Naval Crises in the West Sea and DPRK’s Third Nuclear Test

Abstract

The chapter revisits two tragedies of the sinking of Cheonan corvette and North Korea’s shelling of Yeonpyeong Island. Whereas most of the existing analyses presuppose that the Cheonan submarine was split in half and sunk by the North Korean torpedo and focus on finding North Korean motivation for the provocation, the chapter starts the investigation by delving into the sources of public skepticism on the Lee Myung-bak government’s official reports and carefully infers that there were more intricate problems than North Korea’s bellicose attributes. The second half of the chapter examines how the leadership transitions in all major Northeast Asian countries as well as how the United States reshaped the complex dynamics of the Northeast Asian region. Giving special attention to Obama’s “strategic rebalancing toward Asia” and Xi Jinping’s “new type of great power relations,” the chapter investigates the factors influencing the attributions in North Korea’s strategic decision to carry out its third nuclear test in February 2013 and the challenges facing the concerned states in breaking the current stalemate on North Korean issues.