Conclusion

Abstract

Abstract The conclusion summarizes the main arguments and findings of this book. In so doing, it outlines how, since the end of the Cold War, North Korea has deployed a range of behaviour, defying and complying with the norms of the global nuclear order and wider post-war international order. It argues how, across the four time periods under investigation, the first nuclear crisis (1985–1994), the second nuclear crisis (2002–2009), the Obama administration (2009–2016), and the first three years of the Trump administration (2017–2019), North Korea’s actions have been part and parcel of a quest for greater international status embedded within a counter-hegemonic strategy against what it perceives to be a ‘hostile’ US-led international order. This concluding chapter highlights how, whilst North Korea has learnt from the costs and benefits obtained through its delinquent behaviour to inform its future actions, each temporal period represents a unique confluence of political and strategic conditions that contributed to the DPRK’s actions. This chapter then takes the book’s findings further, outlining areas for additional inquiry. It argues that North Korea’s strategic deployment of delinquency with respect to the global nuclear order can serve as a useful case study for the application of strategic delinquency framework to other ‘rogue’ nuclear states that oppose the global nuclear order’s normative and institutionalized strictures, such as, inter alia, Iran, Israel, and Pakistan.