Manufacturing the next generation of North Korea Watcher

Thinktank "next generation" programs are highly refined processes to create dull, unthinking, but influential supporters of the status quo.

At every conference on North Korea, you’ll see them—the go-getters. They’re bright-eyed students and early-career scholars who tick all the right boxes: educated at respectable institutions, interned at the right think-tanks, cycled through the obligatory “next-generation” fellowships, and now orbiting policy circles as youthful ambassadors of conventional wisdom. They are photogenic, energetic, multilingual, and… above all, predictable.

The North Korea watcher “Go Getter” is not dangerous because they are reckless, radical, or misinformed. Quite the opposite. They are dangerous because they are so thoroughly domesticated by the machinery of influence production that they no longer question it. Their very success depends on a well-rehearsed performance of policy orthodoxy—one that rewards shallow novelty wrapped in the right demographic packaging.

It’s a highly refined process of indoctrination, repeated again and again.