No sooner had the dust settled after its nuclear test than the US media began the vivisection of US policy toward North Korea. But what exactly is US policy toward Kim Jong-il’s regime? If only Kim’s government would completely, verifiably and irreversibly dismantle its nuclear programme, the United States would support the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s reintegration into the “family of nations”. Until the regime takes these steps, Washington will do all in its power to isolate North Korea.

Sound familiar? If Iran would simply halt uranium enrichment and renounce its nuclear ambitions, the US would consider restoring bilateral relations and help the Islamic republic escape its international isolation. But until supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei publicly disavows the nuclear programme, Washington will do all in its power to isolate Iran.

Yet the Bush administration has adopted an entirely different approach towards China, one much more likely to achieve its objectives. US policymakers recognise that efforts to isolate China would be fruitless and self- defeating, and that the interdependence of the US and Chinese economies demands a sort of constructive engagement. Mutually assured economic destruction limits the risk that either side will privilege ideology over pragmatism.

The Bush team is well aware that China remains a police state, that its government denies citizens political liberties that Americans consider sacrosanct, and that the state restricts its people’s access to certain kinds of ideas and information. But they also know that the most effective means of promoting political reform in China is to help the Communist party achieve its economic growth targets.

The Bush administration’s China specialists reason that the country’s economic development relieves millions of people of dependence on their government. The social dislocation it generates creates friction within Chinese society. Both phenomena increase domestic demand for political reform. The growing number of increasingly well-organised and large-scale public demonstrations across the country suggests this argument has merit. According to Chinese government officials, there were 87,000 demonstrations in 2005 involving at least 50 protesters each. Over the past decade, the number appears to have grown at virtually the same rate as China’s gross domestic product.

China’s economic opening has also brought the internet into the country. The 50,000 Chinese security officials who do nothing but monitor the internet must now contend with the 100,000 Chinese who jump online for the first time every day. Who do you imagine will win that race?

US policies towards Iran and North Korea are failing for precisely the same reason that Bush administration policy towards China shows more promise: the isolation of authoritarian states is self-defeating. If the aim is to undermine a dictatorship, one should open it to the outside world.

To understand why this is so, consider the relationship between a state’s stability and its “openness”. A country’s stability is a measure of its government’s capacity to implement policy in the event of a political, social, or economic crisis. Openness is a measure of the degree to which people, ideas, information, goods and services flow freely across the state’s borders and within the state itself.

In an open state, citizens can place an international telephone call, log onto the internet, and travel abroad without restriction. They have access to reliable information about events elsewhere in the country and are free to discuss them publicly. These states are plugged into the global economy. The government of a closed state, on the other hand, does not recognise any of these freedoms as rights.

Some countries (the US, UK, Japan, Brazil, Germany and many others) are stable because they are open. Commercial, intellectual, and social interactions across borders render their cultures and economies ever more dynamic. Other states (North Korea, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Cuba and others) remain stable only so long as they remain closed. In these countries, an authoritarian elite has isolated citizens from the outside world. Any opening in these states, even an incremental one, will generate instability.

To visualise the relationship between these two ideas, imagine a graph on which the vertical axis measures a state’s stability and the horizontal axis measures its openness. Each nation appears as a point on the graph. Taken together, these points produce a pattern very much like the letter J. Nations higher on the graph are more stable; those lower are less stable. Nations to the right of the dip in the J are more open. Those to the left are less open.

As a country that is stable because it is closed begins to open, it slides down the left side of the curve toward the dip in the J, the point of greatest instability. That is, if Saudi Arabia, Burma, or Uzbekistan held free and fair nationwide elections next week, the likeliest result would be considerable political turmoil. If North Koreans had unlimited access to South Korean media for one week, the North Korean government could find itself in quite a lot of trouble.

This is precisely why the governments of closed states expend so much time, energy, and capital on keeping them closed. Late last year, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad banned western music from state-run television and radio. In May, his government announced plans to increase from 50 to 300 the number of jamming stations capable of disrupting satellite broadcasts from abroad. In September, the government acknowledged that it filters more than 10m websites.