North Korea's Anti-Great Power Diplomacy

Abstract

Benjamin R. Young’s Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader weaves together diplomatic records of various countries and North Korea’s publications to show how “Third Worldism formed a fundamental part of North Korea’s national identity during the Cold War era” (4). It uses a wide-angle lens to capture North Korea’s numerous attempts to promote its ideology, support fights against powerful nations, offer to build factories, organize friendly societies, provide military assistance, and spread Mass Games in various small nations in South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In the introduction, Young argues that “Juche’s utopian motivations and ideological simplicity, with its emphasis on national autonomy, was precisely what appealed to many Third World peoples and operated as an effective form of soft power for the North Korean regime” (7). But the following chapters plentily show that North Korea’s incessant attempts to support small nations met with mixed reactions—some leaders were inspired greatly and regarded North Korea as a developmental model to emulate, but others mocked its cultural production as boring and were disappointed at the low quality of the goods produced in North Korean-built factories.