Howard, the former prime minister of Australia.