North Korea Relations Research Articles

Power Succession in North Korea and Prospective Relations between South and North Korea

Power Succession in North Korea and Prospective Relations between South and North Korea

U.S.—North Korea Relations under the Obama Administration: Problems and Prospects

IntroductionThe inauguration of President Obama in January 2009 aroused expectations in Pyongyang that the strained relationship between North Korea and the U.S. would improve under the new U.S. administration, for Obama had indicated during the 2008 presidential campaign his willingness to meet even with leaders of rogue nations, such as Kim Jong-Il of North Korea, if that was what it would take to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. However, contrary to North Korea's expectations, the bilateral relationship between the two countries not improved but deteriorated further, especially after North Korea's missile and nuclear tests in the spring of 2009.It is the purpose of this paper to examine U.S.-North Korean relations under the Obama administration from the time of the inauguration on January 20, 2009, to the present with emphasis on an analysis of the factors which have contributed to the deterioration of the bilateral relationship between the U.S. and North Korea. It is a major contention of this paper that, like his predecessors, President Obama is determined to bring about the denuclearization of North Korea and will not relax sanctions against Pyongyang so long as North Korea persists in its ambitious nuclear weapons program.The Obama Administration's Approach to North KoreaDuring the presidential campaign in 2008, Obama said that he would be willing to sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il if it would help persuade the North to give up its nuclear weapons program.1 Apparently, such a statement aroused the expectations on the part of North Koreans that an Obama presidency would provide an opportunity for improved relations. Pyongyang seemed hopeful for an end to what it called the regime change policy of the Bush administration and anticipated better relations with United States.2 In an attempt to establish cordial relations with Washington, North Korea conveyed its wish to send a representative to the Obama inauguration. However, the Obama transition team turned the request down,3 a decision based on the fact that there were no official diplomatic ties between the two countries.Apparently, North Korea was not near the top of the Obama administration's foreign policy priorities. It was also not clear how much time or attention Obama's foreign policy team would pay to North Korea, given urgent problems in such locations as the Gaza Strip, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran.4 Meanwhile, signs of troubles for the Obama administration's North Korea policy began to surface on the eve of the new president's inauguration. According to Selig Harrison, who visited Pyongyang in mid-January 2009, North Koreans had very high hopes for Obama, but they want to confront him from a position of strength. North Korea made it clear that it had no intention of giving up nuclear weapons before normalizing relations with the U.S.5 Moreover, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman declared on the eve of Obama's inauguration that our status as a nuclear weapons state will never flounder as long as the U.S. nuclear threat remains, even a bit. He went on to say that we can live without normalized relations [with the U.S.], but can't live without nuclear deterrence.6 Although President Obama emphasized his intention to depart from President George W. Bush's policy of unilateralism and shift toward multilateral cooperation, it become increasingly clear that, insofar as the U.S. policy toward North Korea is concerned, the bottom line is (in the words of The Daily Yomiuri) continuation rather than change on the nuclear issue.7 Like his predecessors, Obama firmly believes that the prevention of nuclear proliferation is vital, not only to the security of the U.S. but to the preservation of the existing international system. In fact, as Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund points out, Obama has the most detailed, comprehensive, and transformative nuclear policy agenda any candidate ever carried into the White House. …

North Korea in 2009: The Song Remains the Same

During the first half of 2009, North Korea's relations with South Korea remained frozen, and its second nuclear test angered the entire international community. Beginning in August, the regime adopted a softer foreign policy line, while insisting that it would never give up its nuclear weapons.

North Korea's Clash of Cultures

IntroductionAccording to Samuel Huntington's widely discussed thesis of the clash of civilizations, conflicts in the post-Cold War era will be driven by differences in culture rather than differences in political ideology.1 Today, North Korea is undergoing its own domestic clash of cultures; in fact, this is the country's second culture clash in modern times, and it may prove to be the beginning of the end for the Kim regime.We two authors are not anthropologists, and we do not claim to be offering a definitive analysis of the cultures that contend in North Korea today. If we are covering ground that other scholars have already explored, we apologize to them, but perhaps there are others like ourselves who are not familiar with Korea's social science literature and who will therefore find this concept or our treatment of it to be not entirely redundant.Culture provides the framework in which people define themselves and pursue their life goals. Culture is usually taken for granted because it is shared by the people who live in it. Only when they travel to places in which different cultures predominate or meet people from those places, or when their own culture changes rapidly, do people take notice of their culture-and often rush to defend it. This not to say that everyone in a country lives in exactly the same culture: there are anomalies and variations from individual to individual and between people living in different subcultures.An important characteristic of culture is that it is an organized structure in which one part is compatible with another. For example, if the culture worships animals, it is not likely to be a meat-eating culture. If it highly values religion, it will have many churches. Culture is often viewed as consisting of values (what people think is good and bad), norms (written and unwritten rules about how to behave), and material goods (everything from food and household appliances to architecture). Although it is true that they usually change very slowly, cultures are by no means static. Perhaps the easiest way to see how cultures change is to compare the lives of the younger with the older generation. The youngsters often think and behave differently from their elders, and acquire different possessions. Yet even though young people may live in a somewhat different culture, they often gradually become assimilated to the established adult culture as they grow older, changing it less than one might expect.Three cultures coexist in North Korea today. The original culture is based on Confucianism, and this culture is largely overlaid by succeeding cultures. Beginning in the late 1940s, Confucianism (under Japanese colonial rule) was forcibly replaced by communist culture-specifically, Stalinism as interpreted by Kim Il-sung. Then in the late 1980s-Pyongyang's World Festival of Youth and Students in 1989 may mark the beginning-Western, or what communists like to call culture, began to make an appearance, especially in the lives of younger citizens living in Pyongyang. In his long-running battle to eradicate bourgeois culture, Kim Jong-il has characterized its arrival as imperialist pollution, blaming its coming on the evil designs of the United States and like-minded countries. Kim's battle against bourgeois culture has not gone well; every year it spreads further, replacing the communist culture.In the following pages we provide an overview of the arrival of bourgeois culture and how it is resisted by the Kim regime. We discuss why the regime fears bourgeois culture, why it is likely to replace communism, and what the implications of the new culture might be for Kim, the country, and North Korea's relations with the world.Traditional CultureThe principal characteristics of North (and South) Korea's traditional Confucian culture (or neo-Confucian culture, to include aspects of Buddhism and Taoism) are well known, even though the culture has largely disappeared. …

Recent Developments Relating to North Korea

The article seeks to help find common ground, in the Trilateral context, on the approach to current developments relating to North Korea as well as on long-term policy regarding the Koreas. We are aware of the close and long-established interaction between the Koreas, China and Russia, and the particular interests of the latter two in the Korean peninsula. For India, this is by no means a remote area but indeed an integral part of our growing engagement with East and Northeast Asia. The well documented record of trafficking in nuclear weapons and missile technology between North Korea and our immediate South Asian neighbourhood is a matter of utmost concern. The justified anxiety about the proliferation related implications of North Korea's nuclear weapon and missile activity should reinforce purposeful rethinking on the correct ways and means of ensuring non-proliferation and eventual global nuclear disarmament. Also relevant is the larger picture involving North Korea's internal dynamic and development, its reform programme, incipient globalisation, trends in North Korea's relations with Japan and South Korea, especially inter-Korea exchanges and the long term agenda of reunification, and the prospects for the six-party talks and the role of the US.

Taking Japan–North Korea Relations Seriously: Rationale and Background

centrality of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) to politics in Northeast Asia has been underscored above all by the country's suspected development of nuclear weapons since the early 1990s. North Korea provides a number of issues in regards to which the other regional actors try to coordinate their policies. Yet the literature analyzing the coordination of policy towards North Korea too often neglects aspects of the geostrategic context in which the nuclear drama is unfolding; diplomacy towards North Korea has been dissected predominantly from the viewpoint of US-North Korea relations. This binary focus is quite representative of international relations research in general, both in the postCold War era and earlier. Here, just as in many other contexts, the role, stature and leadership of the United States is often simply taken for granted. The assumption of US power functions as the unquestioned background against which research is done, and upon which analysis is built. In the sense that it possesses the greatest capability, the US may well be described as the most powerful state in the post-Cold War era. However, the limits of US power have recently been suggested by developments in Iraq, Iran and now North Korea, with the result that the extent of US power in concrete circumstances is a question that needs continuous elaboration. The tendency not to scrutinize sufficiently the issue of US power in the literature on multilateral coordination of policy on North Korea is probably further emphasized by the fact that most books and articles addressing the topic are written from a distinctively often rather myopic US perspective, engaging mostly USbased scholars.2

North Korea's Relations with Japan: The Legacy of War

In 1971 the government-controlled North Korean media raged: atrocious nature of the Japanese militarists, born with the brigandish, aggressive nature, bestial cruelty, and unsurpassed cunning, cannot be altered, and it is becoming more pronounced.' That same year, Premier Kim II Sung told the editor-in-chief of Japan's Asahi Shimbun about his desire to expand North Korea's economic and cultural contacts with Japan on the way to normalizing relations between the two countries. These seemingly contradictory foreign policy views reflected the two principal themes of North Korea's postwar Japan policy: on the one hand, residual antiimperialism and on the other, the all-out competition with South Korea that drives Pyongyang to seek political leverage through Japan. Both of these themes stem from Asian wars of the twentieth century. The North-South rivalry represents a continuation of the Korean War, albeit by less violent means. The antiimperialism theme arises from both World War II and the Korean War; rooted in the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910-45, it is now also directed against the United States. I will argue that although both these themes pervade Pyongyang's Japan policy, the rivalry with Seoul goes much further in explaining that policy than does resentment stemming from the Japanese occupation, indeed, that the rivalry with Seoul is the dominant consideration in North Korea's postwar Japan policy. This provides an insightful approach to explaining North Korea's relations with Japan, at least to the extent that it explains a large portion of the data within a relatively simple conceptual framework.

North Korea's Relations with Japan: The Legacy of War

North Korea's Relations with Japan: The Legacy of War

Soviet Perceptions of Soviet-North Korean Relations

Relations between the Soviet Union and North Korea have been studied mostly in the context of the Sino-Soviet conflict and thus have focused primarily on North Korea's playing off Beijing against Moscow. The central question has revolved around whether and to what extent North Korea has been able to adopt equidistant policies toward the Soviet Union and China. One view has North Korea actively manipulating the two socialist giants by adopting policies of equidistance,1 emphasizing North Korean gains such as autonomy in foreign policies and political independence in domestic affairs. The other view depicts North Korea as having limited maneuverability in the Sino-Soviet-North Korean triangle since the situation has not permitted North Korea to adopt equidistant policies on its own initiative.2 Both of these views are Pyongyang-centric in that they make North Korea their focus. For that reason, an important question has not been fully addressed: through what perspective has the Soviet Union viewed North Korea and Soviet-North Korean relations?

North Korea's Relations with the PRC and the USSR

North Korea's Relations with the PRC and the USSR

North Korea's Relations with Japan Since Detente

THE EASING OF tensions in East Asia since the 197I visit of Richard Nixon to Peking and Japan's diplomatic normalization with China in I972 has brought significant changes in North Korea's relations with Japan.* Though they are not yet normalized, the impact of detente has been great enough to raise hopes of eventual normalization. Such a development could significantly affect such crucial issues as the status of two Koreas, South Korea-Japan relations, and North Korean policies toward China and the Soviet Union. The coming of detente presented a dilemma for Japan because of the conflicting interests involved in dealing with North Korea. On the one hand, the Japanese government has to reckon with the increasing pressure from North Korea and from Japan's opposition parties for early normalization. It must also consider the attitudes of China and the Soviet Union, with which Japan has been endeavoring to improve her relations, for a persistent hostile or intransigent attitude on the part of Japan toward North Korea could be viewed by both China and the Soviet Union as a revival of Japanese militarism and colonialism. On the other hand, considering Japan's economic interests in South Korea (with a total investment of $2.012 million, some $6.2 billion of surplus resulting from Japan's trade with South Korea over the past ten years)1 and her national security ties with South Korea, she can not disregard South Korea's strong disapproval of Japan's flexible policy toward North Korea. Japan's basic policy of seikei bunri (separation of politics from trade),2 which has been intended to maximize her interest in and involvement with both Koreas, has not been satisfactory to either North or South Korea. Both have charged that such a policy could perpetuate Korea's division and aid one against the other. In essence,

North Korea: Between Moscow and Peking

Since the ousting of Khrushchev in October 1964, North Korea's relations with her neighbours have undergone a radical change. The warmth that the North Korean leaders demonstrated towards Communist China earlier has all but evaporated. The staunch anti-revisionism which used to characterise North Korean speeches and statements has given way to increasingly frequent warnings about the dangers of left opportunism, dogmatism and sectarianism. The economic and political ties between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Soviet Union which were seriously damaged during the Khrushchev era have now been more or less re-established.