North Korea's disastrous economy is the logical endpoint of Trump's protectionism. So what now?

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Autarky, or total economic self-sufficiency for a single community, has been the dream of a diverse range of political movements since the dawn of industrialisation.

19th century utopian socialists, like the French Fourierists, believed it would liberate them from the social alienation of capitalism.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler, obsessed by Germany’s defeat in the First World War, ranted about the need for national self-sufficiency and the Third Reich actually went to great lengths to achieve this, particularly in agriculture.

Stalin, too, severed historic trade ties with the West, making a mighty push for total economic independence of the Soviet Union in steel and energy supplies in his Five Year Plan of 1928. Mao Zedong tried to emulate this in China with the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s.

Post-independence India was heavily influenced by a nationalistic vision of autarky, inspired by Gandhi’s injunction: “It is the patriotic duty of every Indian to spin his own cotton and weave his own cloth.”

But the modern nation that has come closest to realising economic autarky is North Korea.

Juche, or “self-reliance”, has been the official state ideology of North Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953, when it was imposed by the Communist dictator Kim Il-sung.

And it has turned out to be not a dream, but an all-encompassing nightmare. Juche has delivered not prosperity and happiness, but destitution and a unique form of misery.

The divergent paths of North Korea and South Korea over the past 65 years make up one of the great natural experiments of economics. While the North shut itself off from global trade, the South embedded itself in the global economy, becoming an export powerhouse.

Having been roughly equal in 1952, GDP per capita in the South is today estimated to be 18 times larger than in the North. The health metrics are even more astonishing. Life expectancy is now 12 years lower in the North than in the South. Almost a third of children under five in the North are estimated to be under-developed due to malnutrition, versus just 2.5 per cent in the South.

Kim Il-sung promised that his economic policies would inspire in his people “an ardent love for their native place and their motherland”. Instead, the country is held together only by a brutal, totalitarian regime run by his descendants.

Donald Trump has billed his trip to Singapore to shake hands with (and to give the thumbs-up to) Kim’s corpulent grandson as a “historic meeting”.

The historic symbolism was certainly towering. Here was the leader of the world’s last hermit kingdom standing face-to-face with the leader of the free world.

But symbolism can disguise reality.

Even in its own terms, juche is a sham. The North Korean state relies on energy and food imports from neighbouring China. Beijing props up Pyongyang, its old communist ally from the 1950s, mainly because it fears the economic and humanitarian fallout from the regime’s collapse.

The wider world pays special attention to the histrionic posturing of the kleptocratic Kim family because they have, at enormous cost to the malnourished population, successfully developed nuclear weapons.

North Korea is not economically self-reliant in any meaningful sense; it is a beggar-bully state.

And, on the other side of this summit, appearances are deceptive. Alas, this is no normal American president, no worthy inheritor of the mantle of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan. Trump has more sympathy with the autarkic ideology of the Kim family than he does with any of august predecessors of the past century.

Upon his inauguration, Trump declared that “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength”. Those words might have come out of the mouth of Kim Il-sung.

Richard Nixon went to China in 1972 to meet another brutal communist dictator, Mao. For all his crookedness, Nixon at least believed in the merits of free trade and and paid lip service to the importance of American moral leadership. Not so Trump.

The Trump administration’s preposterous and insulting claim that steel imports from America’s allies in Canada, Mexico and Europe represent a threat to US “national security” is another move that might have been lifted directly from the Kim family playbook.

History shows that autarkic impulses tend to be closely associated with authoritarianism and national aggression.

The great fear is that what went down in Singapore this week was less a historic encounter of ideological opposites, than a meeting of vicious and dangerous minds.