Rethinking North Korea

Abstract

The conventional wisdom in explaining North Korean foreign policy focuses on elites, ideology and attitudes, and domestic variables. This view tends to see the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) as an atavistic state whose ideology and political regime are heading for the ashheap of history, and scholars argue that North Korea has been a pariah state with a cult of personality surrounding the late Kim Il Sung, and an aberrant and unpredictable foreign policy. This essay argues that, contrary to popular belief, North Korea's foreign policy is neither irrational nor impenetrable to systematic explanation. Using a framework derived from neorealism, I argue that North Korea's foreign policy, when separated from the misperceptions that surround it, is neither surprising nor aberrant. Two principal questions undergird this study. First, how well does the conventional wisdom explain North Korean foreign policy, and second, can an analysis derived from neorealist theory explain North Korea better than the conventional wisdom? I attempt to show that not only can neorealism explain North Korea's foreign policy and the long-peace on the Korean Peninsula, but also that neorealism can subsume many of the decision-making explanations. The article consists of three sections. The first reviews the dominant approach to the study of North Korea in which I select five widely accepted facts about North Korea, and discuss methodological concerns regarding their use. The second section shows that these stylized views are both logically and empirically untenable, and presents an alternative viewpoint based on structural approaches to international relations. The final section considers the effect that nuclear weapons might have on North Korea's actions,