Introduction

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea

Curated By

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

The Red Anti-Imperialist Collective is a Marxist Leninist organisation in Australia. Red Ant stands for socialism, anti-imperialism and Marxism-Leninism.

About this Collection

About this Collection

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea remains the most systematically demonised state on earth. Decades of US aggression, military encirclement and the most violent and comprehensive application of unilateral U.S. sanctions in modern history have been imposed on a country seeking nothing but autonomous development outside the Western-led capitalist order. This curated section gathers critical geopolitical analysis, theoretical works by DPRK revolutionaries, news without the liberalism and podcasts that cut through the Western propaganda. We must engage with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on its own historical and materialist terms. And that is, a post colonial socialist state operating under conditions of permanent US imperialist siege.

Read this collection online: https://unlearn.capital/collections/the-democratic-peoples-republic-of-korea

9 articles · 2 books · 4 podcasts · 6 videos

This ebook is about 173 pages long.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. Kim Jong Un says ties between China and DPRK will get closer advancing the common cause of socialism

5 pages

https://socialistchina.org/2026/03/12/kim-jong-un-says-ties-between-china-and-dprk-will-get-closer-advancing-the-common-cause-of-socialism/

Friends of Socialist China

Publication Date: March 12, 2026

Kim Jong Un reaffirmed commitment to closer China-DPRK ties advancing socialism as passenger train services resume between the countries.

2. Defying sanctions, advancing socialism: The DPRK's 9th Party Congress begins

5 pages

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2026/02/24/defying-sanctions-advancing-socialism-the-dprks-9th-party-congress-begins/

Peoples Dispatch

By Ju-Hyun Park

Publication Date: February 24, 2026

The DPRK advances socialist development through major construction and economic achievements despite international sanctions.

3. Fresh reports of drone incursions in DPRK raise stakes on the Korean peninsula

7 pages

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2026/02/06/fresh-reports-of-drone-incursions-in-dprk-raise-stakes-on-the-korean-peninsula/

Peoples Dispatch

By Ju-Hyun Park

Publication Date: February 6, 2026

Recent drone incursions from ROK into DPRK airspace raise new tensions between the Koreas, with investigations revealing potential connections to former administration and possible U.S. involvement.

4. Kim Il Sung Archive

4 pages

https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-il-sung/index.htm

Marxists Internet Archive

By www.marxists.org

Publication Date: January 1, 2008

A collection of Kim Il Sung's speeches, writings, and reminiscences covering revolutionary struggle, Juche ideology, self-reliance, and global anti-imperialism.

5. Grounding with Koreans in the Belly of Another Beast

17 pages

https://hoodcommunist.org/2024/11/28/koreans-in-japan-solidarity/

Hood Communist

By D Musa Springer

Publication Date: November 28, 2024

The author reflects on their experience joining a U.S. delegation to Chongryon, highlighting Korean resistance to imperialism and the importance of solidarity struggles.

6. The Korean Linchpin: The Korean Peninsula's Enduring Centrality in U.S. Indo-Pacific Geostrategy - Monthly Review

27 pages

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-korean-linchpin-the-korean-peninsulas-enduring-centrality-in-u-s-indo-pacific-geostrategy/

Monthly Review

By Tim Beal

Publication Date: July 1, 2024

Examines how the Korean Peninsula serves as a strategic linchpin for U.S.

7. Industrial Agriculture: Lessons from North Korea

26 pages

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/industrial-agriculture-lessons-from-north-korea/

Monthly Review

By Zhun Xu

Publication Date: March 1, 2024

North Korea's industrial agriculture system succeeded during the Soviet era but collapsed after the Soviet Union cut support, causing oil and fertilizer shortages that led to food crises.

8. In Line of Fire: The Korean Peninsula in U.S.-China Strategy

42 pages

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/in-line-of-fire-the-korean-peninsula-in-u-s-china-strategy/

Monthly Review

By Tim Beal

Publication Date: July 1, 2021

The Korean Peninsula's division serves as a strategic flashpoint in U.S.-China tensions, reflecting imperial ambitions and potential conflict risks.

9. The Angler and the Octopus: Kim Jong-un's Ongoing Peace Offensive

40 pages

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-angler-and-the-octopus/

Monthly Review

By Tim Beal

Publication Date: November 1, 2019

Analyzes Kim Jong-un's peace offensive in relation to the US as a decentralized octopus, examining the potential for peace despite establishment resistance.

Other Resources

Other Resources

This collection also includes other media types such as books, videos, podcasts, and more.

Books

On the Juche Idea

Marxists Internet Archive

By Kim Jong-Il

The Juche idea is the guiding ideology of the Korean revolution, asserting that man is master of everything and the popular masses are the subject of history. It demands independence in ideology, politics, economy, and self-reliance in defence, prioritizing political work, thereby opening a new era for oppressed masses.

With the Century

Marxists Internet Archive

By Kim Il Sung

Kim Il Sung's memoir 'With the Century' recounts his early life as an epitome of Korean history, framed by his motto that the people are his God. His father, Kim Hyong Jik, instilled the principle Juche and an 'Aim High!' determination for independence, organizing reading circles at Sungsil Middle School that sparked a 1912 strike.

Podcasts

Kims of the Roundtable

https://prolespod.libsyn.com/ep-96-kims-of-the-roundtable

ProlesPod

By Jeremy and Tony and Rae

Analyzes Juche philosophy and DPRK governance through texts by Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il as inheritors of Marxism-Leninism.

Resisting Imperialism in Korea with Nodutdol

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pranay-somayajula/episodes/Resisting-Imperialism-in-Korea-with-Nodutdol-e2rv05o

Return to Bandung

By Jia Hong

Jia Hong from Nodutdol discusses Korea's history of foreign imperialism from Japanese occupation to current U.S. military presence and resistance movements.

Xiangyu in the DPRK

https://prolespod.libsyn.com/episode-26-xiangyu-in-the-dprk

ProlesPod

By Xiangyu

Xiangyu discusses his experiences in North Korea and compares socialist society to capitalist society.

Communist Study and the DPRK w/ Derek Ford

https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/communist-study

Rev Left Radio

By Derek Ford

Revolutionary Left Radio hosts Derek Ford to discuss communist study, his trip to DPRK, and educational theory within anti-imperialist frameworks.

Videos

Debunking the Myths: North Korea vs US Propaganda

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EIrrRlLuFA

Empire Watch Media

By Keith Bennett

Keith Bennett analyzes North Korean sovereignty, Juche ideology, and resistance to US imperialism while debunking Western propaganda.

The West Couldn't Break North Korea And Now They're Afraid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ITbi-EX39M

Dr. Radhika Desai

By Radhika Desai

Following summits with Presidents Putin and Trump, President Xi Jinping made his first foreign trip of the year to North Korea, a nation of approximately 26 million people, to strengthen Sino-DPRK relations.

The DPRK's Sovereign Development and Revolutionary Internationalism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nWZt1evQR8

Journal of International Solidarity

By Ju-Hyun Park

Ju-Hyun Park analyzes how US sanctions shaped North Korea’s socialist development, rural focus, and deepened alliances with Russia and China.

Korea: Reunification & National Liberation at the End of the U.S. Empire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byZY3d1xYio

Critical Theory Workshop

Speakers analyze the history of US-DPRK diplomacy, nuclear policy, and anti-imperialist solidarity efforts aimed at Korean reunification.

Patriots, Traitors, and Empires: The Korean War and Korea's Struggle for Freedom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hWpNf-AxyM

Rev Left Radio

By Stephen Gowans

Stephen Gowans analyzes the history of the Korean War, Japanese colonialism, and US imperialism in his new book.

North Korea’s Economy Is Booming – Even US Media Can’t Ignore It

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2KP0jtV3XI

BreakThrough News

An analysis of North Korea's unexpected economic growth and strengthened strategic ties with China amid shifting diplomatic landscapes.

Kim Jong Un says ties between China and DPRK will get closer advancing the common cause of socialism

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea — Kim Jong Un says ties between China and DPRK will get closer advancing the common cause of socialism

Kim Jong Un says ties between China and DPRK will get closer advancing the common cause of socialism

Article 1 of 9

Friends of Socialist China

Originally published at https://socialistchina.org/2026/03/12/kim-jong-un-says-ties-between-china-and-dprk-will-get-closer-advancing-the-common-cause-of-socialism/

Publication Date: March 12, 2026

General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) Kim Jong Un sent a reply message to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on March 9, thanking him for his message of greetings on his reelection at the recent Ninth Congress of the WPK.

Kim described Xi’s message as “an expression of support and encouragement to me and all our Party members”, adding:

“It is the unshakable stand of our Party and the government of the Republic to continue to consolidate and develop the traditional DPRK-China friendship in conformity with the requirements of the new era and the aspirations of the peoples of the two countries.

 “I believe that the cooperation between the two parties and the two countries will get closer in the future on the road of advancing the common cause of socialism.”

At time of writing, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) has also reported similar reply messages from Kim to To Lam, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, and Thongloun Sisoulith, General Secretary of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party.

Meanwhile, on March 12, regular passenger train services were resumed between China and the DPRK.

Reporting this, China Daily noted that on March 10, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said that China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are friendly neighbours, and that maintaining regular passenger train operations is important for making travel between the two countries more convenient.

It added that according to China State Railway Group, international passenger train services between Beijing and Pyongyang will run four times a week in both directions — on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays — while services between Dandong in Liaoning province and Pyongyang will operate daily.

The Xinhua News Agency reported on the first service between Dandong and Pyongyang on March 12.

According to the report, Song Ping, a staff member with the Dandong exit-entry frontier inspection station, said authorities had introduced measures to ensure smooth clearance on the first day of operations. The inspection process for the entire train has been shortened to within 30 minutes.

Reporting the train’s arrival in Pyongyang, Xinhua said that the regular service would facilitate cross-border travel and boost economic, trade and cultural exchanges between the two countries.

Regular passenger transport between China and the DPRK was suspended early in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Regular air links were restored in 2023.

The following articles were originally published by KCNA, China Daily and the Xinhua News Agency.

Respected Comrade Kim Jong Un Sends Reply Message to General Secretary Xi Jinping

Pyongyang, March 10 (KCNA) — Kim Jong Un, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, sent a reply message to Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, on March 9.

The reply message said:

Respected Comrade General Secretary,

I express deep thanks to you for sending a warm congratulatory message on my reelection as the general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea at the Ninth Congress of the WPK.

The congratulatory message, sent by you after the sincere congratulations from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China to the Ninth WPK Congress, is an expression of support and encouragement to me and all our Party members.

It is the unshakable stand of our Party and the government of the Republic to continue to consolidate and develop the traditional DPRK-China friendship in conformity with the requirements of the new era and the aspirations of the peoples of the two countries.

I believe that the cooperation between the two parties and the two countries will get closer in the future on the road of advancing the common cause of socialism.

I sincerely wish you good health and greater success in your work to strengthen the party and accelerate the building of a modern and powerful socialist country.

Beijing-Pyongyang passenger rail service to resume Thursday

March 10 (China Daily) – China will resume international passenger train services between Beijing, Dandong in Liaoning province, and Pyongyang starting on Thursday, a move expected to facilitate cross-border travel and promote bilateral economic and people-to-people exchanges, China State Railway Group said on Tuesday.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said Tuesday that China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are friendly neighbors, and that maintaining regular passenger train operations is important for making travel between the two countries more convenient.

China supports the competent authorities of both sides in strengthening communication and creating more favorable conditions for bilateral personnel exchanges, Guo said at a regular news conference on Tuesday.

According to China State Railway Group, international passenger train services between Beijing and Pyongyang will run four times a week in both directions — on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays — while services between Dandong in Liaoning province and Pyongyang will operate daily.

The Beijing-Pyongyang journey takes about 23 hours and 41 minutes. Exit and entry procedures will be handled at Dandong and Sinuiju in the DPRK.

Passenger services for the international trains will be available at Beijing, Tianjin, Shanhaiguan in Hebei province, Shenyang in Liaoning province, and Dandong on the Chinese side, and at Pyongyang and Sinuiju on the DPRK side, the railway operator said.

Tickets for the international passenger trains are already available through offline channels, though fares have not yet been announced.

For the Beijing-Pyongyang service, tickets are available at international railway ticket outlets in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanhaiguan, Shenyang and Dandong. Inquiries can be made through the International Train Ticket Office of China Travel Service Head Office (Beijing) Co Ltd at 010-65120503 or 010-65120507.

For the Dandong-Pyongyang service, tickets are available at an international ticket hall in Dandong. Its hotline is 0415-2391555.

For services departing from Pyongyang to Beijing or Dandong, tickets can be purchased at the ticket office of Pyongyang Railway Station, according to the railway operator.

International passenger train service links China, DPRK

SHENYANG, March 12 (Xinhua) — An international passenger train linking Dandong in northeast China’s Liaoning Province with Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), began service on Thursday.

The train, consisting of five passenger carriages, departed from the border city of Dandong at 10 a.m. (Beijing Time) and is scheduled to arrive in Pyongyang at 6:07 p.m. local time.

At the international departure hall at Dandong railway station, train schedules, electronic screens and service counters featured displays in both Korean and Chinese.

“I’m very excited to return home by train today,” said a DPRK passenger, who bought her ticket on Wednesday after learning about the service.

Song Ping, a staff member with the Dandong exit-entry frontier inspection station, said authorities had introduced measures to ensure smooth clearance on the first day of operations. The inspection process for the entire train has been shortened to within 30 minutes, he noted.

The passenger service will operate daily in both directions. The train departing from Pyongyang leaves at 10:26 a.m. local time and is set to arrive in Dandong at 4:23 p.m. (Beijing Time).

An executive from the international department of China State Railway Group Co., Ltd. said this train service will serve as both a vital window for cross-border travelers and a dynamic link strengthening the friendship between these two nations.

Int’l passenger train from China to DPRK arrives in Pyongyang

PYONGYANG, March 12 (Xinhua) — An international passenger train from Dandong in northeast China’s Liaoning Province to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has just arrived in Pyongyang. Xinhua reporters witnessed the arrival at a railway station in central Pyongyang on Thursday.

China State Railway Group Co., Ltd. announced Tuesday that international passenger trains connecting China and the DPRK will begin operating in both directions on Thursday.

The services will connect Beijing and the northeastern border city of Dandong with the DPRK capital Pyongyang, helping to facilitate cross-border travel and boost economic, trade and cultural exchanges between the two countries, the Chinese railway operator said.

Trains between Beijing and Pyongyang will run four days a week, with two-way services scheduled for Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, while the Dandong-Pyongyang train service will operate daily in both directions, said the Chinese railway operator.

Defying sanctions, advancing socialism: The DPRK's 9th Party Congress begins

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea — Defying sanctions, advancing socialism: The DPRK's 9th Party Congress begins

Defying sanctions, advancing socialism: The DPRK's 9th Party Congress begins

Article 2 of 9

Peoples Dispatch

By Ju-Hyun Park

Originally published at https://peoplesdispatch.org/2026/02/24/defying-sanctions-advancing-socialism-the-dprks-9th-party-congress-begins/

Publication Date: February 24, 2026

9th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea. Photo: Korea Risk

The 9th Party Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea is now underway. Held every five years, the Congress can be regarded as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) most significant political event. A total of 5,000 delegates and 2,000 observers elected by party organizations from across the country are now gathered in Pyongyang for the event.

As preparations for the Congress took place across the country in recent weeks, they were accompanied by celebrations of the successes of the last Five Year Plan, adopted at the 8th Party Congress in 2021. In the past month, completion ceremonies have been held for 21 local projects across the DPRK’s rural communities, ranging from the massive Sinuiju Greenhouse Farm to new factories and hospitals.

Major milestones in housing construction have also been met, and in some cases surpassed. 113,000 housing units were built in 1,860 rural villages and more than 500 farms since 2022. More than 50,000 apartment units have also been built in Pyongyang’s new Hwasong District, exceeding the goals for five-year construction set at the 8th Party Congress. In accordance with DPRK law, these homes were built to fulfill the state’s obligations to provide housing to the people without cost.

These achievements would be impressive in any country, but the DPRK’s special status as one of the world’s most sanctioned countries, and a perennial target of US military threats, makes its recent successes in socialist construction particularly noteworthy. While international media has long maligned the country as backwards, stagnant, and mired in poverty, these recent developments offer a fresh perspective of the DPRK as a dynamic and evolving socialist project that is steadily overcoming the challenges posed to its system and people from without.

Comprehensive socialist development 

The Five Year Plan set forth by the 8th Party Congress was developed with the intent to overcome the significant challenges of tightening US and UN sanctions, along with the global economic downturn of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The DPRK has been a target of economic warfare since the founding of its state in 1948. For decades, the US pursued this end through legislation such as the Trading with the Enemy Act. Following Pyongyang’s first successful nuclear weapons test in 2006, the US introduced UN Security Council sanctions to its arsenal, alongside an expanding list of unilateral US coercive measures. Over time, these sanctions became increasingly draconian, and their intention to impose collective punishment increasingly undeniable. In 2017, a new suite of comprehensive sanctions were imposed on the DPRK.

The economic effects were devastating: fuel imports were drastically reduced, all major export industries were banned from international trade, and the DPRK’s already-limited access to international capital and dollar-based trade was throttled. Available figures on export revenues, while incomplete, demonstrate the extreme effects of these sanctions, as revenues crashed from USD 2.72 billion in 2016 to just USD 316 million in 2018. At the 8th Party Congress in 2021, the WPK noted that economic performance had “fallen short in almost every category.”

Beyond the immediate economic damage to major industries, agriculture, healthcare, and construction all suffered from a lack of available inputs. One study from 2019 estimated that shortages and delays to UN health programs caused by these sanctions in 2018 alone may have killed as many as 3,968 people, of which more than 80% were estimated to be children under the age of five.

These measures, while devastating for any nation, were particularly difficult for the DPRK given its recent history. In 1995, devastating floods swept through the country. The available figures from the aftermath of this disaster paint a picture of biblical catastrophe: 5.4 million displaced, 330,000 hectares of agricultural land destroyed, 1.9 million tons of grain lost, and USD 15 billion in damages. The destruction wrought by flooding was compounded by international and local factors: the recent fall of the Soviet Union had left the DPRK economically and diplomatically isolated, ongoing US sanctions restricted its access to global markets to seek relief, and its own aggressive program of agricultural industrialization had, ironically, left this sector vulnerable to disruptions in electrical infrastructure and the loss of fuel inputs. Images of famine flooded the world, and became the indelible impression of the country in the minds of many.

In response to comprehensive sanctions and collective punishment, the 8th Party Congress answered with a plan for “comprehensive socialist development.” The plan sought to drastically raise quality of life in the country and achieve a new level of strategic economic resilience through all-encompassing development of agriculture, consumer goods, military technology, and industry.

To achieve the goals of the 8th Party Congress, the DPRK relied on its existing strengths and on recent innovations to its socialist system. The country’s historic emphasis on an independent industrial base and military self-sufficiency made many of its recent achievements possible. Besides mobilizing the civilian workforce and volunteer teams, worker-soldiers of the Korean People’s Army were also deployed to supplement construction efforts around the country.

Besides its existing developmental strengths, the DPRK also leveraged newer economic reforms that were refined throughout the 2010s. A new system known as the Socialist Enterprise Responsibility Management System or SERMS, has reformed management to give state enterprises and cooperatives greater control over production, prices, and profits, while remaining beholden to centrally planned goals. Similar reforms have reshaped the agrarian sector, with new individual incentive systems and cooperative models of farming implemented. 

The 20×10 Rural Development Plan 

Many of the hallmark construction achievements now being unveiled in the lead-up to the 9th Party Congress are also part of a new initiative being undertaken across the country: the 20×10 Rural Development Plan.

Inaugurated in 2024, the 20×10 Rural Development Plan seeks to raise the level of rural development through a decade-long initiative to build new economic enterprises, healthcare facilities, and cultural and scientific facilities in 20 rural counties each year. The plan has successfully met its goals in its first two years, and is expected to continue to be a pillar of the country’s development strategy.

Some recent examples of major results from the 20×10 Rural Development Plan include the Sinuiju Greenhouse Farm, a sprawling agricultural complex built on Wihwa Island which was unveiled in January. The Samgwang Livestock Farm, which opened this February, is also now the country’s largest dairy production facility, and will be used to provide dairy products to children across the country. In 2024, the country’s first offshore fish farm opened in Sinpo, marking a new milestone in DPRK aquaculture.

Beyond new agricultural enterprises, light industry and intermediate production facilities are also being built in the countryside, with the goal of increasing the economic output and resilience of rural areas. A major focus of the first year of the 20×10 Rural Development Plan was the construction of facilities to produce backpacks for schoolchildren. This initiative integrated economic development needs with a human-centered approach, targeting the education needs of children to advance rural development.

Aside from economic concerns, the 20×10 Rural Development Plan, in keeping with the themes of comprehensive socialist development, is also striving to raise the overall quality of life in rural areas as well. Towards this end, Kim Jong Un identified “three essential projects” for the 20×10 Plan to integrate in December 2024: rural hospitals, grain management facilities, and “sci-tech dissemination centers.” Three new county hospitals were built in 2025.

While uneven development between the capital and the countryside most certainly persists, the 20×10 Plan has made significant progress towards addressing this in a very short period of time. As the 9th Party Congress approaches, it is likely that the next Five Year Plan will seek to build upon recent successes and accelerate the DPRK’s drive towards comprehensive socialist development.

Fresh reports of drone incursions in DPRK raise stakes on the Korean peninsula

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea — Fresh reports of drone incursions in DPRK raise stakes on the Korean peninsula

Fresh reports of drone incursions in DPRK raise stakes on the Korean peninsula

Article 3 of 9

Peoples Dispatch

By Ju-Hyun Park

Originally published at https://peoplesdispatch.org/2026/02/06/fresh-reports-of-drone-incursions-in-dprk-raise-stakes-on-the-korean-peninsula/

Publication Date: February 6, 2026

Downed drone in DPRK. Photo: KCNA

New revelations of recent drone incursions into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) airspace have cast a pall on inter-Korean relations, and raised questions about the internal integrity of ROK President Lee Jae-Myung’s government.

On January 10, the DPRK released photographs of a recently downed drone that violated its airspace on January 4. A separate drone incursion that occurred last September was also announced for the first time.

The DPRK accused the Republic of Korea (ROK) of carrying out the drone incursions. ROK President Lee Jae Myeong denied any responsibility, and ordered a joint military and police investigation to uncover possible civilian or military culprits.

Shortly after, a graduate student, only identified by the surname Oh, claimed responsibility for the drone incursions in a media interview. Mr. Oh and two other suspects, Mr. Jang and Mr. Kim, are being investigated by police, and face numerous criminal charges.

Oh, Kim, and Jang all serve in the leadership of Estel Engineering, a start-up drone manufacturing company that also runs anti-DPRK media publications. Oh and Jang reportedly previously worked as contractors for the office of former President Yoon Seok Yeol, who was ousted from office last April following a failed self-coup attempt in December 2024. The Yoon administration has been found to have ordered at least 11 drone incursions into the DPRK in the weeks leading up to the declaration of martial law.

ROK Defense Intelligence Command has confirmed Oh participated in covert media operations against the DPRK. Oh has also been reported to have held the rank of colonel in the ROK military, and to have served in the special HID Unit, which oversees infiltration and psychological warfare operations against the DPRK. The HID Unit was previously implicated in Yoon’s self-coup plot. The special investigatory commission is reportedly expanding its investigation in light of these findings, as suspicions of intelligence agency involvement rise.

While the details of what occurred have yet to fully come to light, the incident raises serious questions about the extent to which rogue elements loyal to the past Yoon administration may be seeking to sabotage inter-Korean affairs, and to what extent these forces may be linked to actors outside of the Korean Peninsula.

The revelations also come in a period of intense tension between the two Korean governments. Since the end of 2023, the DPRK has redefined its political line to reject peaceful reunification and categorize the ROK as a hostile state. Its constitution has since been updated to concretize this new position, which many analysts refer to as the “hostile two states theory”. While Lee has pledged to reestablish trust between the two governments and taken a number of public measures towards this end, the DPRK has repeatedly rejected his overtures, citing a long record of escalating military aggression, and the ROK’s lack of political sovereignty.

A track record of hostility

Since coming to power last June, ROK President Lee has sought to clean out the government of insurrectionists who supported Yoon’s self-coup attempt. These investigations have brought former leading politicians, including the ex-president (who may face the death penalty) and former prime minister, before the National Assembly, and also seen a purge of the leadership of the ROK Armed Forces.

A core pillar of the investigation concerns Yoon’s involvement and intent in at least 11 drone incursions into the DPRK carried out between October and November of 2024. In January, a disciplinary military commission found Lt. Gen. Yeo In-hyung, former commander of ROK military counterintelligence, guilty of general treason for his role in these operations. The drones reportedly dropped anti-DPRK propaganda leaflets over a number of targeted cities.

The DPRK expediently announced the 2024 drone incursions, providing photographic evidence, and taking measures to fortify its side of the DMZ, the de facto border separating the two Koreas. International media widely reported the incident, but focused on the DPRK’s detonation of roads and bridges at the DMZ.

At the time, the ROK Ministry of Defense dismissed questions by reporters about the drone incursions. In the aftermath of the failed coup, the incident became subject to renewed scrutiny.

As the prosecution pieced together Yoon’s coup plot, it became evident that the former president sought to spark a new “limited conflict” with the DPRK in order to justify his declaration of martial law. However, these plans did not bear fruit after the DPRK refused to take the bait.

The drone incursions came on the heels of a number of other provocations against the DPRK during the Yoon administration. Upon entering office in 2022, Yoon enshrined preemptive strikes against the north as part of his government’s military policy. Live-fire military drills with the US, which had been paused since 2019, resumed under Yoon’s watch and escalated explosively. US Forces Korea conducted war drills on 200 days in 2023 and 275 days in 2024. Yoon also entered a new trilateral security pact with Japan and the US, known as JAKUS, which became the container for annual trilateral military exercises on the Korean peninsula.

These measures struck a lasting blow to inter-Korean relations, becoming a major factor in the DPRK’s decision to renounce the framework of peaceful reunification at the end of 2023. More ROK provocations continued throughout 2024. Balloons carrying propaganda leaflets were sent into the DPRK by military and civilian forces, loudspeakers were placed on the DMZ to barrage border communities with noise pollution, and Yoon scrapped the 2018 Inter-Korean Military Agreement that summer, moving troops into previously designated buffer zones. With such a record of hostility, the ROK prosecutor’s office has found little challenge in establishing Yoon’s intent to shatter the Korean War armistice and renew hostilities on the peninsula.

While the Lee government has taken measures to oust the remaining insurrectionary forces from the government, the new revelations of drone incursions undertaken during his own presidency, possibly with the support of ROK intelligence agencies, raises the question of whether the investigations, prosecutions, and purges have gone far enough.

In the background, too, is the question of possible US involvement. While the investigation thus far has shed no light on US knowledge of the most recent drone incursions or those that occurred in 2024, the extent of US integration and control of the ROK’s Armed Forces and intelligence services naturally raises suspicions that have yet to be thoroughly addressed.

The US has held operational control of the ROK military since 1950. The armed forces of the two countries routinely train together, and their intelligence agencies also routinely collaborate. The US also extensively surveils the skies above the Korean Peninsula, which raises questions about how so many drone operations could have occurred without US knowledge.

Reconciliation: a dead end?

Lee’s administration may hope its efforts to investigate the drone incidents could reduce tensions with Pyongyang. A scathing statement from Kim Yo Jong, speaking in her capacity as a Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) Central Committee member, demonstrates this may be easier said than done.

While Kim expressed “personal appreciation” for the ROK Defense Ministry’s disavowal of the events and pledges to investigate their causes, she maintained the position that ROK officials still bear responsibility for violations of the DPRK’s sovereignty. In response to assertions that the drones could have been sent by civilian operators, Kim made her party and government’s position clear: “We don’t care.” Kim ended her statement by warning ROK officials, who she referred to as “a group of hooligans and scrap,” that attempts to cast off responsibility onto civilian groups would invite the DPRK’s own civilian organizations to deploy drones into the ROK’s airspace.

The disconnect between the two governments demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the DPRK’s position within the Lee administration.

Kim Jong Un’s adoption of the hostile two states theory reflects the WPK’s assessment of the historical reality of the peninsula and the character of the ROK state. It is not an analysis of any particular administration or individual.

The hostile two states theory identifies the ROK as a fundamentally hostile entity owing to its colonial subordination to US imperialism. While Lee’s efforts could still buy limited good will, the problem, from Pyongyang’s vantage, is structural, not personal.

Lee has notably pursued a number of other measures to improve relations with the DPRK. His government dismantled the loudspeakers aimed at the DPRK along the DMZ, and put an end to all civilian and government campaigns to send propaganda balloons into the north. Under Lee, the ROK has also repatriated fishermen from the DPRK who were lost at sea.

In January, Lee announced his government’s intention to unilaterally reestablish the 2018 Inter-Korean Military Agreement, which was previously dismantled by Yoon. Lee has also publicly explained that while he still supports the eventual denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, insisting on the DPRK’s disarmament is no longer a practical position.

Nevertheless, the DPRK has insisted that any prospect of inter-Korean reconciliation is incompatible with the ongoing reality of the US hostile policy against the DPRK, which the ROK is a party to as an ally of the US which hosts dozens of US military bases and more than 28,000 of its troops.

While trumpeting his administration’s commitment to peace and reconciliation, the Lee government has taken few measures to disentangle itself from the US. While he has vowed to regain operational control of the military, this will require Lee’s administration to participate further in the very war exercises which routinely threaten the DPRK. Under pressure from Trump’s tariff threats, which recently redoubled, Lee made further concessions: moving to increase the ROK’s defense spending to 3.5% of GDP (though some call for as high as 5%), promising USD 25 billion in US weapons purchases over the next decade, and committing USD 33 billion to financially support USFK. These measures, along with the recent drone debacle, have only cemented the DPRK’s view that the ROK lacks the political independence to be regarded as an equal negotiating partner.

The diplomatic impasse in Korea will not be resolved until engagement between Washington and Pyongyang becomes possible. To achieve this, the DPRK set forth conditions that the Trump administration has still yet to meet: namely, for Washington to abandon the goal of denuclearization, and for an overall reduction or elimination in US-led aggression. A recent decision by the UN Security Council (UNSC) to allow further humanitarian exemptions for UNSC sanctions is a step in the right direction, but more must be done.

Trump’s upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing this April has generated substantial speculation that a summit with Kim could also take place around the same time. Lee recently completed his own four-day state visit to China, where he highlighted China’s potential future role in Korean peninsula affairs, and proposed collaboration on a number of regional projects, including the long-sought inter-Korean railway connecting Seoul to Beijing.

In the end, Beijing may prove the key to unlocking the diplomatic puzzle in Korea. Xi’s own words regarding this question, however, ought to be heeded: “Three feet of ice won’t melt all at once.”

Kim Il Sung Archive

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea — Kim Il Sung Archive

Kim Il Sung Archive

Article 4 of 9

Marxists Internet Archive

By www.marxists.org

Originally published at https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-il-sung/index.htm

Publication Date: January 1, 2008

Biographies

With the Century; Reminiscences of Kim Il Sung (1992-94)

History of Revolutionary Activities of President Kim Il Sung (2010)

Anecdotes of Kim Il Sung's Life, vol. 1 (2007)

Anecdotes of Kim Il Sung's Life, vol. 2 (2013)

Kim Il Sung and his Mentor (2021)

Great Man (2022)

Individual Documents

Let Us Provide Active Support for the Revolutionary Struggle of the Chinese People (1945)

Let Us Devote Ourselves to the Service for the Masses of the People (1945)

For the Establishment of a United Party of the Working Masses (1946)

On the establishment of the Workers' Party of North Korea and the question of founding the Workers' Party of South Korea (1946)

On the Occasion of the Founding of the Korean People's Army (1948)

On eliminating dogmatism and formalism and establishing Juche in ideological work (1955)

The Korean People's Army Has Inherited the Anti-Japanese Armed Struggle (1958)

Socialist Medical Science is Preventive Medicine (1966)

Let Us Embody the Revolutionary Spirit of Independence, Self-Sustenance and Self-Defence More Thoroughly In All Branches of State Activity (1967)

Great Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary Cause of Asian, African and Latin American Peoples Is Invincible. On the First Anniversary of the Death of Che Guevara in Battle (1968)

On Further Accelerating Socialist Rural Construction (1969)

Answers to the Questions Raised by the Iraqi Journalists' Delegation (1971)

On the Full Implementation of the Theses on Socialist Education (1977)

Talk to a Delegation from the Socialist Party of Portugal (1977)

Let Us Further Strengthen the People's Government (1977)

Report to the Sixth Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea on the Work of the Central Committee (Excerpt) (1980)

Answers to Questions Raised by the Chief Editor of Mundo Obrero, Organ of the Spanish Communist Party, and by the Editor in Charge of Home News of El País, Unattached Spanish Newspaper (1980)

Answers to Questions Raised by the Chinese Xinhua News Agency Delegation (1981)

Talk to the President of the Editorial Council of the Mexican Newspaper El Día (1981)

Non-Aligned and Developing Countries Should Solve the Agricultural Problem Through Their Own Efforts (1981)

Let Us Uphold Independence (1981)

Talk to the Director of the Indian Newspaper National Herald (1981)

For the Strengthening of Cooperation Between the Non-Aligned Countries in their News Services (1982)

A Talk to the Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and his Party (1984)

For the Development of the Non-Aligned Movement (1986)

Preventing War and Preserving Peace are a Burning Task of Mankind (1986)

Let Us Develop South-South Cooperation (1987)

On Developing Kangwon Province as a Good Tourist Resort (1989)

Let the Entire Nation Unite and Hasten the Reunification of the Country (1990)

Talk with the Delegation of the Socialist Workers' Party of the United States (1990)

Replies to the Managing Editor of Mainichi Shimbun (1991)

For a free and peaceful new world (1991)

Let the North and the South Open the Way to Peace and the Reunification of the Country in a United Effort (1992)

Talk with an American Evangelist (1992)

Answers to Questions Raised by a Delegation of Journalists of Washington Times from the United States (1992)

Enhancing the Role of the Masses of the People is the Guarantee for Victory in the Cause of Independence (1992)

Talk to the Delegation of the Summit Council for World Peace (1992)

Talk with a Delegation from the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America (1992)

Officials Must Become True Servants of the People (1992)

Ours is the Socialism of Juche (1994)

Answers to Questions Raised by a Journalist Delegation from the American Newspaper The Washington Times (1994)

Selections

On Achieving the National Reunification by the Great Unity of the Nation (2008)

On the Relations Betwen the DPRK and the USA (2019)

On the Founding and Development of the Workers' Party of Korea (2020)

On Some Points of the Juche Idea (2020)

For Achieving Global Independence (2022)

We Should Work for the People (2022)

On Self-Reliance and the Building of an Independent National Economy (2022)

Collected Works

Volume 1: June 1930 - December 1945

Volume 2: January - December 1946

Volume 3: January - December 1947

Volume 4: January - December 1948

Volume 5: January 1949 - June 1950

Volume 6: June 1950 - December 1951

Volume 7: January 1952 - July 1953

Volume 8: August 1953 - June 1954

Volume 9: July 1954 - December 1955

Volume 10: January - December 1956

Volume 11: January - December 1957

Volume 12: January - December 1958

Volume 13: January - December 1959

Volume 14: January - December 1960

Volume 15: January - December 1961

Volume 16: January - December 1962

Volume 17: January - December 1963

Volume 18: January - December 1964

Volume 19: January - October 1965

Volume 20: November 1965 - December 1966

Volume 21: January - December 1967

Volume 22: January - September 1968

Volume 23: October - May 1969

Volume 24: June - December 1969

Volume 25: January - December 1970

Volume 26: January - December 1971

Volume 27: January - December 1972

Volume 28: January - December 1973

Volume 29: January - December 1974

Volume 30: January - December 1975

Volume 31: January - December 1976

Volume 32: January - December 1977

Volume 33: January - December 1978

Volume 34: January - December 1979

Volume 35: January - December 1980

Volume 36: January - December 1981

Volume 37: January 1982 - May 1983

Volume 38: June 1983 - December 1984

Volume 39: January 1985 - May 1986

Volume 40: May 1986 - December 1987

Volume 41: January 1988 - May 1989

Volume 42: June 1989 - December 1990

Volume 43: January 1991 - October 1992

Volume 44: December 1992 - July 1994

Volume 45: Reminiscences - With the Century 1 (April 1912 - May 1930)

Volume 46: Reminiscences - With the Century 2 (May 1930 - February 1933)

Volume 47: Reminiscences - With the Century 3 (February 1933 - February 1935)

Volume 48: Reminiscences - With the Century 4 (February 1935 - May 1936)

Volume 49: Reminiscences - With the Century 5 (May 1936 - March 1937)

Volume 50: Reminiscences - With the Century 6 (March 1937 - November 1937) [The title page of this volume incorrectly says Feb. 1935-May 1936]

Writers Index   |  Contact

Grounding with Koreans in the Belly of Another Beast

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea — Grounding with Koreans in the Belly of Another Beast

Grounding with Koreans in the Belly of Another Beast

Article 5 of 9

Hood Communist

By D Musa Springer

Originally published at https://hoodcommunist.org/2024/11/28/koreans-in-japan-solidarity/

Publication Date: November 28, 2024

In the short time between sunrise and boarding the 15 hour flight to Tokyo, all of my travel anxiety turned to excitement. In November 2023, I was invited to join the 2nd annual U.S. Peace Delegation to Chongryon (The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), in a variety group of U.S. academics, journalists, high school youth, and organizers. The delegation was organized by Korean Reunification activists Dr. Kiyul Chung, a Visiting Professor at Tokyo’s Korea University and Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung University, and Derek R. Ford, a US-based activist and visiting lecturer at Korea University. The opportunity to join this exchange felt like a unique chance to build fundamentally anti-imperialist paths to solidarity, and proved itself to be. 

As an International Youth Representative for the Cuba-based Red Barrial Afrodescendiente, I’m familiar with organizing delegations for Africans struggling in the U.S. to ground with Africans struggling against the blockade in Cuba. Aside from it being the longest flight I’ve ever taken, this trip to ground with Koreans in Japan was my first time on the ‘attending’ end of a delegation, putting anti-imperialist politics into practice from that perspective. My time at Korea University, as well as touring the impressive Chongryon Korean National Schools, reaffirmed my commitment to the examples of Cuba’s internationalist politics, and presented much educational dialogue, valuable exchanges, and material pathways for further solidarity. 

I would especially like to thank Dr. Kiyul Chung, the only Korean born in the Southern portion of the Korean peninsula to ever teach at a Northern Korea university! The wonderful Korean comrade and longtime anti-imperialist organizer shepherded us throughout the entire delegation, losing his own sleep for the sake of ours. At 71 years old, Dr. Kiyul has more energy than the entire delegation combined, with his passion for his people and the Reunification of Korea beaming at all times. This experience provided me with further insights into the historical struggles of the Korean people under Japanese imperialism — both as an unrecognized, oppressed colonial diaspora within Japan, and in their Motherland as the target of limitless Western imperialist aggression.

I believe that traveling on delegations is a task that organizers in the U.S. should engage in, within an organized fashion, including domestic trips to share notes with organizers across the country. Our organizations must collaborate and strategize on how they, and in turn us, can do better in supporting a broad and fresh base of members within our ranks to experience the political transformations, solidarity, and exchanges that often come from delegations. In this context my reflection on my time grounding with Koreans, like my reflection on African power and politics in La Marina, is an attempt to offer some perspective on the broad map of global resistance to imperialism, the process of building ties to learn from our Global South siblings in struggle, and to share insights to both the experience itself and what I learned from it.

Koreans In Japan

One of the most staggering revelations of this trip was learning firsthand about the sheer scale of Korean suffering under Japanese imperialism. While the image constructed of Japan in the West is closely related to the island’s cultural exports — popular art, food, entertainment and fashion often associate the island and its history with all things fun and whimsical — the reality of its colonial violence is much less spoken. As Derek Ford details, the origins of Koreans in Japan is fraught with ‘profound violence’:

“From their founding after World War II, Koreans in Japan—who are sometimes called “Zainichi Koreans”, meaning “foreign Koreans”—have always had to struggle to create and maintain educational spaces and systems where they can teach and learn about their own history, culture, traditions, and languages, in addition to other essential disciplines and languages. This was a basic human right as well as a political struggle, as Japan’s colonization of Korea, which officially started in 1910 but began about 5 years earlier, forced over 2 million Koreans—about 90 percent of whom came from the southern part of the peninsula—to move to Japan through either physical violence, coercion, and deceit. The story of the formation of a Korean population in Japan in the 1900s is one of profound violence.

​

Some were “recruited” by Japanese companies after colonial forces stole their lands and gave them to landlords, promised great jobs and good pay but receiving the opposite. Many Korean women, hundreds of thousands, were kidnapped into Japan’s military sexual slavery network, which the U.S. [military] inherited after it replaced Japan as the occupying force in the south [in 1945]. In 1938, Japan forcibly conscripted and kidnapped workers from Korea and brought them to Japan as slave laborers, where they were forced to build the military, munitions buildings and construct secret underground bases and bunkers for the air force. In the latter instance, children were particularly valuable, as their small bodies and hands were essential for creating the tunnels with pickaxes.”

Koreans estimate upwards of 7-8 million were conscripted to Japanese colonial forced labor during the World War period, with at least 800,000 taken to mainland Japan as forced labor. Approximately 300,000 Korean women were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, again, an operation later taken over by the U.S. military occupation. In their explanations of this history on our trip, the Koreans consistently made comparisons to the colonization of Indigenous people and chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas, and the plight of these individuals is a haunting testament to the universal brutality of colonialism. Similar to how African historians intentionally highlight and celebrate our resistance to colonialism and slavery, all of the Koreans made sure to remind us that they revolted consistently. One historian said that an estimated third of all Korean forced laborers actively resisted through guerrilla warfare, organized escape, and marronage, embodying a common anti-colonial spirit of resilience and defiance.

It’s worth noting the population dynamics among Koreans in Japan, because the Korean community in Japan has a complex and significant history, a main theme throughout the delegation. Japan’s policy towards ethnic Koreans living within its borders, particularly those who do not hold citizenship of either Japan or South Korea, reflects Japan’s enduring colonial policies and the greater geopolitical forces of the region. Japan only recognizes the Republic of Korea (‘South Korea’) as the ‘legitimate’ government of the Korean Peninsula. Consequently, Japan does not consider passports or citizenship issued by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or ‘North Korea’) as valid. This stance is rooted in Japan’s imperial legacy, subservient diplomatic relations with the U.S. who wages continual war against the DPRK, and its own colonial recognition policies. As one can imagine, immense issues related to things like traveling, housing, and education arise from not having your citizenship formally recognized.

Of roughly 1 million Koreans in Japan, thousands of them do not possess Japanese nor South Korean citizenship; the term “Choson” is used for them. This term is a reference to the Korean peninsula under the Choson Dynasty (1392–1897), before its division into North and South; from 1910 to 1945 the peninsula was ruled by the Empire of Japan under the name Choson. “Choson” is how the Japanese government categorizes these Koreans in legal, political, and administrative limbo, and it’s important to remember that many are descendants of Koreans brought to Japan during the colonial period who either only have DPRK citizenship, some combination of Japanese and Korean citizenship, or who have chosen not to obtain Japanese citizenship in place of citizenship to their Motherland, the DPRK. ​​In 1947, Japan enacted the ‘Alien Registration Law’, which relegated ethnic Koreans to the status of foreigners within Japan. Following this, the Nationality Law of 1950 removed Japanese citizenship from Korean offspring born to Japanese mothers, while Korean children fathered by Japanese men could retain their Japanese citizenship.

Learning of these dynamics forced me to reflect on the colonial obsession with regulating national identity, citizenship, and ethnic classification; from the centuries-old ‘One-Drop Rule’ that continues to dictate the racial class system of the U.S., to the apartheid segregation system imposed onto the Palestinians by the Zionists, to the dangerous blood-quantum eugenics preoccupation of Nazi Germany. Whether implicitly implied through legal and cultural means, as is the case with Koreans in Japan, or through explicit and violent exclusion, colonizers are always necessarily obsessed with sternly dictating national and ethnic identity, marriage, citizenship, population diversification, and racial classification.     

While some progress has been made, one can imagine the serious implications that these classifications have had for the identity, legal status, and discrimination of the Korean community in Japan for several generations. Those designated as Choson usually face challenges related to their imposed-statelessness, such as limitations on travel, difficulties in accessing most social services, ethnicity-based discrimination in housing and labor, and broader issues of societal oppression. 

One example that we learned from students at Korea University was during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Japanese government created a special program to support students struggling financially. Japan allowed for students across the entire country of all nationalities, including students at international schools in Japan, to request and receive state funds to help needy students afford a laptop to do remote schoolwork during quarantine, access protective gear like masks and sanitizer, and even help paying university tuition. All students, that is, except for students at Korea University. 

These students already faced a number of compounding financial and discriminatory issues long before the pandemic; students informed me that by simply attending Korea University, they have already curtailed the vast majority of their job prospects within Japan. Korea University was the only university where students were not allowed access to this COVID support, and Korean students launched a grassroots campaign in response to protest and calling out the Japanese government. 

Other examples are much more dramatic, but equally illustrative of the oppressive nature of life in Japan for the Koreans. As Ford notes:

“In 2018, a Japanese man attacked a young Korean man with a knife, and he admitted to police he did so “because he had ‘looked down’ on him.” That same year, two men shot up Chongryon’s headquarters in downtown Tokyo.”

During our visit, the mixture of this painful past with the tenuous present was palpable. 

“Just before the beginning of the COVID pandemic we had to crawl through a torn chainlink fence,” participants of the delegation from prior years told me, as we accessed the underground tunnels where thousands of Koreans perished as forced laborers. By November 2023 during my trip, the Japanese government had installed sparse lighting inside the opening of the tunnel, and had a small multilingual plaque acknowledging the historic nature of the site. Having legal access to these tunnels and the small commemorative plaque is itself the result of struggle by local Korean organizers and a small handful of Japanese historians, and remains a point of contention: the plaque doesn’t accurately describe the site, almost reading as a celebration of the horrors endured by Koreans in these tunnels, with absolutely no mention of forced labor. Of the roughly  1200 forced labor tunnels across the island, only less than a dozen are accessible by Japanese historians, who must receive tight-gripped government approval to enter.

These underground cave-tunnels were utilized by the Japanese imperial army, who moved most of their military operations underground to escape bombardments and military action during the World Wars. Once I ducked my way into the dark, humid tunnel, I quickly realized the space was filled with an ominous, heavy, and familiar feeling. We observed the physical marks on the walls of these underground tunnels painstakingly chiseled by the hands of Korean laborers, many just teenagers as young as 12, under the duress of Imperial Japanese guns. These marks are not just scars on stone; they are indelible imprints of a dark history, a somber reminder of the exploitation and suffering endured. 

Exploring the legacies of chattel slavery causes a similarly chilling feeling for Africans in the Americas. At the Castillo de San Severino in Matanzas, Cuba, for example, historians point out where you can still see the bullet holes in the stone walls, where Africans who attempted to escape or revolt were punished by gunfire. There’s a level of reality that is communicated by experiencing the physical remnants of this deep oppression.

Dr. Chung and professor Curry Malott, another participant on the delegation, described that when there were no lights inside these colonial tunnels, only the guide’s flashlight, they were immersed in shadows and the echoes of brutal horror. To honor this, we turned off all the lights to experience just a few seconds of the darkness that plagued Koreans for decades. 

Interestingly, the Japanese public’s awareness of their nation’s colonial history is markedly absent, intentionally hidden and disallowed from public memory in any capacity. The nation’s imperial history is not taught in their schools, nor part of public discussion in any meaningful capacity. The lack of historical consciousness among the Japanese populace about their own country’s role in colonizing Korea is concerning, but not dissimilar to the absolute and proud lack of public knowledge in the U.S. of the atrocities their European ancestors carried out against many colonized and enslaved populations. It points to a broader issue of historical amnesia as a tool of the maintenance empire, the nearly inescapable dominating power of U.S. imperialism, and the importance of truthful historical education in acknowledging and learning from the past. 

Since at least 1948 the Koreans have engaged in organized resistance in the form of grassroots organization and DPRK-supported popular education. In 1955, this grassroots organizations would become Chongryon, a network of Korean schools that they began to build immediately following liberation. Chongryon now exists as a network of hundreds of Korean schools across the islands, cultural centers and businesses, and a humbly stunning university in Tokyo — all leading the struggle against the violent erasure of Korean people’s history, culture, and presence. And, as one professor made sure I understood clearly, all of this is achieved through belief in the values and principles of socialism.  

Microcosm of Regional Imperialist Aggression

The complexities of this situation reflect the ongoing tensions in the East Asian region — due primarily to the presence of U.S. imperialist forces that occupy all of Japan and the Southern Korean Peninsula — and the wider Pacific region through United States Pacific Command (USPACOM). 

In my short time in Japan, I was repeatedly stunned at the extremely visible and influential presence of U.S. military forces on the small island. Signs in some places read “U.S. Military Housing”, while others advertise “Best Car Rentals For U.S. Military Men.” When I ventured into the fashion district in my free time, massive and popular second-hand clothing markets were on most corners filled with used military paraphernalia, proudly sitting across from the McDonald’s on every block. In true ‘traveling while Black’ fashion, I sought out other Black people whenever possible; in Tachikawa, nearly every Black person I saw, including those who messaged me on social apps, were U.S. soldiers and their families. In some regards, what I observed and experienced of the U.S. Military presence in Japan was more visible and aggressive than their presence domestically in many places. The juxtaposition of Japanese culture and context with the U.S. military presence gave the same feeling as the police who occupy U.S. cities, who stick out within a society designed to cater to them. 

The U.S. has not only occupied and wedged its way into virtually every aspect of Japanese life and economy, it has also stunted and outright stopped virtually all attempts at Korean reunification, regional peace and stability, and sustainable diplomatic ties between the DPRK, its citizens, and Japan. 

One afternoon on the trip we drove up a winding, narrow road to park our van at a stunning mountaintop park, surrounded by cherry blossoms and lush greens. The beauty felt like a scene from a movie.

“Right there, you see it,” Said Dr. Kiyul, one hand on my shoulder and the other pointing at the various cargo and military ships in the ocean. “See that big U.S. ship right there? That’s where the nukes are!” 

The ship he was referring to was the unavoidable USS Ronald Reagan, a massive nuclear-powered aircraft ‘supercarrier’ sitting off the shore of Yokosuka. 

“That ship is readied with nuclear weapons and other devastating heavy artillery, aimed at the DPRK at all times. One may think that the Japanese, being the victims of the world’s most tragic and infamous nuclear attack by the U.S., wouldn’t cooperate with this nuclear chauvinism,” said Dr. Kiyul. 

Unfortunately, the U.S. uses the nonsensical guise of “deterrent diplomacy” and maintains a subservient Japanese government to assert that they are keeping Japan ‘safe’ from the DPRK and others, even if the opposite remains true. Most Japanese people I spoke with in my free time felt, for lack of a better term, deeply indifferent to the U.S. military occupation across their island, though some have said that the events in Palestine since October 7 have changed that. 

It’s important to underscore how deeply ingrained the U.S. military presence and militarization is in the Pacific region is. Similar to how U.S. AFRICOM has turned the entirety of the African continent to a subservient militarized zone, or how the U.S.  SOUTHCOM has designated Latin America as its “yard” to dominate, so too has the U.S. PACOM (Indo-Pacific Command) carved the entire Pacific region into its playground. U.S. military bases, naval carriers, occupation installments, and joint-training endeavors completely surround the DPRK and China, utilizing Japan, Southern Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Guam, and surrounding areas in the region to encircle those the U.S. deem as enemies.    

This all-encompassing military presence aligns with the U.S. strategy of “full spectrum dominance” to control all land, sea, air and space possible. Across the continent of Africa the presence of the U.S. AFRICOM resulted in a 100,000% increase in terrorism across the continent, deteriorated the already shaky regional stability, and left neo-colonial forces with new caches of U.S. weapons. In a similar manner, the U.S. presence in the Pacific has caused a breakdown of negotiations between the DPRK and neighborhooding countries like Japan, as well as the Southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. Each time the North and South Korean governments have attempted peace talks, let alone discussions of any potential reunification, the U.S. has swiftly halted such talks; the easing of Japanese hostility against the DPRK was also stunted by the U.S., who deemed the DPRK a grave safety and forbade the Japanese government from seeking peaceful solutions. The U.S. has consistently denied DPRK-initiated proposals to discuss a peace treaty to formally end the Korean war, for example, the longest war in U.S. history.  

What’s clear is that the U.S. prefers to continue an aggressive and antagonistic policy towards the DPRK, using its subservient “allies” in the region as mere launching pads from which they can target their regional enemies. Despite the DPRK remaining politically consistent on the question of peace talks, consistent on the common sense policy not relinquishing nuclear weapons (for fear of suffering the same fate of Libya’s Qaddafi), consistent on their expressed desire for reunification of Korea, the U.S. has been equally consistent in denying the region stability and demilitarized peace. The largest military occupation is in Luchu (Okinawa), which doubles as a U.S. and Japanese colonial occupation of these Indigenous islands. 

For Koreans in Japan, I was told by students, Japanese aggression and discrimination against internal Koreans tends to match the larger geopolitical situations they face. As the geopolitical sphere becomes more complex and contentious, local Koreans face knife attacks, are scared to wear their traditional clothing outside of their schools, are made into the society’s punching bags, and experience a microcosm of the larger regional warcraft by the U.S.. 

68 years of Internationalism, Popular Education In Practice 

The delegation took place just one month following the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation in Occupied Palestine on October 7, and therefore the consistent backdrop of most conversations on the trip was Palestine, the resistance struggle being waged there, and how it is related to the burgeoning potential of a multipolar world. The DPRK has long supported the struggles of the Palestinian Resistance both materially and politically, as they have to a lesser known extent African liberation struggles, including training various militant Black Panthers and supporting some seeking asylum. In fact the DPRK has never recognized the Zionist state, consistently calling for the liberation of Palestine. 

In the Korean elementary and middle schools, I flipped through pages in their history books and saw images of Martin Luther King Jr., Muamar Qadaffi, the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, Ahmed Ben Bella, and other revolutionary figures in African history, which was particularly warming. While in in the U.S. the DPRK is extremely and harshly vilified, the Global South still largely recognizes the DPRK for having never surrendered to imperialism, and as an “unwavering ally of the South and the resolute torchbearer of anti-imperialism”, as the Communist Party of Kenya put it in their December issue of Itikadi. Reverence for the DPRK exists across Africa, with organizations like the Nigerian-DPRK Friendship Association highlighting the role that the DPRK played in supporting African liberation movements of the 60s and the 70s, and African development beyond that. This support includes providing tractors and agricultural supplies, helping to develop local infrastructure like roads and hospitals, exchange of academic training, import-export exchange, and technological cooperation.  

Inside each room of the Korean high schools and the Korean University, images of their anti-colonial heroes Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il hang proudly, similar to the endless images of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Jose Martí plastered across Cuban walls. The Koreans recognize their struggle as primarily a struggle against the contradictions of imperialism and colonialism, with the Korean Juche ideology guiding them, and sew this recognition into the fabric of their work inside Japan. 

In the middle school classes, a young Korean girl was asked to practice her English in front of the class by speaking to us; the students all turned their chairs around and sat quietly, attentively to show her respect. To our surprise, she didn’t simply introduce herself, but rather introduced her entire class, speaking almost exclusively in the collective “we” — telling us what ‘we’ as a class like to do, why they are excited to meet us, and so forth. We all noted the collective, communal nature of the Chongryan system, and the beautiful display of this collectivism in the student’s persistent use of “we.” 

Toward the latter half of our trip, I was able to guest lecture alongside other delegation participants for two different classes at Korea University. The topic of the class that I joined is itself a testament to the advanced nature of their revolutionary education: “End of the Unipolar World, Creation of Multipolar World: Histories of Korea-U.S., Russia-U.S., and China-U.S. Confrontation” taught by professor Kiyul Chung. We discussed the globalization of anti-imperialist principles of self-determination, the role of the DPRK in supporting a burgeoning multipolar world, and the active application of DPRK principles of self-reliance and self-defense. 

When it was my turn to speak, I put into context the struggles of Africans within the U.S. as an internal colony, highlighted several moments of joint history between DPRK and African liberation struggles, and discussed the strong commonalities between Pan-Africanism and Korean Reunification as strategies and political ideologies. The commonalities in these two ideological northstars needs to be further explored. The same way that Korean Reunification wishes to see the U.S., Japanese, and Western imperialist grip on Korea fall, we too wish to see this imperialist grip on Africa fall. The same way that they desire the reunification of the Korean Peninsula under scientific socialism, so too do we wish to see the unification of Africa under scientific socialism. In the same way that they envision safety and security for the Korean diaspora as being existentially linked to the reunification of Korea, we also understand the safety and security of Africans in our diaspora from imperialist racism as only being achievable through Africa’s unification.  

And as they wish to see the fall of the neo-colonial puppet governments of Japan and South Korea — who take their orders directly from the U.S. — we, too, wish to see the fall of the neo-colonial comprador class, who exploit Africa and Africans at the command of Western imperialists. 

The discussions highlighted the irony of certain academic narratives that focus exclusively on single-issue oppression with a U.S.-centric lens, while ignoring the broader history and experience of imperialism globally. While discourse of ‘global anti-blackness’ has gone viral in recent years, rarely have I seen this perspective properly contrasted with the experiences of Koreans under Japanese imperialism, including the mass rape and enslavement of Korean women, or other colonized populations. It underscored the importance of recognizing and respecting the diverse histories of both suffering and resistance across the world, rather than subsuming them under singular narratives of blanket oppression hierarchies.

This trip helped me to think deeper on the often cited concept of ‘the world being built on antiblackness’, critically examined in the light of the Pacific region’s experiences, the Arab (West Asia) region’s experiences, and so forth. The sufferings of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran, in Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii, and in other regions includes levels of dehumanization, mass murder, sanctions, exploitation, and slavery by Western powers that challenge the narrative that centers solely on anti-Blackness as the foundational for global oppression. This view feels reductive in light of serious engagement with the world history of imperialism, as it overlooks the multifaceted nature of imperialist violence and the diverse experiences of those suffering under it, in favor of grand narratives.

While I do not claim to be an expert on such subjects nor want this occasionally controversial topic to overshadow the overall reflections in this piece, I do hope that we can broaden our understanding of our own oppression in light of global struggles. Conditions of enslavement, colonization, vicious racism and discrimination emanate from a system of imperialism that dictates super-exploitation at all costs, that simply reappears in various forms and locations. We must resist the urge to claim a form of chauvinism which asserts a global preoccupation, consciously or subconsciously, with our oppression as the ‘psychic’ lifeblood of the modern world. In reality, imperialism is the lifeblood of the modern world-building project, with the U.S.-EU-NATO bloc dictating the terms of exploitation to the world. 

This, perhaps, is why the Chongryon school network is primarily based on Korean culture as their basis of community and education. “Korean culture is thousands of years old, and our oppression is not,” one student at Korea University told me. “That is why we focus on learning our Korean language, our mythology, our history. if we do not preserve it, Japan will squash it out of us.”

In Cuba, a similar phenomenon exists. The depth of African culture, from language and dance, to fashion and spiritual practice, help to unify and sustain the Revolution, by creating a common African identity that Afro-Cubans unif around. For the Koreans in Japan, their culture is not just an act of resistance against Japanese erasure, it is also a source of unity and great ethnic, national pride. For African organizers in the West, we have to remember that our culture is a powerful tool for unification and pride, taking the lessons from other colonized individuals who have proven as much. 

Under the guise of building a ‘battery factory’ and with firm belief in the power of their culture, Koreans in Japan secretly built Korea University without the knowledge of the Japanese government, which opened in 1956. On the basis of culture and popular education, they have turned this act of defiance into a network of contested spaces, where they are able to exercise their autonomy. Language, song, dance, history, traditions, clothing, all are celebrated as a basis for the socialist experiment in self-determination that is Chongryon. I couldn’t help but wonder, what it would mean for us to return to and celebrate our African culture in a similar and serious manner.

As we move forward, it is crucial to carry these lessons with us, fostering an empathetic and decisive discourse on resistance and liberation. Delegations are not simply to perform a more ethical form of tourism, but rather are crucial moments to witness and learn the opportunities that exist for colonized peoples who are organized and dedicated. After my trip to Chongryon to ground with Koreans in the belly of another beast, I am reaffirmed that our struggle as Africans must be decisively socialist and anti-imperialist, firmly rooted in notions of cultural power, and remain consistent in our solidarity with the Korean struggle. We have to join them in calling for the reunification of Korea and supporting the U.S. Out Of Korea movement, because the intertwined nature of our struggles are profound. 

The Korean Linchpin: The Korean Peninsula's Enduring Centrality in U.S. Indo-Pacific Geostrategy - Monthly Review

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea — The Korean Linchpin: The Korean Peninsula's Enduring Centrality in U.S. Indo-Pacific Geostrategy - Monthly Review

The Korean Linchpin: The Korean Peninsula's Enduring Centrality in U.S. Indo-Pacific Geostrategy - Monthly Review

Article 6 of 9

Monthly Review

By Tim Beal

Originally published at https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-korean-linchpin-the-korean-peninsulas-enduring-centrality-in-u-s-indo-pacific-geostrategy/

Publication Date: July 1, 2024

Closeup of the Korean Demilitarized Zone that surrounds the Military Demarcation Line. By Rishabh Tatiraju - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link.

Tim Beal is a retired New Zealand academic with a special interest in U.S. imperialism, mainly but not exclusively with respect to Asia. He is the author of North Korea: The Struggle Against American Power (Pluto Press, 2005), Crisis in Korea: America, China, and the Risk of War (Pluto Press, 2011), and numerous articles. He has traveled to North and South Korea and is chair of the NZ-DPRK Society. His website, Asian Geopolitics, has more information and links to his recent publications.

General Paul LaCamera, testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee on March 20, 2024, stated:

The U.S.-ROK [United States-Republic of Korea] Alliance serves as a linchpin for peace and prosperity in Northeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific. Our two nations share common values and democratic norms, value human rights, and abide by the rules-based international order. We also share significant economic and cultural ties that benefit both nations. The ROK sits at the heart of Northeast Asia, a region of significant security and economic interest for the United States. The presence of U.S. forces in the ROK and Japan demonstrates our ironclad commitment to the people of Korea and protects our strategic interests in Northeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific region.¹

Stripping aside the cant, what LaCamera is saying is that Korea is the linchpin of U.S. strategy in Northeast Asia, and thus across the Indo-Pacific. This strategy is aimed at preserving and expanding U.S. hegemony by containing China and Russia, and destroying them as challenges to U.S. domination.

Admittedly, LaCamera is Commander of U.S. Forces in (South) Korea, and so has reason to exaggerate the importance of Korea, but geography does support his assertion. The Korean Peninsula is situated at the point where the four major powers of the contemporary world meet and contest. It is contiguous with China and Russia, physically adjacent to Japan, and effectively adjacent to the United States on the other side of the “American lake.” Historically, the peninsula has been the conduit through which Indian Buddhism and Chinese culture flowed to Japan. It was the route by which the Mongols attempted to conquer Japan and the Japanese, in turn, colonized in their attempts to subjugate China. Geography gave Korea a location with huge potential as the hub joining the major economies of the northern hemisphere, from Western Europe through Eurasia and on to the United States. History has tended to thwart this beneficence as the major powers fought each other in, and over, Korea.

It is necessary to look at recent history to understand how the United States utilized geography to make Korea so important in U.S. strategy, and why it has continuing centrality.

The American Century and Its Challenges

In the mid-1940s, the Second World War was coming to an end and the American Century, proclaimed by Henry Luce in 1941, was in its infancy.² The American elite had many issues, usually interlocked and overlapping, to confront as it established its new empire. This was a strange beast. Although it contained many elements of its predecessors throughout history, it was the first truly global one—having been born out of one, if not two, world wars—and of a distinctly different character. It was informal and uncodified, and many denied, and still deny, its existence. Its edges were blurred: Which countries were within and which without and its depth uncertain. How much control does the United States have over Britain or France? These parameters also changed over time; in 1945, China was in, and, four years later, it was out.

There were major challenges, including: how to deal with the conquered enemy states, Germany and Japan; how to manage the client states; how to cope with the wave of anticolonialism and socialism; and what to do about the Soviet Union?

The Soviet Union was seen as the main obstacle to the implementation of the American Century and its geographical position, straddling Eurasia, leading to the division of the world into four theaters. To the west of the Soviet Union was the rest of Europe and the Atlantic (hence the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO), to the east was the Pacific, the subject of this essay, and to the south was the Middle East, which had its own specific dynamics, especially regarding oil and Israel. That left the rest of the world—Latin America (as still seen as dominated by the United States via the Monroe Doctrine), Oceania, Africa, and South Asia—as peripheral to the main struggle centered on Eurasia. The “Loss of China” in 1949 reinforced this division and raised the importance of the Pacific theater. In 2018, then U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis extended the remit of the Pacific Command to cover South Asia and the Indian Ocean and it was redesignated the Indo-Pacific Command.³ However, this change reflected not so much the intrinsic importance of the Indian Ocean, and South Asia (mainly India), but rather its role in the U.S. confrontation with China. India was seen as a counterbalance to China, and the Indian Ocean offered great opportunities for the interdiction (hopefully with help from India) of Chinese imports of oil from the Middle East.⁴ The focus here is on the two theaters of greatest relevance, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and their position in the struggle to protect and expand U.S. imperialism against the resurgence of Russia and the rise of China.

The Atlantic Theater and NATO

History presented the United States with a political environment and a civilizational cohesion conducive to the creation of a vehicle for control of the Atlantic theater: NATO. The quip of Lord Ismay, its first Secretary-General, about the purpose of NATO is often quoted: “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”⁵ In reality, the Russians were not trying to get into Western Europe, and the Americans were not trying to get out, but his formulation served the trans-Atlantic elite and was widely accepted. The ease with which NATO survived the removal of its ostensible raison d’être after the collapse of the Soviet Union indicates its deeper, more resilient function as an instrument of U.S. imperial power articulated through a European client elite. The continued success of NATO as such an instrument serves as a beacon in more perilous, declining times. In February 2024, the publication Foreign Affairs, concerned at the way things were going and fearful of a return to Trumpian disruption of imperial management, republished Dean Acheson’s 1963 essay “The Practice of Partnership,” noting with approval that he had realized that a military alliance was not sufficient, but what was required was “a strategic plan that combined military, political, and economic policies—one that every member of the alliance could stand behind.”⁶ In other words, Acheson was calling for an enmeshing of the European elite into an enduring subservient relationship to the United States using the full spectrum of power, not least soft power. The most striking success story here has been the co-option of the European Greens, most notably the Germans such as Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, as fervent servants of U.S. strategy against Russia, sacrificing their own societies in the process.⁷

History presented the United States with a more difficult task in the Pacific theater.

The Pacific Theater

The United States had a very different canvas with which to work in the Pacific. The Soviet Union had borne the brunt of the war against Germany. It had suffered the most human and material damage, inflicted the most casualties, and taken Berlin. Its role in the peace settlement might be contested, but could not be ignored. By contrast, the United States was the paramount power in the Pacific War, with the Soviet Union playing a far smaller (but in actuality a very significant) role.

Although the atom bomb was in the pipeline, tests were not complete, and no one could be sure what devastation nuclear weapons might produce or the effect this would have on Japanese decisions. Accordingly, Franklin D. Roosevelt had been pressing Joseph Stalin to enter the war against Japan, and at Yalta in February 1945, Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union would do so three months after victory in Europe. This it did, and the Red Army routed the once-famed Japanese Kwantung Army, producing “Japan’s Greatest Defeat.”⁸ Indeed, so impressive was the Soviet campaign that it is argued that: “The fear that the Soviet Union would replicate its Manchurian exploits in Europe became the foundational anxiety of the Cold War.”⁹

The Soviet entry into the Pacific War was overshadowed by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and nuclear weapons have been a dominant feature of geopolitics since then. However, the necessity of bringing the Soviet Union into the war, and the fear of the consequences, led to the U.S. division of Korea, which has had a profound impact, both globally and on U.S. Pacific strategy in particular.

The bilateral division had not been discussed at Yalta, but was a last-minute decision to forestall Soviet participation in the Japanese peace settlement and to ensure as much U.S. control over the Korean Peninsula as possible. Harry S. Truman, who had become president upon Roosevelt’s death during this crucial period, had hoped that the atomic bomb would force Japan’s surrender before the Soviet Union entered the war, and that the United States would gain unilateral control over Japan, China (via the dependent government of Chiang Kai-shek), and the Korean Peninsula. The State Department feared that, if left to their own devices, the Koreans would establish a socialist regime which “might easily receive popular support.”¹⁰ Moreover, the only Korean military force was Kim Il-Sung’s guerrilla army—the United States had no surrogate force such as the Republic of China (ROC) army. The Soviet entry into the war and rapid invasion of Manchuria precipitated a change in policy. Truman dumped Roosevelt’s trusteeship in favor of pushing a bilateral deal with Stalin to divide Korea; better, in the words of James I. Matray, “to settle for half a loaf since its troops were over six hundred miles away.” Colonels Charles H. Bonesteel (who later commanded the U.S. forces in Korea, USFK) and Dean Rusk (subsequently Secretary of State during the Vietnam War) were to find a dividing line as far north as possible. According to Rusk, they tore a map out of a National Geographic magazine and chose the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, giving the United States the capital, Seoul.¹¹

To the Americans’ surprise, Stalin acquiesced to the division at the Thirty-Eighth parallel. In reality, the United States would not have accepted Soviet occupation of the peninsula with equanimity. It is likely that Stalin was acutely conscious of the weakness of the USSR compared with the United States and its allies, and was anxious to avoid unnecessary confrontation. Control of Poland and the western borderlands of the Soviet Union were vitally important for defense of the country; Korea was not.¹² Moreover, although the Red Army had shattered the Japanese defense forces (though not without some bitter fighting), it was a long way from the Soviet heartland. Geography is more than distance on a map and while the Soviets had local superiority at the time, the United States would have the logistical advantage in a protracted war—the waters of the Pacific would have provided easier transit than the steppes of Siberia. Moreover, the United States was at the time the “Arsenal of Democracy” and the behemoth of production for industrial warfare. This is true no longer, and its current weakness has made control of South Korea particularly important.¹³

Consequences of the Division of Korea

Although overshadowed by the advent of nuclear weapons, the division of the Korean peninsula was to have momentous and continuing consequences. First of all, it led to the Korean War, which was both a civil war and an anticolonial war. The U.S.-installed president in the South, the Korean-American Syngman Rhee, did not have a political base of his own (unlike Kim Il-Sung in the North) and needed to rely on an administration inherited from the Japanese and run by collaborators.

The U.S. occupation prevented the eradication of Japanese colonialism from the southern part of Korea, while in the north, the Soviet occupation allowed Kim Il-Sung to consummate decolonization. In Bruce Cumings’s view, this unfinished business inexorably led to the Korean War.¹⁴ The heritage of Japanese colonialism has bedeviled South Korea ever since and today is resurfacing strongly in the Yoon Suk Yeol administration to much public criticism.¹⁵ The United States did not sweep away Japanese colonialism, but rather incorporated it into its own neocolonial control of South Korea.

The Korean War was the first modern U.S. war that it did not win, which led to the conflict being shunted aside in U.S. memory (though not of that of Korean or Chinese) and becoming the “Forgotten War.”¹⁶ It was also the first U.S. war against China, with a second, and arguably more consequential one, looming.¹⁷ The U.S. division of Korea also led to the division of China, because, in the early days of the Korean War, the United States reversed course and directly intervened in the Chinese Civil War by sending the Seventh Fleet to protect the rump Chiang Kai-shek government that was holed up in the province of Taiwan (which had been returned to China from Japan upon U.S. insistence in 1945). The two interconnected divisions of Korea and China are hugely important because they both in their various ways create an inherently unstable situation, and one which is used by Washington to justify its forward military presence in East Asia (and by extension now the whole Indo-Pacific), and which provides the United States with a mechanism to escalate tension whenever required.

The Korean War, firmly bedded in the Cold War, created the Permanent War Economy, changing the business of the United States from business, as in President Calvin Coolidge’s days, to war.¹⁸ The United States became a state constantly at war, be it economic, political, informational, or kinetic, either directly or by proxy. Undoubtedly, this would have happened even without the war in Korea. If not there and in that way, then it would have happened elsewhere, in some way or another because it was inherent in the concept of the American Century. However, it did happen in Korea, and that forged the specific characteristics of U.S. imperialism. It also placed the Korean Peninsula at the core of evolving U.S. imperial strategy in the region, through which the major objectives of U.S. policy—the subordination of Japan and the destruction of the Soviet Union/Russia and China as challenges to global hegemony—could be achieved. In short, it transformed U.S. policy in the Pacific theater.

The Transformation of U.S. Pacific Policy

Prior to the Korean War, U.S. policy toward China had been somewhat ambivalent. It had wisely refrained from direct involvement in the Chinese Civil War and had reconciled itself to the fall of Taiwan, the ROC’s last stronghold, to the Communists. The Korean War changed that. The United States intervened, but in a way that posed no danger to U.S. forces, since it was confined to naval protection of the island. Chiang Kai-shek, of course, wanted the United States to take back the mainland on his behalf, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff dismissed that fantasy.¹⁹

However, buttressed by McCarthyism at home, the Korean War also solidified hostility to the newly established People’s Republic of China (PRC). Instead of coming to some sort of terms with Beijing, which was put on hold until the Henry Kissinger/Richard Nixon démarche in the early 1970s, Washington continued to recognize the ROC as the legitimate government of China and to block the PRC from taking up the China seat in the United Nations Security Council. Not for the first or last time, a state that the United States could not control was transmogrified in both elite and popular consciousness into a fantastical parody of reality. Chester Bowles, writing in Foreign Affairs in 1960, gives a typical prediction: “That mainland China, with an inadequate resource base, spiraling population, ruthless Communist leadership and intense nationalist spirit, will develop fiercely expansionist tendencies directed toward the weaker neighboring states to the south.”²⁰

This perception led to the war in Indochina, complicity in the massacres in Indonesia, and general support of repression in Southeast Asia. It also has echoes in Cold War discourse about “Soviet expansionism” then and in current warnings that Vladimir Putin will “invade Europe.”²¹ All of this has strong elements of psychological projection about it, since it was the U.S. empire that was expanding and the Soviet Union, later Russia, and China were reacting to that. Interventions across the border—in Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union, in Ukraine by Russia, and in the Korean War by China—were essentially defensive.

More than any empire in history, the American one is curiously lacking in self-awareness. Others may have happily conflated plunder with the altruistic promotion of their religion, or a “civilizing mission,” but they did not deny empire.²² The United States does, and this fact makes it particularly important to disregard surface froth and to attempt to analyze the actual functions of policies and actions, even though they may be hidden from the principal actors themselves. In this case, we have the United States constructing a network of alliances and a latticework of institutions whose function is to preserve hegemony and to expand it by defeating any challenges to its rule. This is often identified as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, but it is more than the exultation of the triumphalist unipolar moment. Rather, it is the constant purpose, with variations, of the American Century.²³ How could it be otherwise post-1945 for an empire with global aspirations?

The Network of Alliances and a Latticework of Institutions

A defining characteristic of an empire is that it combines its own power with a hierarchal architecture of subordinate states and, in the modern world, with institutions that transcend state boundaries. No power is absolute and, in the case of countries, must be shared with local elites and, in the case of institutions, other countries, even adversaries, the United Nations being the major example. Moreover, there is always the danger that countries outside the empire might coalesce; thus the first rule of imperial management is divide et impera. The Nixon/Kissinger move to enlarge the split between China and the Soviet Union is a classic, if belated, example. Recent U.S. administrations, perhaps out of arrogance and entitlement, have been bad at this, driving their adversaries together rather than apart—leading to the growth of the BRICS+ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and several more recently joined states); the China-Russia partnership, now bringing in Iran; and a strengthening of the relationship among North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK), China, and Russia.²⁴

U.S. Pacific policy originally focused on the defeat of Japan and aimed at the exclusion of the Soviet Union, with the division of Korea being a part of that. The “Loss of China” in 1949 and the subsequent rise of China led to adjustments in policy, and over time China has become the chief focus. Japan has remained the major component of what might be termed “American Asia,” with Australia playing a subsidiary role to the south.

The United States was very lucky with respect to Japan. Not merely had they kept the Soviet Union out, but their vassal allies had little say in the governance of Japan. By keeping the imperial state in place, they have been able to rule Japan without much difficulty since 1945. The initial policy to demilitarize Japan was abandoned—another result of the Korean War—and today, Japan is on its way to having the third largest military budget in the world.²⁵

The Korean Peninsula was not in itself considered important in 1945. It was its location that provided value.²⁶ While location has continued to be a major factor, Korea—North and South—has assumed great importance in differing ways in U.S. strategy.

Although North Korea achieved significant growth in its early decades, the collapse of the Soviet Union, coupled with ongoing U.S. sanctions, devastated its economy and, although recovering, it is still far short of its potential. While its economic and societal resilience has surprised and exasperated the United States, it is the development of its nuclear missile deterrence that has been the main issue. Both the economic problems of North Korea and its pursuit of a nuclear deterrent are the result of U.S. policy. The first can be judged as deliberate on the U.S. part; if it produced the collapse of the DPRK and its absorption by the South Korea, thus extending U.S. control over the whole peninsula up to the borders of China, then that would be well and good. If it did not actually precipitate collapse, it would demonstrate the sorry fate that awaited those who defied Washington. The deliberateness of the second is more complex. Clearly, for most, the development of the North Korean deterrent was unwelcome, but there may have been those in the U.S. strategic community who saw the value of it—and valuable for U.S. grand strategy it certainly is. Although portrayed as a huge threat to the United States, it is not. Except in the unlikely case of a truly “accidental war” (that is, a war that has not simply been made more likely by the deliberate construction of a situation so as to increase the chances of a triggering incident), a weak country’s deterrent is not a real threat to the United States. Its offensive use would be not only unproductive, but also suicidal.²⁷ However, the myth of a North Korean aggressive threat is the cornerstone for the justification for the U.S. forward military position in Asia, primarily aimed at China.²⁸

The U.S. domination of South Korea, together with the concomitant “North Korean threat,” has produced a number of benefits—bases, control of the ROK military, and ROK nominal sovereignty as a political asset and utilization of its economy as a resource, a weapon, and a munitions manufacturer.

The main U.S. base in South Korea, Camp Humphreys, is the largest U.S. overseas base, and the one closest to Beijing.²⁹ South Korea also serves as a virtual base for the U.S. military alliance. One aspect of this is the constant stream of joint military exercises involving countries throughout the empire, from Australia to the United Kingdom.³⁰ In addition, the ROK participates in exercises held outside the region, in Europe or the United States.³¹ The overriding objective of these exercises is to enhance interoperability and U.S. control and command of alliance forces.³² More substantial are the underlying linkages being developed under parental supervision among these various militaries and that of the ROK. Two in particular stand out: Japan and NATO.

Legacy of Colonialism—Japan-South Korea Antagonism

A classic management problem, from empires to corporations (and families), is how to bring fractious subordinates together for a common purpose. The enmity between Japan and South Korea at the popular level and, frequently, at the government level—a legacy of Japanese colonialism—has long bedeviled the United States, for which the integration of the two, militarily and politically, under its leadership is a priority. The greatest gift that Yoon has brought the United States is his willingness to flout popular opinion to forge a close, junior relationship with Japan.³³ This has led to the U.S.-Japan-ROK Trilateral Alliance, formalized at the Camp David summit among U.S. President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and Yoon in August 2023.³⁴ This is clearly aimed at China, and its area of operation is described as the Indo-Pacific, with sometimes the words “and beyond” added, signifying that the United States is a global power, and it seeks to utilize its assets worldwide.³⁵

Asian NATO—the Integration of the Atlantic and Pacific Theaters

So far this integration of global assets has focused on bringing the Atlantic to the Pacific. Leaders of American-influenced Asia—Japan, ROK, Australia, and New Zealand—have been summoned to Europe as attendees at NATO summits. The talk has been of NATO extending its role to Asia, frequently using terms such as “Global NATO” and “Asian NATO.”³⁶ Although the idea of a Tokyo Liaison Office had currency for a time, this fell through because of objections from French President Emmanuel Macron, and it is South Korea that is becoming the linchpin of NATO’s Asian expansion.³⁷ Western European countries are also projecting power eastward and developing Indo-Pacific strategies to counter China, both individually and as members of the European Union.³⁸ Nevertheless, NATO has been the main instrument for this meshing of the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, in particular establishing Individually Tailored Partnership Programs with Japan, Australia, South Korea, and possibly New Zealand: the “Indo-Pacific Four.”³⁹

The United Nations Command

However, this may change with the “revitalization” of the South Korea-based United Nations Command (UNC).⁴⁰ NATO has various drawbacks as an instrument of U.S. strategy, and the UNC may well provide a preferable alternative. NATO is too democratic, constraining U.S. power. Decisions have to be taken by consensus and so leaders, if they can withstand U.S. pressure, have a veto. Macron scuttled the Tokyo Liaison Office, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delayed the accession of Sweden in order to do some horse-trading.⁴¹ Then there are Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, and Slovak prime minister Robert Fico. In the late 1940s, when NATO was established, subordinate states knew their place. NATO is also redolent of European imperialism. More importantly, Asian NATO seems to be driven not by the United States, where there are voices in the strategic community who see it as a distraction.⁴² Rather, its most active proponents are those (mainly European countries) in the huge NATO apparatus who are desperate to demonstrate to Washington their continued relevance (hence guaranteeing their employment) in the face of the collapse of the proxy war in Ukraine, the lackluster remilitarization of the European powers, and the looming possibility of a second Donald Trump administration.⁴³ All this is epitomized by the franticness of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. NATO has been here before. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a desperate need to justify NATO. The solution was to follow Senator Richard Lugar’s injunction “go out of area or out of business.”⁴⁴ That led to war against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya; now it leads to confrontation, perhaps war, with China.

The so-called UNC offers an elegant solution to the need to harness European power—military but also political—to fortify U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy. It is best articulated by Clint Work in an article in Foreign Policy titled “South Korea Offers a Chance to Modernize Old Alliances”: “The United Nations Command (UNC), a U.S.-led multinational command headquartered in South Korea (formally named the Republic of Korea, or ROK), is often overlooked in discussions of the minilateral architecture that Washington hopes to construct in the Indo-Pacific.”⁴⁵ “Modernization” here essentially means utilizing the UNC as the core of an expanded and repurposed global alliance structure to be deployed against China. Admittedly, there is an element of special pleading here in that Work is director of academic affairs at the Korea Economic Institute of America, a Washington-based, American-staffed think tank owned by the South Korean government.⁴⁶

The UNC has three characteristics that make it eminently suitable as a vehicle for U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy. First, despite its name, it is not an organization under the control of the United Nations, but, in fact, a U.S.-controlled military alliance that got its deliberately misleading title during the early stages of the Korean War, when the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN Security Council over the United States blocking the PRC assuming China’s seat.⁴⁷ Second, because of its name and its illegal use of the UN flag and logo, the UNC can be portrayed as a UN body, an expression of “the international community,” rather than of the U.S. military. One ploy is to embed officers of dependable vassals in subordinate roles: a Canadian was made Deputy Commander of the UNC in 2018. He was followed by an Australian, a Brit, and, currently, another Canadian.⁴⁸

Third, the UNC is scalable, with membership not being limited to original countries or constrained by geography. The United States has been making efforts over recent years to rejuvenate it and reactivate the involvement of the “Sending States,” the original sixteen participating countries, and any new ones that might be added “solely within the discretion of the U.S. Government.”⁴⁹ The Sending States are, in Work’s phrase, “The Forgotten Parties in the Korean War,” who fought China in the 1950s and need to be remembered in the context of the present challenge.⁵⁰ The original impetus for this program was to find a solution to how to retain de facto control over the South Korean military if the United States were forced to make good its promise to transfer operational control back to the South Korean government.⁵¹ The United States had taken over direct control during the Korean War, and so-called peacetime control was transferred in 1994, but the jewel in the crown, wartime control, still lies with the United States via the Combined Forces Command (CFC). The UNC is a superior and separate body to the CFC. LaCamera, when testifying to the House Armed Services Committee, described himself as “Commander, United Nations Command; Commander, United States-Republic of Korea Combined Forces Command; Commander, United States Forces Korea.” The order of titles by UNC, CFC, and USFK is significant. Accordingly, when the role of CFC was under challenge, its reactivation became imperative.⁵² The South Korean military is a major force multiplier for the United States, so control over it is not to be relinquished easily. However, the potential of the UNC stretches far beyond the Korean Peninsula.

The Sending States, in theory, comprise a formidable military asset, comprising sixteen countries, ranging from Australia to the United Kingdom. Some, such as Turkey, are unlikely to return for a second war against China; others probably would, with Australia, Canada, and Britain in the vanguard. It was not without reason that their senior military personnel have been appointed to the post of Deputy Commander.

However, as Work suggests, the UNC can be expanded by invitation to those countries, which, for a variety of reasons, were not able to be utilized in 1950—including Japan, Germany, Poland, and, the holy grail of U.S. desire, India. In other words, these bodies (NATO, Asian NATO, and more) would all be under direct U.S. control. Ironically, the one entity that cannot be brought into the UNC is the Republic of China on Taiwan because it is not a recognized state, even by the United States, and so is not a member of the United Nations.

None of this may yet come to pass. The U.S. government may not take up the idea; U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell has not publicly commented on the UNC. India is proving a difficult prize, one moment aligning with the United States, then edging toward China, Russia, and BRICS+, keeping its options open.⁵³ The United States military command in Korea might be stripped of its UN camouflage, with the use of the UN flag and logo the first to go.

The United States has tried many minilaterals in the Indo-Pacific over the years, but none has matched NATO for sustainability, and bilateral alliances have tended to be more dependable.⁵⁴ Bilateral relationships are limited and the search for suitable minilaterals continues. Current frontrunners are AUKUS (the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom), the Quad (the United States, Japan, Australia, and India), and the Trilateral Alliance (the United States, Japan, and South Korea). These may be expanded, merged, or supplanted, but none really answers the challenge of linking the vassal militaries of the Atlantic and Pacific theaters into an integrated whole that can be deployed as required against China, Russia, and minor adversaries.

The U.S.-ROK Bilateral Relationship

The Washington-Seoul alliance provides substantial benefits in its own right to the United States over four dimensions:

Military

The United States currently has direct control, when required, over the very large ROK military, the fifth most powerful worldwide according to one league table, although there are doubts about the capabilities of its reservists.⁵⁵ This may be deployed globally—it has been used in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—but in the event of a war with China, its primary use, apart from logistical support, would be to create a crisis on the Korean Peninsula to tie down Chinese forces in the north.⁵⁶

Political

As a middle power and a major economy, and nominally sovereign, South Korea has or could have considerable political heft. It hosted the third “Summit for Democracy,” an annual jamboree thrown by the Biden administration’s “Democracy versus Autocracy” campaign in March 2024. This was a damp squib, which may have been due to the inherent falsity of the concept, the declining status of Biden’s United States, and its being overshadowed by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Nevertheless, President Yoon, basking in U.S. approval, is an inveterate globetrotter and has grandiose plans for South Korea to become a “global pivot state.”⁵⁷ In fact, this is a charade. South Korea is merely a surrogate for the United States, not an independent player. However, Yoon can be portrayed by the U.S.-dominated media as a global statesman, enjoying “major foreign policy successes.”⁵⁸

Industrial

South Korea’s astounding industrial growth has led it to become one of the world’s major centers for information technology and semi-conductors, both of these sectors, as well as military production, are of great importance to the United States. Its technology sector has been used as a pawn against China, especially in the “Chip War.”⁵⁹ It has assumed a major role in the provision of munitions, especially in the context of the hollowing out of U.S. and European capability, and is fast becoming the “Arsenal of Imperialism.”⁶⁰

Geostrategic Instrument

The division of Korea into an U.S.-dominated South and an independent North provides the United States with a powerful instrument to influence the geopolitical environment and climate in Northeast Asia and beyond. The construction of a threatening North Korea provides justification for the U.S.-forward military presence.⁶¹ It is noticeable that any time there is a danger of peace breaking out, someone like John Bolton, National Security Advisor under Trump, steps in to save the day.⁶² The United States also has the ability to adjust the temperature, especially through the use of threatening military exercises on North Korea’s borders, with the propaganda machine inverting the chain of causality.⁶³ The Pentagon is fully aware that North Korea’s military posture and policy are defensive—how could it be otherwise with such a disparity in military power? LaCamera admitted as much in his testimony to Congress: “North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s top priorities are ‘regime survivability’ and ‘preparing to defend his nation.’”⁶⁴

The Linchpin

Ever since 1945, Korea has played a central role in U.S. Pacific theater strategy. The principal target of that strategy was initially the Soviet Union, but since 1949–1950 China has taken its place. The theater was renamed the “Indo-Pacific” in 2018, but this extension was primarily to outflank China. While the division of the world into two major oceanic theaters was a necessary organizational construction for a traditional seapower, it should not obscure the global underpinning of U.S. strategy. The United States is a global empire and all parts of the world, and all the countries in it—friend, nonaligned or foe—are interconnected. The four main U.S. enemies at the moment, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, are joined together in Eurasia. The struggle can be conceptualized as the United States deploying two giant oceanic pincers to contain, subjugate, and dismember Eurasia, a replay of the debate between Alfred Mahan and Halford Mackinder for our times.⁶⁵ Thus, we have seen South Korea being used to supply artillery shells to Ukraine and to host European militaries either bilaterally, or via the Asian NATO/UNC.

All countries are interconnected through geopolitics. Korea’s position in this giant mechanism is due to its role as a linchpin of U.S.-China strategy in Northeast Asia, and thus inevitably throughout the Indo-Pacific theater, and further into the global struggle between U.S. imperialism and the emerging multipolar world.

Industrial Agriculture: Lessons from North Korea

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea — Industrial Agriculture: Lessons from North Korea

Industrial Agriculture: Lessons from North Korea

Article 7 of 9

Monthly Review

By Zhun Xu

Originally published at https://monthlyreview.org/articles/industrial-agriculture-lessons-from-north-korea/

Publication Date: March 1, 2024

Zhun Xu is an associate professor at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

For years, when the Western mainstream media mentioned the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (commonly known as North Korea), it would often present two kinds of stories: one about its threat to the United States and U.S. allies, and the other about its poverty and hunger. Beyond that, the United States always deliberately portrays the North Korean leadership as “irrational.”¹

Regarding the threat argument, Marxists and the anti-imperialist left often point out that North Korea has long been in a defensive mode, and it is the United States that has been threatening and suffocating North Korea since the division of the Korean peninsula.² On the poverty and hunger issue, however, the left seems to have not produced much in-depth discussion. Across the political spectrum, scholars in general have less knowledge of North Korea’s social and economic conditions than those of other former socialist bloc countries. It is telling that Jon Halliday in the New Left Review and Joseph Nye in the Korea Times used the same title, “North Korean Enigma,” for two different essays.³

Indeed, with neoliberalism dominating the political imagination in the post-Cold War era, many commentators worldwide took for granted that North Korea would either collapse or follow China and others in starting its own reform and opening. This limitation in knowledge is not just a problem in the West. Even in China, a country that supposedly has a close relationship with North Korea since the early revolutionary period, the public and intellectuals do not always have a better understanding of North Korea than people do elsewhere in the world. Some on the left still praise its socialized housing and health care, while the right wing likes to suggest that North Korea represents a smaller version of Maoist China that has not started its reform of embracing the global market—yet.

It is certainly true that North Korea is now a poor country, especially compared to its close neighbors such as South Korea and Japan. However, such observations lack crucial context. The North Korean economy was doing reasonably well until the demise of the Soviet Union, which greatly undermined the economies of the entire Soviet trading bloc. According to the University of Groningen’s Maddison Project, the North Korean real GDP per capita had reached $2,315 (measured in 2011 U.S. dollars) in 1980.⁴ This was much higher than the income levels in both India and China, as well as those of many developing economies in the world. North Korea also offered free health care, education, and welfare, together with good quality, heavily subsidized housing, heating, and transport. As documented by Gavan McCormack, around 1980, North Korea had twenty-three doctors per ten thousand people, while Japan had about twelve and South Korea had fewer than six.⁵ As another measure of social orientation, 27 percent of the North Korean population were students at some stage, a higher proportion than Japan and South Korea.⁶ Moreover, North Korea achieved these in a war-torn land, despite the U.S. blockade and tense geopolitical conditions.

It is important to note that, although the North Korean economy and society suffered greatly in the 1990s and the economy still has not recovered, North Korea has been able to improve the general standard of living since the time of the “Arduous March” in the 1990s. North Korea’s life expectancy reached around 70 years in 1990 and dropped to 64 years by 1998, but it has since risen, reaching 73 years in 2020. This is higher than the levels in countries such as India and the Philippines.⁷

Even so, North Korea always seems to be struggling to feed its population; the mass food shortages and starvation of the 1990s were not too long ago. Amid the pandemic, there were reports suggesting the potential for another significant food shortage in the country.⁸ The previous food shortage had been severe enough to force the North Korean government to reach out to South Korea and the United States for help. For a country that has self-reliance as a core political ideology, the inability to build its own food production presents a real issue.

Mainstream writers often attribute the food shortage and starvation in the 1990s to socialism or nonmarket institutions. For example, the former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Andrew Natsios, published a book called The Great North Korean Famine.⁹ In it, he argues that virtually every aspect of the North Korean food system was problematic, including the so-called perverse incentives in collective agriculture and the rigid, Soviet-style public food distribution system, among others. Natsios highlights the collapse of the public food distribution system during the great food shortage as a major cause of starvation, and suggests the rise of private market and family-based farming as the correct way out. The blame leveled at the socialized egalitarian distribution system is not really accurate. As Natsios himself acknowledges, when the public food distribution system worked well, it could deliver the basic necessities to the population at heavily subsidized rates.¹⁰ The North Korean food distribution system only went into full crisis in the 1990s, and, clearly, there must be other causes at the root.

It is worth noting that among the former socialist bloc countries, North Korea was the only one that experienced dramatic food shortage and starvation following the demise of the Soviet Union. Even so, among countries with severe food shortages, North Korea has a relatively high income.¹¹ In other words, North Korea presents a unique case for understanding food shortages in the contemporary world. Revisiting the North Korean food problem is thus relevant for socialist struggles and the quest to feed the world in general.

Pre-1990 North Korean Economy and Agriculture

Despite the suffering under a half-century of Japanese colonization, the subsequent civil war, and then an imperialist blockade, North Korea managed to rebuild its national economy based on the Soviet model. Although it received generous support from other socialist countries such as the Soviet Union and China from the beginning, North Korean leadership highlighted a core idea of juche, that is, independent thinking and self-reliance. In their book Socialist Korea, an important early study of North Korea published in 1976 by Monthly Review Press, Ellen Brun and Jacques Hersh suggest that this attitude of self-determination and self-reliance is in stark contrast to a strong tradition of the elites on the Korean peninsula, that is, the tradition of saddae, or literally “working for the powerful.”¹² The controversial idea of juche could arise from the determination to keep independence in the complex politics both inside and outside the socialist bloc, but it was likely also a recognition of the actual often hostile conditions in which the country had to strive.

During the Japanese colonial period, most colonial industries located in both the northern and southern parts of the peninsula were made to produce rice and textiles.¹³ The partition of the nation left North Korea with a relatively fortunate starting point, with some heavy industry and mining (although not fully developed). It also had a weak base of light industry and industrial agriculture.¹⁴ By the time of partition, railways and communication systems were also fairly developed in North Korea.

By economic measures, North Korea had an impressive first three decades or so. Its GDP per capita grew at 4.5 percent annually between 1950 and 1980, or about twice the respective growth rate of the United States and only a little lower than that of the much-celebrated South Korea.¹⁵ Thirty years after the civil war, North Korea had achieved a high level of urbanization and industrialization. Even though many socialist countries saw high industrialization, North Korea stood out; by 1987, more than half of the North Korean labor force was in industry. This share was the highest among the socialist countries.¹⁶ After the 1970s, much like the Soviet Union, North Korea entered a period of slow growth. Between 1980 and 1985, North Korea’s GDP per capita only grew 2 percent annually, and started to decline at around the same rate for the rest of the decade.¹⁷ Nevertheless, initial North Korean economic achievements were real. Even in a critical evaluation, Halliday reckoned that “no one who has been in the DPRK [North Korea] can fail to be impressed by the economic achievements, making every allowance for selected tours and Potemkin villages.”¹⁸ In a recent report, leading South Korean expert Seogki Lee recognized that in North Korea, the socialist system functioned well at the outset and the country had a fairly high level of industrialization by the 1970s.¹⁹

North Korean agriculture was also successful, at least for a while. The pattern of Korean macroeconomic growth mirrored the changes in its agricultural production. Between 1961 and 1980, its cereal output increased by 4.8 percent annually, but throughout the 1980s, the annual growth rate was merely 0.8 percent.²⁰ The stagnation in food output, however, was entirely different from the later story of food shortage and hunger. In fact, during this period, the North Korean food supply was still in a relatively sound position. The country only needed modest cereal imports, and it was even able to export cereals in 1985.²¹

It is worth mentioning that North Korea does not have very favorable natural conditions for agricultural production. Roughly 80 percent of the country is mountainous, and only about 14 percent of North Korea’s territory is arable land.²² The summer growing season is also short. Although rice is a major part of the Korean diet, North Korea has less rice cultivation than South Korea or Japan due to such constraints.²³

The North Korean government sought to overcome such natural challenges by increasing chemical use in agricultural production. Around the world, there has been a trend of increasing chemical use in agriculture for much of the twentieth century. The Green Revolution further reinforced this trend. Socialist states pioneered some of the important early efforts in building environmentally sustainable societies in the twentieth century.²⁴ In many instances, however, socialist leaders and activists also perceived the future of agriculture as a highly industrialized sector based on mechanization and chemical use. In this regard, North Korea was not an exception—though arguably, North Korea was under the most pressure in terms of feeding its people. Meanwhile, food self-sufficiency was a natural part of the juche framework, which likely added to the urgency of North Korean leadership in promoting agricultural production. North Korea thus had a thorough industrialization of agriculture.

In his thesis on North Korean rural development in 1965, North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung highlighted the importance of the technical revolution in the countryside, putting it before the other basic tasks. Kim summarized his visions of socialist agriculture as follows:

Irrigation, mechanization, electrification, and the use of chemicals are the four fundamental components of the technical revolution in the countryside. A steady rise of crop yields in farming is impossible if irrigation and chemicalization are neglected to the benefit of mechanization and electrification. If, on the contrary, only irrigation and chemicalization are accentuated and mechanization and electrification are neglected, labour efficiency cannot be raised, nor can the heavy work done by the peasants be lightened.²⁵

All of the major components of industrial agriculture were pieced together in just a short time. Irrigation and rural electrification projects were completed by the mid-1970s, labor-intensive jobs such as plowing were fully mechanized by 1975, and the number of farm tractors increased eight times between 1963 and 1976.²⁶ These were no small achievements for any economy. The increase in fertilizer production was equally stunning. Although the Korean War destroyed the entire fertilizer industry that was established during Japanese colonialization, North Korea was able to rebuild it quickly after the war. By the 1970s, North Korea possessed some of the largest fertilizer factories on the east coast of the Asian mainland.²⁷ A CIA report in 1978 acknowledged the fast growth in North Korean grain output, as well as its “quite heavily mechanized” agriculture, with its high fertilizer application and extensive irrigation projects.²⁸

Interestingly, with the then-emerging environmental consciousness in the 1970s, Brun and Hersh mentioned that many foreigners would ask about the pollution from these chemical projects. They discussed the question with chemical engineers, teachers, professors, and others. The responses varied, but the authors were positive that North Korea would surely realize the seriousness of the pollution problem as it was increasingly recognized worldwide.²⁹ However, the very model of industrial agriculture based on chemical inputs and fossil fuels seemed unquestioned.

The deep belief in industrial agriculture and the Green Revolution persisted. In a speech to the Central People’s Committee of North Korea in 1990, Kim reiterated his theses raised in 1965. He recalled that the old dream of the Korean people was to live on rice and meat soup, and the Party would realize this long desire. In the speech, Kim also shared his vision of socialist agriculture based on a somewhat mystified image of large capitalist farms: “According to information available to me many years ago, there were tens of thousands of farms in a developed capitalist country, and most of them were large farms with 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 or 10,000 hectares of cultivated land, and their levels of irrigation, electrification, mechanization, and chemical application were very high.”³⁰ The way, then, to develop socialist agriculture was to speed up the technological revolution. Kim argued that since electrification had been basically completed, the remaining tasks were irrigation and mechanization, and “to ensure a liberal application of fertilizer to paddy and nonpaddy crops,” since the yields “increase in proportion to the amount of fertilizer applied.”³¹

Chart 1 presents the fertilizer application in a group of countries from 1961 to 1990, and the level of fertilizer use per unit of land in North Korea grew particularly fast in the 1960s and ’70s. Even in the early years, the intensity of fertilizer application in North Korea was already much higher than that in China and India. Starting in the 1970s, The intensity of North Korean fertilizer use increased steadily, surpassing U.S. levels. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, North Korea on average applied much more fertilizer than China, India, and the United States, although still less than Japan and much less than South Korea. In other words, regardless of political orientation, the entire Korean peninsula enthusiastically embraced those aspects of the Green Revolution based on industrial petroleum and chemical-based agriculture.

Chart 1. Fertilizer Intensity in Select Countries: 1961–1990

Notes and Sources: Fertilizer intensity is measured in kilograms of land fertilizer consumption per hectare of arable land. Based on World Development Indicators, data.worldbank.org.

Even if one overlooks its devastating ecological implications, this industrial agriculture poses a contradiction to North Korea’s juche idea. On the surface, the seemingly successful effort in “modernizing” agriculture indeed enabled North Korea to achieve high crop yields and food self-sufficiency for decades. The problem is that its industrial agriculture, including advanced mechanization and intensive chemical use, was driven by the widespread and increasing use of petroleum. While North Korea has coal and hydropower resources, it does not have petroleum, and needed to obtain a steady flow of petroleum and other fuels from abroad to sustain the efforts to build industrial agriculture. In other words, the drive for self-reliance via the Green Revolution inherently led to more dependence on foreign markets, which then naturally gave rise to more emphasis on international trade and foreign exchanges. For North Korea, this mainly involved geopolitical economic relations with the Soviet Union and China, which were about to change abruptly on the eve of the turbulent 1990s.

Trade, Debt, and the Great Hardship of the 1990s

The 1990s saw unprecedented challenges for North Korea. Between 1990 and 1998, the North Korean GDP per capita dropped by almost half, reaching the lowest level since the early 1970s.³² As late as 1993, North Korea still produced about 9.1 million tons of cereals, a record that was never achieved before and has not been achieved since.³³ However, the previously working agricultural model quickly ceased to function and the country had a huge problem feeding itself. Following 1993, North Korea’s food production collapsed and its cereal output decreased by more than 70 percent in just two years.³⁴ This food crisis lasted several years, causing malnutrition and starvation nationwide. North Korea did not start to restore part of its food output steadily until the beginning of the current century. Despite its efforts, North Korea still has not recovered from this shock, as its cereal output in the last two decades has only managed to achieve about half of the peak level in 1993.

What happened to North Korea’s agriculture and the economy in general? In many former socialist countries, the elites imposed shock therapy reforms that destroyed the socialist economic system, and economic and social crises immediately followed. However, this was not the case in North Korea. The leadership started to experiment with some market reforms early on, but did not follow the shock therapy route. Nevertheless, the dramatic changes in the socialist bloc profoundly shrank the international political and economic space that North Korea had relied on for decades.

To illustrate this point, we can examine the patterns of North Korean foreign trade before the crisis. During the Korean War years and the rest of the 1950s, North Korea traded almost exclusively with the Soviet Union and China, among other socialist countries, although it chose not to be part of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Starting in the 1960s, North Korea diversified its trading partners and by 1970, 30 percent of its exports and 13.7 percent of its imports were exchanged with non-socialist bloc countries.³⁵ Chart 2 presents the value of total exports and imports of North Korea from 1950 to 1988. Both exports and imports grew rapidly, but overall, North Korea consistently had trade deficits. One possible mechanism for the chronic deficits was North Korea’s reciprocal bilateral trade arrangements with other socialist countries.³⁶ When North Korea presented an increase in its exports, other socialist countries would provide higher reciprocal commitments. However, North Korea often failed to send the agreed quantity of goods to the trading partners, thus increasing trade deficits and debts over time.

Chart 2. North Korea’s Foreign Trade: 1950–1988

Notes and Sources: Both exports and imports are measured in thousands of U.S. dollars. Data are based on Soo-Young Choi, “Foreign Trade of North Korea, 1946–1988,” PhD dissertation, Northeastern University, Boston, 1991, 312–13.

As it started from humble origins, North Korea was not naturally in an advantageous position in international trade when selling raw materials or buying machines and equipment. Nonetheless, North Korea enjoyed preferential treatment when trading with the Soviet Union and China, and, during the 1950s and ’60s, the trade deficits were mostly mild. Such deficits became much worse, however, when North Korea started to engage extensively with the Western economies in the 1970s, as Chart 2 shows.

At least part of the increasing trade deficits was due to North Korea’s import substitution industrialization and the resulting demand for advanced equipment from the West. Among capitalist countries, Japan played a major role in initiating trade with North Korea. Some Western countries followed suit, and, in a matter of just several years, North Korea accumulated about U.S. $1 billion in debts with the West. These debts were just enough to pay for its trade deficits with the West. Since, unlike those with the socialist countries, the loans were short-term ones, North Korea started to default on its debts.³⁷ This obviously had some long-term impact; mainstream commentators claim that North Korea “had thoroughly burned its bridges” to the international financial market.³⁸ This track record, among other political factors, effectively shut off North Korea’s access to Western credit.

Although the issues of deficits and debts are worrying, they are common issues for developing countries. What made North Korea particularly vulnerable was that the country became increasingly reliant on such trade to sustain the basic functioning of the domestic society and economy. In the 1950s, North Korea mostly exported minerals and imported machinery and equipment. This pattern quickly shifted as the country experienced rapid industrialization in subsequent decades. By the 1970s, almost half of North Korea’s exports were manufactured goods, while the number one import became mineral fuels (mostly crude oil).³⁹ Also during the 1970s, technical support from the Soviet Union and China enabled North Korea to complete multiple petrochemical and oil refinery plants at Unggi and Pongwha.⁴⁰ Imports of crude oil sharply rose afterward. In the 1980s, more than 20 percent of North Korea’s imports from the Soviet Union were petroleum and petroleum products, with about 80 percent of those being crude oil.⁴¹

As China expanded its oil output, a pipeline was built between the two countries in 1976. China then gradually replaced the Soviet Union as the main oil supplier for North Korea. For example, North Korea imported 2 million tons of oil from China in 1980, and 1.5 million tons from the Soviet Union and the Middle Eastern states altogether. In fact, more than 80 percent of North Korea’s imports from China in the early 1980s were mineral fuels. Although the ratio later declined, it was still more than 60 percent as late as 1987.⁴²

In other words, North Korea was building its high industrial agriculture based on oil imports. With the chronic trade deficits and foreign debt, this strategy increasingly relied on external support from the socialist bloc. This worked while the world socialist movement was advancing. In spite of oil price increases in the 1970s and ’80s, North Korea was able to obtain large amounts of crude oil at a discount price from the Soviet Union and China.⁴³ However, unsurprisingly, when the entire socialist bloc started to go through market transitions in various ways in the late 1980s, North Korea also entered its crisis phase.

As the other socialist countries embraced the market economy and profit principle, aid and credit to North Korea became an unnecessary expenditure. The Soviet Union and China did not really pressure North Korea to pay back old loans, but easily could cancel new ones. The Soviet Union cut its aid and support to North Korea starting in 1987. What was likely the most painful moment came when the Soviet Union demanded North Korea pay world market prices in foreign exchange for imports when it established a diplomatic relationship with South Korea in 1990.⁴⁴ China followed suit and established its own diplomatic relationship with South Korea in 1992. Before that year, China often had reciprocal goods exchange agreements with North Korea, such transactions being handled by the Ministries of Commerce in both countries. Starting in 1992, the term “goods exchange” was replaced by “trade” in such agreements, and such “trade” was to be managed by trading firms.⁴⁵ In 1993, China also began to demand hard cash for trade payments, which became “increasingly difficult” due to the tightening of sanctions.⁴⁶

The dissolution of the socialist trading system was a huge blow to North Korea, as the country’s economic model was not designed for international market competition. The rapidly changing political economy in both the Soviet Union (soon to be Russia and other countries) and China suddenly meant that North Korea actively had to engage with the capitalist world system to gain U.S. dollars to buy basic economic inputs. No one expressed this urgency better than the late Kim Il-Sung himself. In a speech at the end of 1992, Kim argued that “we must boldly venture into the capitalist market to develop foreign trade…officials must be positive in their activities. They can never develop economic relations with foreign countries if they only wait for someone to take the initiative in joint ventures or collaborations or if they worry about the defunct socialist market.”⁴⁷

Despite North Korea’s intense efforts to increase its volume of exports in order to establish a favorable balance of trade, its products were not competitive on the world market. For a long time, North Korea’s so-called soft goods were acceptable to other socialist countries, but the new, profit-oriented enterprises in those countries were unlikely to honor such a tradition of solidarity.⁴⁸ In a speech regarding this situation, Kim carefully discussed the details of all the major potential export items from North Korea, saying that “if we want to sell our goods on the capitalist market, we must improve their qualities much higher. The quality of the goods we are now producing is not high. Nobody will buy goods of poor quality in the capitalist market.”⁴⁹ Such efforts, for example, would include better packaging, as “it is very important to package export goods well.… Poorly packaged goods do not fetch good prices. Goods should be packaged to cater to the tastes of people in capitalist countries.”⁵⁰

Without sufficient international currency, North Korea was not able to maintain crucial imports such as crude oil and grain from abroad. At the same time, North Korea had to struggle alone with the increase in longstanding U.S. hostility, the embargo, and sanctions. The dramatic pressure can be seen in virtually every statistic. In terms of overall trade, North Korea lost about 58 percent of its exports and 46 percent of its imports between 1990 and 1995.⁵¹ During the same period, North Korea’s crude oil imports also dropped by more than half, according to one estimate.⁵² All of these factors led to a rapid decline in total energy supply by 28 percent in five years, even though the country still had rich coal resources.⁵³ Meanwhile, severe natural disasters destroyed about 19 percent of farmland permanently.⁵⁴

More than anything else, being cut off from crude oil was devastating for a highly urbanized economy that had grown to rely on chemicals and mechanization. Already mechanized agriculture requires fuel to run the tractors and trucks and to pump water for irrigation, among other uses. For instance, with an increasingly smaller oil supply, Kim ordered in 1992: “The oil produced by the chemical works must first be supplied to the countryside and then the remainder to other sectors.”⁵⁵ Under this oil shortage, Kim would also place part of his hope in a particular vehicle model: Sungni-58 trucks, as they could work on farms using substitute fuels, such as methane or sub-bituminous coal, instead of petroleum.⁵⁶

Equally importantly, the shortage of oil also meant a shortage of chemicals. Kim never gave up his idea of industrialized agriculture, and amid the oil shortage he still emphasized that “fertilizer means rice” and “rice is socialism.”⁵⁷ Among other demands, he asked that “the chemical industry sector must by all means produce 1.8 million tons of nitrogenous fertilizer next year. Along with this, 500,000 tons should be imported from other countries.”⁵⁸

Indeed, in North Korea’s industrial agriculture, fertilizer means rice and other foods. But a shortage of oil and subsequently fertilizer would then mean a shortage of food. Chart 3 presents the total cereal output and the aggregate chemical fertilizer application in North Korea from 1961 to 2020. Although fertilizer statistics for North Korea are usually based on some educated guess, the overall trend is likely reliable.⁵⁹ Based on the data, North Korea’s industrial agriculture was successful before 1990, when it raised its cereal output on the basis of increasing fertilizer application. After 1990, fertilizer application rapidly dropped; the level in 1995 was just 12 percent of that in 1990. Even assuming other factors stayed the same (and the actual conditions were much worse in North Korea), a decline of this magnitude in fertilizer would lead to a disastrous output in any country. Thus, the drop in oil imports was probably the most direct cause of the 70 percent decline in cereal output.

Chart 3. North Korea Fertilizer Use and Cereal Output: 1961–2020

Notes and Sources: Fertilizers are calculated as the sum of potash, phosphate, and nitrogen. Both cereal output and fertilizer are measured in thousands of tons. Estimates are based on data from the FAO, fao.org/faostat, and World Development Indicators, data.worldbank.org.

Not unlike shock therapy, the huge decline in food production and other economic activities paralyzed the entire North Korean society. Hitherto well-functioning institutions met with great difficulties, including less efficient collective agriculture, a malfunctioning public food distribution system, and, not surprisingly, clumsy responses from the government.

All the resulting problems would become the main talking points of mainstream writers such as Natsios, who argued that the institution of socialism was the ultimate problem, and capitalism and the market would save North Korea. However, as discussed above, the problems North Korea encountered in the 1990s had much more to do with industrial agriculture than socialism. The disappearance of the socialist trading system and the reduction of oil imports were the direct causes of the hardships. On a fundamental level, North Korea’s challenge was its excessive dependence on fossil fuels, which was a result of the efforts to build an independent, industrialized society in a small territory with too few favorable natural conditions and too many hostile imperialist aggressions.

The Food Question and Socialism

Following the crisis in the 1990s, North Korea has made efforts to address its food shortage problems. These measures include a more active role in the free market, more private incentives, more private plots, and a less regulated and subsidized food distribution system.⁶⁰ In other words, North Korea did implement most of the mainstream writers’ suggestions to a certain extent. However, North Korea’s industrial agricultural model still seems intact, and so the fundamentals have not really improved. According to Chart 3, although cereal output is now generally better than in the mid-1990s, it is still considerably lower than the level in the 1980s and early ’90s, as the fertilizer application remains low.

The contemporary lack of access to fertilizer and fuel in North Korea is not just because of the balance of payment issues, but is also due to relentless sanctions by the United States and United Nations. A more recent joint assessment of food insecurity in North Korea by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) acknowledged that the sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council in 2017 were “the strictest yet.”⁶¹ The report argued that the restrictions on the importation of fuel, machinery, and spare parts for equipment are harming North Korea’s agriculture, as the shortage of those resources limits the ability to irrigate, reducing yields and making crops susceptible to extreme weather shocks.

The report also noted a severe decay of North Korea’s agricultural mechanization: “There is a starkly diminished level of agricultural mechanization in the country as machinery ages, spare and replacement parts are unavailable, and fuel is in short supply…. Delays are experienced in agricultural operations because manual labour and animals substitute for mechanized operations.”⁶² That is, some of the most important legacies of industrial agriculture are falling apart, decades after the high mechanization days.

Fortunately, the public distribution system, part of the socialist legacy, remains in place. This nationally planned system provides food rations twice a month to all registered households at low prices.⁶³ In 2018 and 2019, for example, comparable food items in the public distribution system were around fifteen times lower than market prices.⁶⁴ The food problem in North Korea would have probably been worse without such an egalitarian ration system. Even so, Natsios, the former U.S. Agency for International Development administrator, argued that the market mechanism is the only correct choice while acknowledging that “some relief workers actually admired the egalitarian public distribution system.” He suggested that these workers were simply being naïve and deceived.⁶⁵

Nevertheless, an egalitarian distribution system does not by itself address the entire food problem. Although the public distribution system ensures basic access to food, rations have been declining since 2012 and remain considerably below the government target.⁶⁶ North Korea still needs to navigate through many challenges and build a new path of development to increase food availability, among other goals.

As discussed above, the main challenge for North Korea is not so much a lack of income or technology per se; rather, it has to do with the unreliability of industrial agriculture, especially under the geopolitical constraints on the Korean peninsula.

Politically speaking, transcending industrial agriculture might meet less opposition in North Korea compared to many wealthier countries. With the challenges that North Korea faces, its leadership has a genuine motivation to build an alternative agriculture. The reason does not need to involve any romanticizing of the North Korean leadership, but it is useful to understand the country’s political economy. Despite years of hardship, North Korea did not implement shock therapy or a gradualist transition to a market economy. The North Korean government did try waves of marketization on smaller scales, but none of them has caused profound changes.

Importantly, this impasse is a result of the high industrialization achieved before the crisis in the 1990s.⁶⁷ A Chinese type of gradualist market transition in essence relies on a large potential reserve army in the countryside. Without such a large potential reserve army, a market transition would have to create a reserve army among the existing workers; that is, the Soviet Union type of shock therapy. North Korea has had many years of successful industrialization and was already highly urbanized by the 1980s. Since it did not have a considerable potential reserve army in the villages, the gradualist model was not viable. At the same time, suicidal shock therapy was a unique outcome at the end of the Soviet Union, and it would not be quite so persuasive to the North Korean working class or society at large, given the disastrous consequences. This is why North Korea still maintains some core elements of the Soviet model, at least in part, even decades after the demise of the Soviet Union, despite repeated attempts to embrace the market economy. In a similar vein, given the objective conditions—regardless of what the elites in North Korea might think—it would only make sense to transition from the old industrial agriculture built in the high age of the Green Revolution to a much more pragmatic, effective, and ecological mode of agriculture. The recent geopolitical rift in Europe and high oil and fertilizer prices only reinforce the necessity of moving away from fossil fuels.

It is notable that the problems of industrial agriculture are not confined to North Korea. Within the same geographical region, South Korea and Japan, with much higher incomes, have not really done better in feeding themselves in comparable terms. Table 1 presents fertilizer intensity, cereal output, and yield, as well as the relative scale of cereal imports for selected countries in 2020. As a snapshot, the data illustrates some interesting patterns. First, North Korea had a lower fertilizer intensity than all other countries listed, including Cuba. North Korea has managed to achieve more than half of the yields of South Korea, Japan, and China with less than one-fifteenth of those countries’ fertilizer intensity. If North Korea or Cuba raised their fertilizer intensities to U.S. levels (while still keeping them much lower than those of the other East Asian countries), their cereal yields likely will increase dramatically and might even be higher than U.S. levels. Second, South Korea produces roughly the same amount of cereal as North Korea, despite having a fertilizer intensity twenty times higher. Additionally, both South Korea and Japan are highly dependent on food imports. In other words, these wealthier East Asian capitalist countries with highly intensive industrial agriculture only avoid a major food shortage because they can purchase large quantities of food in the global market.

Table 1. Fertilizer Usage and Cereal Output in 2020

Notes and Sources: Fertilizer intensity is measured as kilograms of fertilizer per hectare of arable land; cereal output is measured in thousands of tons; cereal yield is measured by kilograms per hectare; import ratio is defined as net import of cereal as a share of domestic cereal output. The numbers are based on FAO data, fao.org/faostat, and World Development Indicators, data.worldbank.org.

As a neighbor with much larger territories, China largely has been able to maintain a high level of self-sufficiency, but has also accumulated tremendous problems decades after its own application of aspects of the Green Revolution. Table 1 shows that China uses fertilizer even more intensively than South Korea and Japan. Partly due to the rapid development of industrial agriculture and overuse of agricultural chemicals, China has seen significant soil acidification, degradation, and pollution in the decades following decollectivization.⁶⁸ It is at least partly against this backdrop that the Chinese leadership has been calling for an ecological transition and the establishment of an ecological civilization.⁶⁹

Table 1 also suggests that Cuba is still under immense pressure regarding the food problem. Like North Korea, Cuba’s economy suffered greatly since the ending of the Soviet Union centered economic network, and Cuba similarly has faced a long-term blockade by the United States. Since the “special period” in the early 1990s, the Cuban people have explored sustainable models of agroecology that have been highly effective.⁷⁰ Cuba has also been able to import more food and fertilizer than North Korea, which helps alleviate some of the pressure. Cuba’s cereal output dropped by more than half between 1990 and 1993, but its output quickly rebounded to a historic level in 1997.⁷¹ At the same time, Cuba has developed “two extreme food-production models: an intensive model with high inputs, and another, beginning at the onset of the special period, oriented toward agroecology and based on low inputs.”⁷² This means that Cuba has not been able systemically to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and chemicals. Cuban food output remained stable throughout the current century until the most recent economic crisis starting in 2020. The reports so far seem to point to the lack of fossil fuels and fertilizers as the key reason for the food shortage.⁷³ If this is the case, the current crisis is again a crisis in industrial agriculture, and it is of the same nature as the challenges that both Cuba and North Korea faced in the 1990s.

It is fair to conclude that the lessons from North Korea, Cuba, and the other models of agriculture strongly suggest that industrial agriculture—though seemingly productive and even “scientific”—is unreliable and unsustainable. We must acknowledge that twentieth-century socialists have usually taken the industrial agriculture model for granted. This was clear in the vision of a future socialist society shared by Kim. Socialism, or any attempts to sustainably feed the working people, must move beyond the model of industrial agriculture. An objective understanding of North Korea among the experiences of socialist countries would be a necessary first step.

However, ecological agriculture would be impossible without socialism. If a society plans to phase out fossil fuels and intense chemical applications, it implies we have to keep a considerable level of human physical labor in farming and other activities and a robust and populous countryside. This is against the overall trend in the history of capitalism. The people must develop the effective economic means of bringing an end to both the division of material and mental labor and the separation of town and country. This, of course, is just another way of describing socialism.

In Line of Fire: The Korean Peninsula in U.S.-China Strategy

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea — In Line of Fire: The Korean Peninsula in U.S.-China Strategy

In Line of Fire: The Korean Peninsula in U.S.-China Strategy

Article 8 of 9

Monthly Review

By Tim Beal

Originally published at https://monthlyreview.org/articles/in-line-of-fire-the-korean-peninsula-in-u-s-china-strategy/

Publication Date: July 1, 2021

Tim Beal is a retired New Zealand academic who has written extensively on Asia with a special focus on the Korean Peninsula. Recent publications include the entry on Korea for The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (New York: Springer, 2019). He has also written some chapters for a forthcoming collection: Immanuel Ness and Stuart Davis, eds., Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

He is very grateful for the unstinting assistance of Ankie Hoogvelt and Gregory Elich in providing comments and corrections.

In August 1945, Washington’s view of the world was utterly transformed in line with the “gunboat diplomacy” dictum of Lord Palmerston—countries have no permanent friends or enemies, just permanent interests.¹ Countries that had been enemies, such as the United States and Germany, or the United States and Japan, were, once conquered, considered on the way to becoming friends. Once their friendliness was firmly established, they were elevated to allies.² In the case of Germany, this process involved denazification. No such purge was undertaken in Japan, where the emperor was not hanged but “democratized,” and a new constitution, usually known as the Peace Constitution, was written for the Japanese.³ Those allies not considered friendly were transmogrified into enemies. The main enemy was the Soviet Union, which had done so much to bring about victory but was now seen as an impediment to what Henry Luce had termed “the American Century.”⁴ Thus, the war against fascism was transformed into what was to be called the Cold War. U.S. imperialism, subdued somewhat by post-First World War isolationism, came into full flower. Washington implemented this sea change in many ways, and one of them was the division of the Korean Peninsula.

The Palmerstonian Calculation and the Division of Korea

Location is the curse of the Korean Peninsula, although it has the potential to be a blessing. It is the place where four great powers meet and contest—Russia, Japan, China, and the United States. Many writers, especially Americans, leave the United States out of that list, thus vitiating their analysis.⁵ The peninsula has been a conduit of culture from the Asian mainland, mainly China, to Japan, but it has also been the route of invasion—once by the Mongols, but mostly by Japan. In August 1945, with the Pacific War rapidly coming to an end and the Soviet Army mopping up Japan’s famed Kwantung Army, the United States decided it needed a buffer in Korea to protect conquered Japan from its main ally.

It is frequently stated that the division of the Korean Peninsula was a joint enterprise by the United States and the Soviet Union—“the United States and the Soviet Union had each granted themselves control over one half of Korean territory.”⁶ This is quite misleading. The division was a U.S. initiative to which Joseph Stalin acquiesced. This is a crucial point because it establishes the foundation for understanding the U.S. motivation for the division as well as its consequences.

The actual operation of deciding on a dividing line and presenting it to the Soviet Union is usually portrayed as a rushed, even amateurish business, with the United States taken aback by the speed of the Soviet advance with colonels Charles Bonesteel and Dean Rusk (later secretary of state) using a map from National Geographic in the course of “frantic deliberations” to choose the thirty-eighth parallel.⁷ This was less than the United States wanted but it gave them the majority of the population and the capital, Seoul. Stalin accepted the proposal without demur, to the surprise of the officials then and U.S. scholars since.⁸ The surprise was because Stalin’s acceptance contradicted the central myth of the Cold War, which started in 1945 before the hot one even ended—namely, that it was a matter of the United States and allies responding to Soviet, and later Chinese, expansionism. The myth was a case of psychological projection. Soviet incursions beyond its borders—the construction of the satellite system in Eastern Europe in particular—were primarily defensive, and while some assistance was given to socialist movements in Europe and anticolonialism elsewhere, especially in Asia and Africa, this was limited and cautious.⁹ The expansionism in reality emanated from Washington, which since 1945 has built up a huge network of subordinate states, bases, and what is euphemistically called a “forward defense” perimeter as close as possible to the borders of adversaries, in particular the Soviet Union/Russia and China.¹⁰ While defense is used to obscure the essentially aggressive nature of U.S. imperialism, this perimeter also provides what Jim Mattis describes as “defense in depth.”¹¹

Motivation

The immediate reason for the division of the Korean Peninsula was to protect, militarily, politically, and perhaps ideologically, the war prize of Japan from the Soviet Union. The United States was in no mood to share Japan with even its close allies in the Pacific War—Britain, Netherlands, Australia, France, and the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek, let alone its principal adversary, the Soviet Union.

A foothold on the Korean Peninsula consolidated the U.S. strategic position in the Western Pacific. From Korea, the United States could keep an eye on newly conquered Japan, and on China, as yet not “lost.” The U.S. relationship with Chiang had been fractious but the United States could reasonably consider it “owned China,” hence the insistence that those parts Japan had seized, in particular Taiwan and the islands in the South China Sea, be returned. Later, in Palmerstonian fashion, it would decide that they were not really part of China after all.¹² After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, Taiwan (still under Chang Kai-shek), Japan, and South Korea would become the three cornerstones of the U.S.-forward military presence in Asia. Although the bases in Taiwan had to be relinquished in 1979 as part of the establishment of diplomatic relations with the PRC, those in Japan and South Korea remain and are considered essential to U.S. strategy in Asia.¹³ The giant Camp Humphreys base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, is not merely the largest U.S. overseas base in the world, but it is also the one closest to Beijing.¹⁴ Significantly, most of the cost is borne by South Korea, another illustration of the exploitative nature of imperialism.¹⁵

The occupation of the southern part of the Korean Peninsula thus afforded the United States both protection of Japan and a platform from which to project power. Over time, South Korea has provided further services and the division of the peninsula has served the United States well.

Consequences

The consequences of the division of the peninsula were momentous, and are still with us. The American Military Government swept aside the Korean People’s Republic—“a polyglot assemblage of communists, anarchists, trade unionists, Christian socialists, and social democrats”—that had been declared in Seoul in September 1945 and instead parachuted in Syngman Rhee from Hawai‘i.¹⁶ Had the Koreans been left to arrange their own affairs in an undivided land, no doubt there would have been political turmoil and some bloodletting to assuage decades of Japanese colonialism, but it is unlikely that there would have been anything like the carnage that actually ensued nor the intractable problems of division. With no popular support or political base, Rhee utilized the state apparatus left behind by the Japanese and he is remembered today mainly for his massacres, such as that on the island of Jeju.¹⁷ In the north, Kim Il-sung, who had waged a guerrilla war against the Japanese, pursued a policy of anticolonial cleansing and social revolution, the two being linked. The result was two versions of Korea, diametrically opposed and each claiming legitimacy. Many consider that the Korean War was, in some form, inevitable given the situation that division had produced; Bruce Cumings, for instance, sees it as a civil war that began in the 1930s, if not earlier.¹⁸ However, it was the division of Korea, and the U.S. geopolitical objectives of which it was an instrument, that transformed that struggle. What began in June 1950 as a Korean civil war soon became a war of U.S. imperialism against Korean nationalism and, then, with Chinese intervention, the first Sino-U.S. war. A new and terrible world was born.

Ramifications

First, there was, of course, the devastation visited on the people and the land of Korea. Millions died, were injured, and displaced. Bombing, far more extensive and undiscriminating than that on Europe or Japan, obliterated the homes, cities, and farms of the north.¹⁹ Curtis LeMay, head of Strategic Air Command, commented, seemingly nonchalantly, that his bombers had killed some 20 percent of the population.²⁰

The ramifications of the Korean War extended far beyond the peninsula itself. It provided stimulus to the global economy, especially in East and Southeast Asia, and set three of the four “little dragons” or “Asian tigers” (Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) on the way to rapid economic growth, with the fourth, South Korea, joining them during the Vietnam War. It rescued Japan from economic stagnation and put it on the road to both its “economic miracle” and remilitarization.

Chinese Intervention: Revisionism and the New Realism

Although there has been considerable revisionist criticism within China of its intervention in the Korean War, especially during the now fading rapprochement period when Dengist dreams of a benign United States facilitating China’s peaceful rise held sway, at the time it was a source of pride that the Chinese People’s Volunteers had fought the world’s most powerful military to a standstill. It provided a stimulus to nation-building and enhanced the legitimacy of the PRC as a capable and powerful country. It prevented the United States from attacking, via Taiwan, and made it tread carefully in Vietnam.²¹

Mao Zedong is attributed with describing the closeness of the relationship between China and North Korea at the time of the Korean War as that between “lips and teeth.”²² Over time, the relationship between the two grew conflicted, with both sides having problems. The conventional opinion was expressed by Alan Romberg in 2009 when he claimed that the lips-and-teeth relationship had long since “certainly faded into nothingness.”²³ This was superficially correct and many saw it as evidence that China would not object to South Korea taking over the North, absorbing it, somewhat similar to what happened in Germany.²⁴ This was mistaken for two reasons. First, if South Korea were an independent country, then China would probably reluctantly accept its absorption of the North. But South Korea has limited sovereignty and is subordinate to the United States in many ways, not least of which is the U.S. wartime control of its military. Second, there is no reason to suppose that there would be no resistance, so any takeover would have to be done with some (and probably a great deal of) military force. That would mean U.S. control; a U.S. general standing on the banks of the Yalu looking over the new frontier between the United States and China. The Chinese general on the other side would not be too pleased with that. Moreover, a unified Korea under Seoul’s administration might well generate irredentist claims to the loyalty, and perhaps the land, of the 2.5 million ethnic Koreans in China.²⁵ Given that the United States utilizes the class imperialist strategy of fomenting ethnic and religious divisions to fragment adversaries—Xinjiang and Tibet in the case of China—these claims would have U.S. support.

That the wartime lips-and-teeth relationship between China and North Korea would subsequently fray should come as no surprise. It is a very common phenomenon; with the common enemy gone, or in abeyance, then natural divergences of interest will reemerge. Both Koreas have problems with patrons, but there are important differences between the two. North Korea has two patrons: the Soviet Union/Russia and China. This has given North Korea the advantage of attempting to play one against the other, as well as the disadvantage of being under pressure to declare allegiance, as during the Sino-Soviet schism.²⁶ South Korea has but one patron: the United States. This means that North Korea is fiercely independent while South Korea remains a client of the United States.

There are strong but rather unexplored parallels between the deteriorating Sino-Soviet relationship in the 1950s and that between North Korea and China in more recent years. The Soviet Union wanted to relegate Chinese nationalist aspirations, notably over Taiwan, with what it saw as the need to forge a less threatening relationship with the United States. Similarly, China has been anxious to avoid antagonizing the United States or giving it any reason or pretext for interrupting its “peaceful rise” and has been willing to sacrifice North Korean concerns over U.S. hostility.

Many commentators misinterpret the Chinese position on North Korea. Because Washington and Beijing often say the same thing, they presume that the Chinese are doing it for the same reason as the Americans. U.S. policy toward North Korea is part of a global strategy to preserve hegemony, which includes the need to contain and depower China. In contrast, China wants peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula to avoid conflict with the United States and has been willing both to sacrifice North Korean interests and to compromise on strategic principles, notably by supporting U.S. initiatives in the UN Security Council condemning and sanctioning North Korea. This was predicated on the naive belief, dating back to Deng Xiaoping, that the United States would allow its peaceful rise. Events have confounded that dream and, as a result, China is becoming more resistant to U.S. pressure.²⁷

Both China and North Korea may chafe, for different reasons, at the lips-and-teeth relationship, but neither can escape it. It is somewhat like an arranged marriage, in this case determined by geography and history, which cannot be dissolved despite all the problems. The Korean Peninsula is vitally important to the United States because it is on the border with China. The peninsula is even more important to China precisely because of its location, which was brought home by the Korean War.

The Consolidation of U.S. Imperialism

The effect of the Korean War on the United States was the most consequential in global terms. Because the Soviet delegate was boycotting the UN Security Council in protest of the U.S. blocking of the new Chinese government from the China seat, the United States was able to get the United Nations to endorse its expeditionary force, called even today the UN Command despite being completely U.S. controlled.²⁸ This manipulation of the United Nations was replicated in 2006 with the beginning of UN sanctions against North Korea for its nuclear deterrent program.

The Korean War was a godsend to the U.S. security establishment. It was the hot war that was needed to firmly bed down the Cold War, both functionally and in the popular imagination. It provided an economic stimulus that soon became addictive and established the permanent war economy.²⁹ The military-industrial complex, about which Dwight Eisenhower of all people warned in his valedictory speech, became a central feature of U.S. society.³⁰ This complex encompasses not merely the military and armaments manufacturers, but also the security and intelligence communities, and all those in politics, media, think tanks, academia, and so on, who make a living out of war and the fear of it. The military-industrial complex complements imperialism in informing and driving U.S. foreign policy, and much of U.S. society. The Korean War was thus the genesis of the “forever wars” that presidents promise to abolish but never do.³¹

Despite its success in promoting militarization, the Korean War was the first war that the United States did not win. It ended in a military stalemate, resulting in an armistice—a suspension of fighting—but neither victory nor peace. For the public, it became the “forgotten war” and for militarists a good reason to increase military expenditure. Despite overwhelming advantages in technology and industrial might, the Pentagon found China to be a formidable power. The fear of kinetic war with China meant that war was to be continued by other means—namely, diplomatic (attempting to keep it out of the UN Security Council and Taiwan in) and economic, with the embargo lasting into the 1970s and continuing sanctions, varying in intensity since 1950 but increasing greatly in recent years as fear of China’s rise has mounted in Washington.³²

The Korean War also led the United States to intervene directly in the Chinese Civil War. Washington had bankrolled Chiang and provided him with war materiel (that usually ended up in the hands of the Communists), but now his bolthole on Taiwan was to be protected, producing a running sore in U.S.-China relations.

In his pathbreaking 1952 Monthly Review Press book The Hidden History of the Korean War, I. F. Stone highlighted the close cooperation, perhaps collusion, between Chiang and Rhee, especially in spring 1950 in the buildup to war.³³ Both needed U.S. support against their more powerful and popular domestic foes, the Communists.

The war anchored U.S. imperialism to the Korean Peninsula and made its continued antagonistic division a necessary part of the U.S. forward position against China.

The Korean Peninsula

The war completed the construction of the two parts of Korea as separate, adversarial states, competing for legitimacy and each in a relationship, albeit of different characteristics, with patrons—the United States, PRC, and USSR. At the same time, they must be viewed as a symbiotic entity. Neither would have received the same level of aid had the other not existed. Had the North prevailed and unified the peninsula under its control, then, in time, the United States would have come to terms with it, as it would later do with a unified Vietnam.

North Korea

North Korea has seldom been out of the U.S. headlines, especially in recent decades, and it is lodged firmly in the mindset of the foreign policy community. Why it occupies such a prominent position requires explanation beyond the usual cliches. Clearly, the failure of the Korean War rankles, but that of the Vietnam War was more embarrassing and, in China, more consequential. North Korea is clearly no direct danger to the United States, nor to its hold on the South. After the outflanking landing at Inchon, there was little likelihood of the North reigniting the war and pushing down the peninsula as in the mid–1950s. With the United States controlling the sea and air, and showing no real signs of abandoning its beachhead on the Asian mainland, such North Korean efforts would be futile even if they were feasible. Similarly, the hysteria in recent years about North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, probably but not certainly capable of striking the U.S. mainland, is preposterous; its bizarreness nicely captured by the story of defense secretary Jim Mattis sleeping in his gym clothes in expectation of an attack.³⁴ Threatened retaliation, which would be suicidal if needed to be carried out, is one thing, but gratuitous suicide by launching a missile strike is another.³⁵ These constructions have more to do with the dynamics of U.S. domestic politics, helped along of course by a hungry military-industrial complex, than with reality. Nevertheless, perception and belief, however irrational, are very important, and all presidents come into office believing there is a need to “do something about the North Korean threat.”

In fact, North Korea does present U.S. imperialism with two main challenges. One is the example it gives to others. If it were to be destroyed like Iraq or Libya, then that would serve as a warning to others. But its defiant resilience for seventy years demonstrates the limits of U.S. power rather than its ineluctability. The recent development of a nuclear deterrent amplifies that. Furthermore, if North Korea can utilize this deterrent to ward off attack but force the United States into accepting peaceful coexistence, that would provide a very dangerous message to others, starting with Iran.

Then there is the question of China. Vanquishing North Korea and extending U.S. power to the Chinese border might be tempting, but even if achieved would undercut the justification for U.S. presence in Korea and the whole forward military position in Northeast Asia, the core hard power underpinning U.S. strategy toward Asia.³⁶ The United States needs North Korea as a perceived threat to vindicate and consolidate its control over South Korea.

Early indications are that the Joe Biden administration will continue the uncompromising policy of the past, demanding unilateral nuclear disarmament from Pyongyang with nothing substantial in exchange.³⁷ This is not surprising since tension on the Korean Peninsula is a crucial component of the anti-China strategy. The reaction from Pyongyang is predictable and presumably anticipated and desired. First vice foreign minister Choe Son-hui issued a statement on March 18, 2021, as the first Biden-era military exercises were coming to a close, reiterating that “no DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea]-U.S. contact and dialogue of any kind can be possible unless the U.S. rolls back its hostile policy towards the DPRK.”³⁸

South Korea

Although greatly overshadowed by North Korea both in elite consciousness and media coverage, South Korea is really the focus of U.S. interest in the peninsula. Being perceived as the subservient “good twin,” in contrast to the defiantly independent “evil twin” to the north, it attracts less attention. This perception of obedience is not quite accurate—Rhee openly defied the United States, especially during Korean War armistice negotiations, and twenty years later Park Chung-hee began a clandestine nuclear weapons program.³⁹ Roh Moo-hyun dreamed of moving toward “autonomy,” but current president Moon Jae-in shows no such independence of spirit.⁴⁰

Irrespective of presidents, South Korea is a client state with limited sovereignty created by the United States to serve its interests. The United States has direct “wartime control” over the Republic of Korea’s military and, despite promises, this is likely to continue, perhaps through the UN Command.⁴¹ That is no minor prize. The Republic of Korea has a standing army of about six hundred thousand troops plus a huge reservoir of trained military manpower.⁴² Its military expenditure in 2019 was tenth in the world at $40 billion.⁴³ Typical of U.S. “allies,” it does not have a self-reliant capability, but because of the policy of interoperability it is dependent on the United States for key control functions. It cannot wage war on its own, but is a formidable ancillary to U.S. military might.⁴⁴ Despite the brouhaha about the North Korean threat and the need for U.S. presence, the military strength of South Korea alone is far greater than that of the North.⁴⁵ Its military budget may be over thirty times that of the North.⁴⁶ However much its proponents may internalize the myth of defending South Korea against the North, this construct is essentially a pretext for a forward position against China.

South Korea was an important adjunct to the United States in Vietnam, providing three hundred thousand troops—second only to the United States itself.⁴⁷ It has subsequently supplied largely symbolic contingents to the wars in the Middle East. In what way the South Korean military might be used in a war against China is an open question, but no doubt strategists in Washington are working on it in private.⁴⁸

South Korea is also a very lucrative market for U.S. arms sales. In the ten years up to 2019, it accounted for one quarter of U.S. sales and in some years it was the largest purchaser.⁴⁹ Although occasionally the military attempts to buy weapons that are more appropriate for their needs, political pressure usually wins out and some 80 percent of its purchases are American.⁵⁰ The Republic of Korea as a nominally sovereign middle power has considerable diplomatic importance in Northeast Asia and on the world stage, for instance at the United Nations.

These contingent benefits to the United States are undergirded by a more permanent one. The reason that Washington established itself on the Korean Peninsula in 1945 was above all its strategic location, which still holds, with China now the major focus.

U.S. presence in South Korea provides it with bases, notably Camp Humphreys and Osan Air Base. In addition, there is the Jeju Naval Base, which is ostensibly a South Korean facility but would provide facilities for the U.S. Navy in the case of heightened tension with China.

Although bases are principally an asset from which to project power, they are also gaining in importance as places to facilitate the receiving of reinforcements. As a global empire with a relatively slim standing military but substantial logistic capability, the ability to shift forces around the world is crucial. For at least a couple of decades, the focus has been shifting to the ability to bring in reinforcements as needed, not least to South Korea.⁵¹ What is known as Reception, Staging, Onward Movement, and Integration plays an important role in U.S. military strategy and is a key component of the joint U.S.-Republic of Korea military exercises.⁵²

The U.S. military presence in South Korea allows it to deploy and manage assets that benefit from being close to the target. Notable here are the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense units that are ostensibly there to protect South Korea from North Korean missiles. There are good reasons to consider this bogus.⁵³

Probably the main military function of THAAD deployment in Korea is the X-band radar system, which the Chinese fear would enable the United States to detect missile launches from deep inside China and feed the information into the U.S. missile defense system.⁵⁴ That, in turn, helps the United States to develop a first strike capability against China. U.S. experts tend to downplay the surveillance capability of the THAAD radar, but Chinese ones do not, and that is the important point because it is they who influence Chinese policy.⁵⁵

A wider concern of the Chinese, and something that U.S. strategists celebrate, is that the deployment of THAAD, against protests in South Korea and retaliation from China, strengthens the U.S. hold over South Korea and advances the U.S. dream of forging a close-knit alliance between it and its two clients in Northeast Asia—South Korea and Japan.⁵⁶ This strategy is hampered by the ongoing antagonism of South Korea toward Japan, but it remains a key tenet of U.S. policy.⁵⁷ The deployment of THAAD led to extensive and continuing popular protest, though that did not deter the Moon administration from complying with the U.S. decision.⁵⁸ The protests have tended to focus on environment and health concerns overlooking the security implications; THAAD increases the danger of South Korea being a target of Chinese retaliation in time of war.

Of course, retaliation can happen in time of peace and China’s response to THAAD was swift, restrained but forceful. It might be seen as a precursor to the steps taken against Australia in 2020, a calibrated warning that threats to China’s security (South Korea) or interfering in China’s internal affairs and undermining its territorial integrity (Australia) in service of U.S. strategy would incur costs. One estimate put the cost to South Korea at over $15 billion by 2019 alone.⁵⁹ In a pattern replicated with Australia, the government-level economic retaliation was accompanied by a consumer boycott, with tourism and Lotte department stores in China being notable victims.⁶⁰

The THAAD affair highlights the dilemma facing South Korea, and one shared by many countries around the world, of being forced to choose between its national interest and the demands of U.S. grand strategy.

Perhaps nowhere in the world is this dilemma more acute and consequential than in South Korea. President Park Geun-hye, the daughter of Park Chung-hee who was ousted by the Candlelight Revolution and is currently in jail, accepted the deployment of THAAD despite Chinese concerns; the Moon Jae-in administration agonizes more, then capitulates.⁶¹ To take but one instance, the Pyongyang Declaration that Moon signed with Kim Jong-un on April 27, 2018, promised that: “The two sides will make joint efforts to defuse the acute military tensions and to substantially remove the danger of a war on the Korean Peninsula.… The two sides agreed to completely cease all hostile acts against each other in every domain including land, sea and air.”⁶²

It is difficult to see war exercises with the United States as not violating these sentiments, yet the following month, the United States and South Korea were conducting joint air drills that the North regarded as practicing “a preemptive air strike at the DPRK.”⁶³ While the military exercises were toned down following the Singapore Summit between Donald Trump and Kim in June 2018, the military pushed back and continued at a more subdued, but still provocative, level, with 120 airstrikes in 2020 alone.⁶⁴ The COVID-19 pandemic imposed its own constraints, but as the military learned to find ways around it and the Trump administration was ending, they have been making a comeback. So much so that Kim Yo-jong, Kim Jong-un’s sister, who is in charge of relations with South Korea, issued a warning (in a very clunky official translation) that Moon’s dreams of pursuing détente while remaining subservient to the United States was doomed to failure: “Whatever and however the south Korean authorities may do in the future under their master’s instructions, those warm spring days three years ago, which they desire so much, won’t come easily again.”⁶⁵

The standard argument to justify the military exercises is that they are necessary to deter North Korea, but given the huge disparity in power, this holds no water. They fulfill various functions but the main one is that they are a good way to ramp up the tension while blaming Pyongyang, hence proving the necessity of the U.S. presence in Korea.

Ultimately, the military exercises and indeed the whole U.S.-South Korea “alliance” is about China. In an attack on Trump’s negotiating with Kim Jong-un in 2018, two Australian strategists dismissed North Korea as a “dangerous distraction,” hampering concentration on the real enemy, China. South Korea’s role was clear: “The United States still remains preeminent in Asia, thanks in large part to its regional alliances. Defense networks are a cost-effective force multiplier.”⁶⁶

South Korea is a force multiplier in so many ways. It has a large, well-equipped, and trained standing military, and a vast reservoir of reservists, all accustomed to following U.S. orders. It provides a base for power projection and surveillance close to China. It is on the Asian mainland, thus complementing Japan, which, like Taiwan, is an unsinkable aircraft carrier.

The much-touted necessity to defend South Korea provides a cover for the U.S. forward military position. Diplomatically, it is a substantial middle power, with a large economy and role in international trade, and can be deployed to consolidate U.S. power in international fora. Its leading role in the manufacture of semiconductor chips (along with Taiwan) is an important component of U.S. economic struggle with China.⁶⁷ A key aspect of that strategy is to force the South Korean economy to decouple from China, and be entirely part of a U.S.-dominated trading and supply chain system.⁶⁸ As a bonus, it provides a lucrative market for the U.S. armaments industry.

South Korea is thus far too valuable for the United States to relinquish its presence and control willingly, and indeed establishment U.S. commentators do not even conceive of the possibility.⁶⁹

Tension and the threat of war, and the manufactured perception of North Korea as an aggressor that only the United States can keep at bay, underpins its forward military presence in Asia centered on confrontation with China, with South Korea as a key node. Reinforcing this was the clear purpose of the first visit of “Biden’s enforcers”—secretary of state Anthony Blinken and National Security Agency Jake Sullivan—to Seoul in March 2021, during the military exercises.⁷⁰

The Centrality of Korea in U.S.-China Confrontation

For the United States, the Pacific War was essentially over China. For Japan, the objectives were wider. It wanted China but also needed the resources of Southeast Asia, notably oil and rubber. With Japan’s defeat, the United States thought it had won the battle over China, but in 1949 it discovered it had “lost China” and a hunt followed to find those traitorous Americans responsible, fueling McCarthyism.⁷¹

If some Americans had lost China, it followed that there might be some to regain it. The prime candidate for that role was Douglas MacArthur, who was eager to use the Korean situation to extend the war to China. The U.S. military establishment stamped on that: “In the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this strategy would involve us in the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy,” its chairman, general Omar Bradley, said.⁷² The “right enemy” at the time was the Soviet Union.

China in time became the right enemy and the underlying driver of U.S. Asia policy. For a couple of decades, the battle line shifted to Southeast Asia, with lurid, if ahistorical and subsequently invalidated, visions of “Chinese expansionism” being the cause of the anticolonialist movement.⁷³ Nevertheless, Korea was a continuing, and sometimes important, element in what came to be called “the containment of China.” Park Chung-hee’s support for the United States in Vietnam was valuable to the United States and profitable for the South Korean economy, providing the basis for South Korea’s “economic takeoff in the mid–1960s.”⁷⁴ All the while, North Korea, whatever it might do or not do, was portrayed as a belligerent threat necessitating the massive U.S. political and military presence in Korea, on China’s doorstep. Whenever there were moves to lessen that presence, as with Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, they were foiled. ⁷⁵ The actual number of U.S. troops in South Korea has declined over time—military power is decreasingly measured in troop levels—but the U.S. strategic presence continues unabated.

In 1899, secretary of state John Hay issued his famous “Open Door Policy” calling for “equality of treatment of all foreign trade throughout China.”⁷⁶ He did so in confidence that U.S. commercial superiority was such that it had nothing to fear from foreign competitors in the China market, and presumably completely discounted any competition from Chinese industry. A century and a bit later, the situation was completely transformed. Not merely had the United States lost unquestioned superiority over its rivals, but competition from China itself was becoming increasingly successful. This was accompanied by China’s challenge to U.S. hegemony. The two concerns—commercial and geopolitical—were conflated and the United States increasingly had to resort to political power to buttress its failing competitiveness, actions against Huawei being a prime example. Inevitably, U.S. thoughts turned to war. Some warned against it—it was a Thucydides Trap that could be avoided if recognized, argued Graham Allison.⁷⁷ Others have discounted it entirely, even arguing “There Will Not Be a New Cold War.”⁷⁸ Others see it looming while yet others unpack the mechanics of it.⁷⁹ And in the shadows, in the corridors of the Pentagon and throughout the huge U.S. military apparatus, others no doubt are laying plans, which their counterparts in China are seeking ways to defeat.

Whether war might be curtailed, limited, or catastrophic, there is general consensus that the three most likely places where a war between the United States and China might start are the South China Sea, Taiwan Straits, and Korean Peninsula.

Because of the conflicting territorial claims between the littoral states, the United States sees the South China Sea as a useful way of forming an anti-China alliance. However, its main military interest, and the reason for the Freedom of Navigation Operations, is to set a precedent and build capability for interdiction. Much of China’s imports, especially oil, pass through here and it is the transit route for Chinese ballistic submarines to get to the safety of the deep waters of the Pacific.⁸⁰ A clash here is probable but unlikely to develop into war—for the United States the dangers outweigh the benefits, and for China the issue is important but not existential. A war over Taiwan can only happen with the endorsement and participation of the government in Taipei. However, Taiwan has de facto independence, which the PRC tolerates with pragmatism, and the additional benefits of de jure status are greatly outweighed by the costs and dangers so that is unlikely to be forthcoming.⁸¹

The Korean Peninsula is different again. As with Taiwan, the United States has to interact with a client government. However, while the dream of “retaking the Mainland” died in Taiwan decades ago, that of reunifying Korea under Seoul has not. The Moon Jae-in administration clearly wants to improve relations with the North and to maintain friendly ties with China, but it is politically weak. President Moon has been unable to stand up to the United States, which has been decisive.⁸² There was a considerable degree of détente in 2018 following the opening of Kim Jong-un’s peace offensive and his offer to send a team to the South Korean-hosted Winter Olympics, but ultimately the U.S. state stepped in and quashed cooperation between the two Koreas. This was obscured somewhat at the time by Trump’s fantasies of negotiating with Kim Jong-un. In a very real sense, both Moon and Trump were defeated by John Bolton and the forces he exemplified—the “octopus” that is the U.S. state.⁸³ At the same time, the THAAD affair is an example, albeit a prominent one, of U.S. use of South Korea as a pawn against China. This process looks set to intensify under the Biden administration whose first high-level meeting with Seoul was to reiterate its role in the U.S. anti-China alliance.⁸⁴

The United States is not the only opposition to détente with the North with which Moon has to contend. Naturally less visible to outside observers, but surely potent nonetheless, is the huge South Korean military establishment and the National Intelligence Service (formerly the Korean CIA), which have had intimate ties with their U.S. counterparts over many decades. Also influencing public opinion and more visible because they have to work front of house are the right-wing parties (such as the main conservative People Power Party) and the media, notably Chojoongdong, the trio of ultra-conservative papers Chosun Ilbo, JoongAng Ilbo, and Dong-A Ilbo.⁸⁵

While the visible face of South Korean conservatism is virulently anti-North Korea, its position on China is slightly more ambivalent. Chosun Ilbo, for instance, frequently complains about U.S. pressure to join its anti-China campaign without regard for South Korean interests.⁸⁶

Nevertheless, there appears to be more appetite for war with the PRC in South Korea than in Taiwan, precisely because the reward—conquering of the North—is feasible. It may be far less feasible than the hawks in Seoul anticipate, but the United States and South Korea do have great military superiority. North Korea can retaliate but ultimately not defend itself against attack. However, fantasies about China’s acceptance of a U.S.-led invasion of North Korea are common and dangerous.⁸⁷ In the case of the Taiwan Straits, there is a direct war with China, but in Korea there is the worrying possibility that decision makers may convince themselves that war with China can be avoided.

However, there is also another possibility. It may not be a case of stumbling into war with China—thinking one is swallowing a minnow but finding that one is choking on a whale—but a deliberate decision. If strategists in Washington decide on a war against China, and there has been no shortage of talk about that, then precipitating it through a crisis on the Korean Peninsula makes admirable sense. There is the substantial South Korean military, already under U.S. command and used to U.S. control. South Korea hosts huge U.S. bases and has facilities for rapidly bringing in and deploying reinforcements, and both have been well practiced. In addition, Japan under Shinzo Abe had long signaled an enthusiasm for intervening in conflict in Korea and there is no reason to suppose Yoshihide Suga is less enthusiastic.⁸⁸

In either case, the Korean Peninsula is the most likely place for the eruption of the second U.S. war with China.

Hypocrisy, Irrationality, Deep Rationality, and the Contextualization of U.S.-Korea Policy

The literature on U.S.-Korea policy displays dazzling pyrotechnics of hypocrisy. That representatives of the world’s most potent nuclear power, and the only one to have actually used nuclear weapons, can condemn with high moral dudgeon North Korea for developing a small nuclear deterrent, in response to the U.S. threat moreover, is truly astounding. That such hypocrisy garners applause and repetition rather than ridicule is a telling compliment to the power of U.S. global perception management. However, beyond hypocrisy, and mirroring it, there lies irrationality. Much of the discussion of the issues just does not make sense and there is little in the way of rational explanation. For instance, we are frequently told that North Korea is a threat, even an existential one, to the United States, South Korea, and “the region.”⁸⁹ Yet, we are also told that a North Korean attack on the United States or South Korea would clearly be suicidal and futile, as Colin Powell expressed: “It would be suicidal for North Korea to attack the US.… If North Korea attacked the US, the US would immediately strike back, and the North Korean regime would be no more.”⁹⁰ How can both statements hold? Why would North Korea commit suicide for no purpose? The threat of retaliation as a deterrent, even if it were suicidal if carried out, does make sense, but that is quite another matter, seldom discussed.⁹¹

One way of attempting to resolve this contradiction is to claim that Kim Jong-un (or his father Kim Jong-il before him) is irrational. “We are not dealing with a rational person,” claimed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.⁹² Senator John McCain called him a “crazy, fat kid.”⁹³ More informed observers realize this will not work and thus produce more convoluted explanations and prescriptions that ultimately are no more satisfactory.⁹⁴

A better approach is to move beyond U.S. myopia and analyze U.S.-Korea policy in terms of “deep rationality.” That is, the underlying reasons for behavior not articulated by the actors, perhaps out of prudence, but also quite likely because they are not aware of them themselves. Imperialism is the central characteristic of U.S. foreign policy, but is neither mentioned nor admitted by the establishment. They are socially conditioned not to recognize imperialism even as they practice it.

Three aspects are relevant here.

First, the “North Korea threat” is a domestic political construction, created over decades and with deep purchase in both elite and popular opinion, but has no solid base in reality. It is more properly the subject of political psychology, with its roots in the failure to prevail in the Korean War and thereafter, rather than geopolitics. As a perception, it may seem to determine decision-making (it certainly affects it), but ultimately the reasons for U.S. policy lie elsewhere.

Second, North Korea’s nuclear deterrent, whose efficacy is uncertain, is in itself no danger to the United States unless the United States launches an invasion. If the United States is perceived in Pyongyang to be about to do just that, then that might prompt an attempt at a preemptive strike. In either case, the initiative really lies with Washington; no war then no retaliation. The real issue is global proliferation—a meaningful concern despite tending to be hidden behind a wall of self-serving obfuscation. The spread of nuclear weapons to small countries is portrayed as a danger to the world, and the U.S. crusade against proliferation a noble one. In fact, the possession of a nuclear deterrent by countries threatened by more powerful ones is peace enhancing, as Kenneth Waltz argues in the case of Iran.⁹⁵ The North Koreans claim, probably rightly, that their deterrence has kept the peace in Korea.⁹⁶ This forms the basis of the U.S. objection to proliferation. It is an equalizer that helps redress the imbalance of power between it and those countries it wishes to attack, such as Iraq and Libya. If North Korea is successful in forcing the United States into peaceful coexistence, then that would give a “bad” example to other countries, such as Iran.

Third, U.S. desire to defend, maintain, and hopefully enlarge its hegemony against major challengers is key. In the early days, the major challenger was the Soviet Union, as now it is China with Russia being relegated to an important but minor role, especially in East Asia. We have seen how important Korea is in U.S. confrontation with China. “Korea” is in fact a dyad and the relationship between the two is a crucial part of U.S. strategy. Antagonism between the two is to be welcomed and détente to be feared and prevented. North Korea has to be kept belligerent to justify U.S. military presence in South Korea (and to a lesser extent in Japan), and to keep South Korea in line so it may be better harnessed to the anti-China program.

Palmerston would have recognized U.S. achievements in utilizing the Korean Peninsula in its confrontation with China and the challenges it faces. He was, after all, foreign secretary when Britain launched the First Opium War against China in 1839. The war led, among other things, to the British seizure of Hong Kong and the “Century of Humiliation,” which still reverberate in China today.⁹⁷

Palmerston’s “gunboat diplomacy” was successful because Britain had gunboats and China did not. Now China does.⁹⁸ The United States has supplanted Britain and Blinken has succeeded Palmerston. Although the balance of power in its various facets, from the military to soft power, still favors the United States, the gap is closing. The United States and China are two whales, one declining in power and the other rising, different in characteristic and in motivation but both huge. This poses great danger for Korea, which is caught in the line of fire, because, as proverb has it, when the whales fight, the shrimp gets its back broken.⁹⁹

The Angler and the Octopus: Kim Jong-un's Ongoing Peace Offensive

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea — The Angler and the Octopus: Kim Jong-un's Ongoing Peace Offensive

The Angler and the Octopus: Kim Jong-un's Ongoing Peace Offensive

Article 9 of 9

Monthly Review

By Tim Beal

Originally published at https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-angler-and-the-octopus/

Publication Date: November 1, 2019

Tim Beal is a retired New Zealand academic who has written extensively on Asia with a special focus on the Korean peninsula. His most recent work is the entry on Korea for The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (Springer Publishing, 2019).

Ever since the United States divided the Korean peninsula in 1945, North Korea has had to cope with the existential challenge of U.S. hostility. Korea marks the western boundary of the empire, a border area where the sea power of the United States adjoins the land power of Russia and China. North Korea has been able to utilize this liminality to create a sovereign state—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)—whose independence is not welcomed by either Moscow or Beijing but tolerated because the alternatives, a client of the other or absorption into the U.S. empire, are considered worse. Washington, as global hegemon, has been less willing to tolerate this independence but has faced constraints. The result has been a policy of hostility, of unrelenting diplomatic and economic war of varying intensity, stopping short of actual kinetic war, though never far from it. The United States is frustrated by this situation, which is an affront to its hubris, but is restrained by the consequences. For North Korea, the situation is far more serious. Kinetic war would mean its destruction while the prevailing diplomatic and economic war produces its impoverishment—it is claimed that its per capita gross domestic product is less than 4 percent of that of South Korea.¹ For North Korea, the U.S. relationship is of paramount importance, the key to survival and prosperity.² For the United States, North Korea is but one part of the theater of politics, colorful but more fantasy than substance.

The so-called North Korean crisis occupies a special place in the U.S. political repertoire. Policy in the Middle East, and now Venezuela, is bedded in the strategic necessity of domination of oil supplies. The confrontation with the Soviet Union/Russia and China, whatever the distortions in the narrative may be, has a grounding in real geopolitical struggle against substantial adversaries. The North Korean crisis is different in that it is basically a domestically constructed political issue fueled by the specific geopolitical needs for tension in East Asia supplemented by the generic hunger of the military-industrial complex. It is not a real security issue in itself: North Korea is far too small to pose any real threat to the United States, other than limited and suicidal retaliation if attacked. But politics are often not firmly tethered to reality. Additionally, over generations, especially in recent decades, the myth of the North Korean threat has been nurtured by politicians, the military and security sector, and the media to assume an unchallenged authenticity of its own. Most presidents have felt compelled to “do something” about North Korea and this has fluctuated between threats (coercive diplomacy and the military option) and negotiations. Talks, however, were always doomed and designed to probably fail because they came with preconditions or demands that were inherently unacceptable to Pyongyang. The U.S. state bureaucracy tolerated failure in negotiations because there was no danger, and secretly welcomed it because the real problems would start with a resolution of the supposed crisis. Peace on the Korean peninsula would erode the U.S. military presence and forward strategy in East Asia, and negotiated peaceful coexistence with a defiantly independent North Korea on the basis of its nuclear deterrent might well encourage other countries to follow that path and undermine U.S. global hegemony. Over the years, U.S. negotiations with North Korea have manifested this tension between the president’s desire to “do something” and the state’s desire to “do nothing” in order to preserve the status quo. But the Donald Trump presidency presents a new dimension to the drama with its distinctive level of dissonance, reaching public antagonism, between the president and the wider state apparatus.

North Korea and the United States are so vastly different in historical experience, size, motivation, and governance that it is useful to see their relationship as a struggle between an angler, small but focused on the main task, and an octopus, gigantic and powerful but discordant and without a clear and unifying focus other than its voracious appetite.

The U.S. Octopus and the Child Emperor

Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man battled with a marlin, a giant fish longer than his own boat. The United States, in contrast, can be better considered an octopus for one main reason. Marlins, fish, and animals in general (both human and nonhuman) all have brains that basically control the rest of their bodies. The octopus is different: “Like humans, they have centralised nervous systems, but in their case there is no clear distinction between brain and body. An octopus’s neurons are dispersed throughout its body, and two-thirds of them are in its arms: each arm can act intelligently on its own, grasping, manipulating and hunting.”³ The octopus has a decentralized intelligence and decision-making system, which makes it a better analogy for the United States than a marlin.

The Trump administration has a very soft center that exacerbates, though did not create, the dysfunctional, uncoordinated octopoid nature of the state. The tentacles of this particular octopus are not merely large in relation to the governing and guiding center, they are also fundamentally disproportional. The physical infrastructure arm is decrepit, the part representing social services such as health is enervated, while that of the military and the wider so-called national security apparatus is grossly bloated.⁴ This is, again, not unique to the United States and long precedes Trump, although he has markedly worsened the state of affairs. The State Department, long the poor relation of U.S. foreign policy compared to the military, has been eviscerated.

So much has been written about Trump’s psychology that there is no need to repeat it here. He is like a child emperor who is managed by devious and more knowledgeable courtiers, any of whom he can (and often does) banish on a whim.

No modern presidency has had as much opposition and pushback from the bureaucracy and the political elite in general, as articulated by much of the media and instrumentalized by Russiagate, as Trump. The fundamental, though unspoken, criticism of the foreign policy elite is that he does not understand that he is running an empire, not just a country. He does not value alliances and the soft power that is such an essential component of the empire. His knowledge is fragmentary and his strategy incoherent. He is not alone in that, but he takes these failings further than most.

However, it is Trump’s very ignorance of his imperial role and his narcissistic, disheveled personality that paradoxically present a faint possibility of peace breaking out on the Korean peninsula. A cleverer president, such as Barack Obama, would not countenance peace, but Trump might just stumble across it. The chances are low but substantial enough to cause anguish across most of the foreign policy establishment. Nevertheless, there are indications that some, as we shall see, are looking for ways to mitigate the consequences so that, if Trump does succeed in “solving the North Korean crisis” and perhaps picking up a Nobel Peace Prize, the damage to U.S. hegemony in general and to geopolitical strategy in East Asia in particular will be limited.

Kim’s Peace Offensive and Its Main Driver

The 2018 New Year’s Address by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ushered in remarkable new developments.⁵ He claimed that advances in North Korea’s 2017 nuclear deterrence meant that “in no way would the United States dare to ignite a war against [him] and [his] country.” It is likely that the confidence the deterrent provided formed the foundation that enabled him to launch the diplomatic peace offensive. The United States portrays matters quite differently, claiming that “maximum pressure” has compelled Pyongyang to sue for peace on U.S. terms. Clearly, which driver—confidence or desperation—offers the better explanation is of utmost importance. If it is maximum pressure, that is, the intensification of economic and diplomatic warfare and the military threat, then its continuance and escalation where possible will bring victory: North Korea’s abandonment of its nuclear deterrent and whatever consequences might follow that. If the driver is confidence, both in the effectiveness of the nuclear deterrent and the ability to withstand U.S. pressure, then things will turn out differently: a refusal to buckle to U.S. demands leading to a stalemate in U.S.-North Korea negotiations, decreasing Chinese and Russian compliance with U.S. demands, and possibly a crisis in South Korea as South Korean president Moon Jae-in gets squeezed between aspirations for Korean détente and opposition to it from the United States.

Eighteen months after the launch of the offensive, it is increasingly clear that, in the words of Ruediger Frank, “North Korea Is Not Desperate.”⁶ Confidence in its deterrent and resilience to withstand maximum pressure has led to a transformation of the diplomatic landscape, increasing support from China and Russia and continued disarray among U.S. ranks.

The Angler Casts the Lure, Outflanking Washington and Utilizing Seoul

Kim unsuccessfully attempted a direct overture to Trump in 2017. In turn, this led to Trump’s bellicose threats. This time, however, Kim embarked on an outflanking maneuver, ignored Trump, and made the initial overture to Moon.

Moon had been swept into power by the Candlelight Revolution but, despite his rhetoric, it soon became clear that he was not going to make much progress on promoting peace on the peninsula. He was not strong enough to stand up to the United States or to the domestic conservative/military bloc. Since they had no interest in peace, except perhaps for the peace that follows conquest, as long as he was subservient to them, he would achieve little.⁷ And so it turned out.⁸ Indeed, Kim made this point in his address though he diplomatically refrained from naming Moon. He then played the Olympics card, suggesting that the North participate because “it is natural for us to share their pleasure over the auspicious event and help them.”⁹

The Winter Olympics held in Pyeongchang in February 2018 were of great importance to South Korea. Kim’s offer was welcomed by progressives, and of course President Moon himself. The North’s participation was not something the United States or conservatives could publicly oppose, although they were clearly unhappy about it, hiding behind the argument that an excluded North Korea would somehow disrupt the games.

Thus began the diplomatic peace offensive of 2018. On February 10, 2018, Kim proposed a summit to Moon, who accepted. It took place at Panmunjom on the common border on April 27 of that year. While the relationship with the South is hugely important to North Korea, it is ultimately the United States that counts. The United States dominates South Korea—it is U.S. military power that threatens the independence of North Korea, and U.S. economic and diplomatic power that starves its people. Improving its relationship with the South, on its own, achieves little given Seoul’s limited freedom of action. Moon needs U.S. approval for virtually all aspects of the détente.¹⁰ Accordingly, Kim, like a boxer who jabs to the left then strikes on the right, made two overtures to the United States.

The Double Overture to the United States: Freeze and Summit

The first attracted little attention but was in fact of great importance, containing the kernel of a possible peace accord. On April 21, 2018, the DPRK announced, in a report given by Kim to the Central Committee of the Worker’s Party of Korea (WPK), a unilateral moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests.¹¹ An earlier moratorium, entered into during the final days of Bill Clinton’s administration to promote dialogue, had been withdrawn in 2005 after the George W. Bush administration, having abrogated the Agreed Framework, showed little interest in meaningful negotiations.¹² The earlier moratorium was in effect before North Korea had tested a nuclear weapon (and would not have been if Bush had stuck to the Agreed Framework) or long-range missiles. This time was different. Kim claimed that tests were “no longer necessary” and that the task of constructing a deterrent was complete. The rhetoric masked a couple of significant issues.

All countries that have developed nuclear weapons have needed physical tests in the early stages. For example, the United States conducted over one thousand such tests. Israel is the only exception, presumably because the testing was done by those who provided the technology. The United States and other leading nuclear weapon states signed test-ban treaties because their technology had reached the stage where such tests were no longer necessary and testing could be conducted without an actual explosion in what are known as subcritical tests.¹³ On April 21, 2018, Kim declared that North Korea had conducted subcritical tests. While claims are not proof, they can establish a useful degree of ambiguity if they are credible, as this one seems to be.¹⁴

The second leg of the deterrent—long-range missiles—also offers uncertainty. The big issue is whether North Korea has mastered reentry technology. A warhead reentering the atmosphere needs to be protected against the extreme heat generated, otherwise it will be destroyed before it reaches its target. Although Kim has claimed that this has been achieved, some foreign experts are skeptical.

Thus, the moratorium provides what might be termed an ambiguity buffer, which, as we shall see, may turn out to be highly significant in that it allows U.S. officials to accept a freeze on further tests and a cap on North Korea’s nuclear program because it has not yet developed a real capacity to retaliate against the U.S. mainland.

The moratorium on tests also addresses a core component of the U.S. so-called North Korea crisis. As noted at the beginning of this article, North Korea does not pose a meaningful threat to the United States. This is irrespective of issues such as reentry capability. North Korea is just too small and, even if it had a handful of fully functioning nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), a unilateral attack is just not feasible. Nothing would be achieved—defeat, perhaps obliteration, would be inevitable. The threat of retaliation as a deterrent is one thing; an aggressive attack is quite another. The myth of the North Korean threat is a product of U.S. domestic politics generated over decades. It is a bogus fear accorded credibility partly by relentless propaganda, but also by the inevitable visibility of the development process. Nuclear and missile tests give politicians, officials, and the media a flag to wave; it is the testing of weapons rather than the weapons themselves that tends to attract political and hence public attention. This leads some to come up with what is called the Israel model of managing public perception, an issue to which we will return.¹⁵

However, it was the second overture that garnered by far the most attention. It was political theater pitched to a reality television host, and the bait was irresistible. Chung Eui-yong, Moon’s national security advisor, went from meeting Kim in Pyongyang to Washington, where he invited the United States to a summit on behalf of Kim, to which Trump—who sees himself as a superb negotiator who can dare to tread, and win, where his predecessors did not—agreed.¹⁶

Will Kim succeed in doing what his father and grandfather failed to, that is, hooking the U.S. president to haul him in for serious negotiations about peaceful coexistence? Only time will tell, but the metaphor of the fisher catching a large creature with patience, guile, and perseverance and bringing it to shore offers insights.

The creature is large and strong, and the fishing line is relatively weak. If the fisher allows the prey to swim away, then eventually it will come to the end of the line and it will break. If the fisher hauls it in too impatiently, the creature will resist, again breaking the line. As Hemingway’s Old Man says: “I could make the line fast. But then he could break it. I must hold him all I can and give him line when he must have it.”¹⁷ Hemingway’s target was a marlin, but Kim’s is an octopus, a much more complicated creature.

The U.S. establishment reacted to Trump’s acceptance of the summit invitation with dismay, chagrin, frustration, and concern.¹⁸ Interestingly, disapproval was often couched in sexual terms as a homophobic delegitimization device: it was variously described as “bromance diplomacy” and “improvisational flirtation.”¹⁹

Establishment disapproval is only one part of the problem. The octopoid nature of the U.S. state is compounded by Trump’s incoherent presidential management. He does, after all, personally appoint key staff and, in this context, that means Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Bolton’s recent replacement Robert O’Brien. No leader has a completely free hand and the pool of candidates is limited by various constraints. Nevertheless, the objective must be to have advisors who are broadly supportive of the leader’s vision—that is, if the leader has a vision at all, and it can be argued that Trump indeed does not. In this case, professed loyalty to Trump and a competitive disposition may be the most desired qualifications.²⁰

O’Brien’s position on Korea is as yet unclear, but he is likely to take his lead from Pompeo. At the time, Bolton was independent and deeply hostile to negotiations with North Korea (and any other country for that matter), far preferring to bully and threaten. He thrived on antagonism toward most of the rest of the world and the resulting tensions. Negotiated peace was not in his lexicon.

Pompeo, in contrast, is rather more difficult to pin down. His Middle East policy is clearly bedeviled by his evangelical Christianity, suggesting that God may have sent Trump to save Israel from Iran, but in respect to East Asia we might expect him to be more rational, pragmatic, and untroubled by any principles, as befits a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.²¹ Pompeo may entertain a deal if it were consistent with his strategy for preserving U.S. hegemony and, perhaps more importantly, his personal ambitions.

Pompeo and Bolton reportedly had conflicting visions and were natural rivals.²² The foreign policy establishment, military or civilian, has no compelling reason to support a settlement and will oppose it, as overtly or covertly as needed.

Thus, we have the U.S. octopus with the central brain exercising relatively little control over the tentacles, which are opposed to defusing tensions. Within the central brain, we have Trump: confused, narcissistic, and impulsive but also manipulable. And who better to manipulate him than advisors such as Pompeo, Bolton, O’Brien, and their ilk? It is often claimed that Kim is tricking Trump, and while there is some truth to that, it also draws on a deep well of racial stereotyping that bears little relationship to historical reality.²³ All foreign leaders attempt to play the U.S. president—just think of Justin Trudeau, Theresa May, and Shinzō Abe—but with Trump success is ephemeral.²⁴

Kim has to try to maneuver Trump into a deal, but ultimately his agency, as that of any foreigner, is limited. The real and decisive struggles are always in Washington.²⁵ This is the key to understanding the political theater of the Trump-Kim summits.

Other Denizens in Korean Seas

The various countries in or adjoining East Asia have a strong interest in the tussle between the angler and the octopus, although there is diversity between them and ambivalence within them. Japan, especially under Abe, is keen to keep tensions high (though perhaps not boiling over) because it advances remilitarization and distracts the Japanese electorate from scandals at home.²⁶ China and Russia, despite the obvious differences between them, have an overarching commonality. They are both facing U.S. belligerence, desperate to avoid war with the United States or to put it off as long as possible, and willing to sacrifice North Korean interests for this strategic objective. However, as U.S./Western aggressiveness mounts—Russiagate, Skripal, South China Sea, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), trade war, Syria, Huawei, and so on—the case for appeasement in Korea or elsewhere is weakened and they are forced together.²⁷

Nevertheless, their position on Korea remains ambivalent, reflecting their weakness relative to the United States. Instead of taking a firm line against U.S.-led sanctions against North Korea in the UN Security Council—sanctions that are a clear violation both of the UN Charter and of the norms of international law—they have compromised and horse traded, using a strategy of watering down resolutions and then not implementing them rigorously.²⁸ This strategy has been employed in other conflict areas, especially in the Middle East, and the reasons are clear enough. Not merely are they much weaker militarily than the United States, but the Security Council is constructed in such a way that the United States is undefeatable. For instance, a Russian resolution condemning the April 14, 2018, missile attack on Syria by the United States, together with Britain and France, was easily defeated despite the attack being a blatant violation of international law and the UN Charter.²⁹ However, compromise yields the legal and moral high ground to the United States, whose sense of entitlement and exceptionalism is thereby reinforced and its intransigence, not least regarding Korea, strengthened. U.S. commandeering of the Security Council is one of the great triumphs of its foreign policy in that it greatly magnifies and legitimizes U.S. aggression. U.S. sanctions become UN sanctions and countries around the world reluctantly or enthusiastically implement U.S. power to starve North Korea into submission; some 40 percent of its people “struggle with food insecurity and undernutrition and lack of access to basic services.”³⁰ This in the name of the United Nations and the so-called international community.

South Korea between Autonomy and Subservience

South Korea is a very special case. It was created by the United States in 1945 as a client state, hewed from the detritus of the Japanese empire as a bulwark protecting subjugated Japan against contagion from the Eurasian mainland. As a linchpin of U.S. East Asia strategy, it benefited in many ways from its subservience to the United States, receiving massive aid and access to the U.S. market (to Trump’s later regret).³¹ But benefits can also be bonds. Despite considerable economic and social growth, it is still a long way from independence. Its military is under U.S. control during wartime, but does any other time really matter?³² The deployment of THAAD, whose radar provides surveillance of Chinese ICBM launch sites but whose interceptors provide little defense against North Korea in the event of war, is just one example of South Korea’s interests being sacrificed to U.S. strategic objectives.³³ However, South Korea’s history can also be viewed as an ongoing struggle, with successes and setbacks, to wrest autonomy and eventual independence from the United States. Moon exemplifies this conflict, partly inner, partly public, between subservience and rebellion.

And there are two ways in which Moon is seeking a path out of this dilemma. After initial hesitation, he responded to Kim’s invitation for a summit. The meeting went well and others followed, but the limited power of the two Koreas to achieve much under the shadow of the United States suggests that the extravagant hope of observers such as David Kang that their initial summit “will be more important than any meeting between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump” is fanciful.³⁴ Moon is also seeking to be an intermediary between Washington and Pyongyang, but this pretension is becoming increasingly hollow despite much wishful thinking in South Korea, illustrated particularly by the liberal newspaper Hankyoreh.³⁵

The Racist Trope of the Fiendishly Clever Oriental

It is quite common to describe Kim, along with his father and grandfather before him, as fiendishly clever, in the way that “devious Orientals” are often portrayed in supposed contradistinction to Westerners, who are portrayed as forthright and honest. As Bruce Cumings, among others, has pointed out, “cunning and shrewd are standard adjectives in stereotypes of Asians.”³⁶ There are many variations on the theme and an extensive literature going back hundreds of years.

The North Korean negotiating team is much more experienced, disciplined, and focused than its U.S. counterpart. For instance, Kim Myong-gil, the current lead negotiator, has worked on negotiations with the United States since the Agreed Framework talks in the early 1990s and lives in New York, working at the DPRK mission to the United Nations. There is no one on the U.S. side that comes near to matching his experience. Nevertheless, the strategy is not devilishly cunning. For one thing, there are not many options for a small country trying to defend itself against the belligerent U.S. behemoth. Foreign analysts often construct fanciful justifications to explain away what is, essentially, a fairly obvious response to imperialist aggression. However, Pyongyang can make some choices and there are a number of ways in which it could do better. It could improve its communications. As Harold Pinter has pointed out, the “United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road” when it comes to propaganda, and while North Korea does not have the resources and power to match, it need not be as inept as it is.³⁷ It could, for example, make better use of the UN Charter; the United States may be able to bully and bribe the United Nations as an institution but it cannot do so with the founding document. The Charter may be continually broached, but it is clear that North Korea is broadly compliant and the United States frequently in violation—a point that should be forcefully reiterated, preferably in liaison with countries in a similar position.³⁸

Denuclearization: The Confucian Albatross

The main problem with North Korea’s diplomatic strategy, and one for which lack of power and resources is no excuse, is the centrality of the term denuclearization. What North Korea wants is peaceful coexistence with the United States. It needs, as it has frequently stated, the United States to drop its hostility policy, cease economic and diplomatic warfare, remove the military threat, live in regular diplomatic and economic intercourse with the DPRK, and recognize, as a member of the United Nations should, its legitimacy and sovereignty. Denuclearization does not address any of these issues but rather diverts attention from them.

Denuclearization plays into U.S. hands because however much North Korea might talk about “denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” of turning the Korean peninsula “into a land of peace free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threats,” and indeed of bilateral or global disarmament, the United States has a much louder megaphone.³⁹ However many times North Korea may reiterate that it will not countenance unilateral disarmament, for most people that is what the negotiations are all about.⁴⁰

The North Korean proposal for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is confusingly vague, at least in public discourse. Does it just cover land-based weapons or also those of the sea? If so, how far away? Does it include the U.S. nuclear umbrella?⁴¹ Moreover, does a geographical limit make any sense in a world where nuclear weapons have been a strategic weapon to be delivered from a great distance and, since the 1960s, from the U.S. mainland itself? Here, the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula suffers from the same yawning fallacy as proposals for a Northeast Asia Nuclear Weapon Free Zone: if the major nuclear power involved, the United States, can strike targets within the zone from anywhere in the world, then the nuclear-free zone offers no protection.⁴²

The North Korean emphasis on nuclear weapons is also misplaced. If the United States does invade North Korea, it will be by using what is now the standard procedure—U.S. airpower, local ground troops, and special forces for decapitation and asset seizure—not nuclear weapons, which are primarily a deterrent or, if used aggressively, would be employed only against large, indigestible countries such as Russia and China.

Furthermore, and with deep irony, there has been a transformation of the nuclear weapons calculus since 1945. Then, nuclear weapons were the sole prerogative of the richest of the rich: the United States. They have since become a great leveler, potentially protecting the weak against the powerful, which is why the United States is so concerned about proliferation.⁴³

For all these reasons, North Korea allowing denuclearization to occupy center stage of negotiations is very unwise.

How has it come to pass? The answer would seem to lie in an undue Confucian deference to Kim Il-sung, who was particularly concerned about the nuclear threat. In the late 1970s, the United States had about seven hundred tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea.⁴⁴ And in the 1970s it was South Korea, not North Korea, that was developing nuclear weapons.⁴⁵ Changing circumstances should produce new, appropriate strategies, but North Korean thinking is still trapped in the past.

The Political Theater of Summitry and Pushback

Kim Jong-un’s diplomatic offensive unleashed a flurry of summits: three with Trump, three with Moon, five with Xi Jinping, and one with Vladimir Putin.⁴⁶ These attracted a huge amount of media attention, especially because of their rarity and theatricality. The leader of North Korea had met with counterparts in the Soviet Union/Russia, China, and to a lesser extent South Korea over the years, but the Singapore summit was a historic first.

Summits are, by their nature, theatrical and imbued with symbolism. Summits within the imperial framework, such as those between the United States and South Korea, carry little weight, although the minor power naturally attempts to inflate their importance. A summit with an independent, even adversarial, leader is quite another matter. Since the United States is the global hegemon and far more powerful than any other country, there is always opposition to presidential meetings with other leaders, even of large countries such as the Soviet Union/Russia and China. To have such a meeting with a small, defiant country such as North Korea was unthinkable until Trump came along. A summit accords legitimacy to a foreign leader, the argument goes, and legitimacy should only be bestowed on the obedient, or in the cant phraseology, a “member of the international community,” not a rogue regime. Bolton spoke for many when he said: “There’s no way we should give North Korea a peace treaty. They’re lucky to have a meeting with the president of the United States.”⁴⁷

Bilateral summits are worth more than multilateral ones or those that take place as an adjunct to an international meeting, and the location has great significance. The host gains added stature and if neither side gives way, then a third location—Singapore or Hanoi—is a compromise solution.

Summits are choreographed and scripted, with the substantive discussions remaining private and, if things go according to plan (which they did in Singapore but not in Hanoi), a joint statement, usually anodyne, is crafted by officials from both sides and signed by the leaders. Leaking is very much in the U.S. tradition, but leaks are done for a purpose and may well present a distorted version of what has been agreed in private.

Much of the importance of summits is the reaction of power elites to what was agreed, and what is thought to have been agreed, or to the very fact that the meeting took place at all. This has been particularly the case in the Trump-Kim summits, where pushback from the establishment has dominated the media coverage and hence public awareness.

The difficulty of ascertaining the significance of these summits is compounded by the indecipherability of Trump himself. When Kim described a letter from Trump as “excellent” and is reportedly “appreciating the political judging faculty and extraordinary courage of President Trump,” it is clear, despite the stilted translation, that he is encouraging Trump to continue the dialogue despite opposition from the elite. Trump’s unscripted words and his tweets display, on the surface at least, an astounding lack of understanding of the issues. He is like a 5-year-old, wandering through a conference of weapons manufacturers and generals, admiring the baubles, dazzled by the toys, but not really comprehending what the adults are talking about.

The Washington Post reported thus on Trump’s comments about Kim in May 2019, after North Korea had tested some short-range missiles and just after the Department of Justice (with or without his approval) seized North Korea’s second largest ship, the Wise Honest, as it traveled toward Indonesia:

But Trump portrayed the North Korean dictator as a leader who believes, as the president himself said he does, that his country has “tremendous economic potential,” but who understands he can’t develop it while still pursuing his nuclear ambitions.

“He knows that with nuclear, that’s never going to happen, only bad can happen,” Trump said. “He understands. He is a very smart man; he gets it.”

The president—a former real estate developer—also cast Kim’s opportunities through the lens of his previous passion. North Korea, the president said, is “located between Russia and China on one side, and South Korea on the other. It’s all waterfront property. It’s a great location, as we used to say in the real estate business.”⁴⁸

The downside of great locations, as Trump’s father exemplified, is that they attract predators. Korea’s location has been the prime reason that it has attracted the attention of imperialists over the years, be they Mongolian, Japanese, or American. And unilateral disarmament is not the solution to that problem.⁴⁹ However, it seems that behind the clichés many of the adults, if we take the Washington Post as representing them, do not understand much either.

The Singapore Summit successfully brought together, for the first time, the leaders of the United States and North Korea. It produced a joint statement that was suitably aspirational and vague, with the potential to peacefully defuse tension in East Asia.

So successful was it in this regard that it unleashed a torrent of backlash as the various tentacles of the octopus signaled their disapproval. The military, current and former officials, the security industry incorporating the intelligence community, and most think tanks all prophesized doom if peace broke out.⁵⁰ Various state agencies, notably the Treasury and Department of Justice, did what they always do in such circumstances—they took action in an attempt to derail any peace process.⁵¹ In South Korea, the conservatives were particularly worried by the prospect of a U.S. rapprochement with Pyongyang allowing Moon’s détente to move forward and perhaps establish a peace regime that would erode their power.⁵²

The mainstream media, in the United States and the West generally, acted as a cheerleader, collator, and disseminator of the pushback process. Perhaps the most prominent and flagrant ploy was to accuse North Korea of not honoring commitments that it had not actually made given that the Singapore statement was intentionally vague. Naturally, no mention was made of U.S. failure to promote the peace process, nor of its attempts to hinder and prohibit, through its control of the so-called United Nations Command (not in fact a UN body), inter-Korean détente.⁵³ There were, however, occasional chinks in the propaganda curtain. For instance, CNN’s Will Ripley demolished the cheating accusation and injected a dose of reality—U.S. demands for “complete denuclearization” upfront was “a nonstarter for a nation that remains deeply suspicious of the outside world and would never leave itself strategically vulnerable simply for the promise of economic gain.”⁵⁴ So much for Trump’s real-estate fantasies. However, Ripley was very much a lone figure in the media landscape.

The campaign to demolish Trump’s idiosyncratic and confused peace negotiation had a natural, if unexpected, culmination in the Hanoi Summit. It was widely and reasonably supposed that this would follow the Singaporean format of happy photos and a joint statement of vague promise. It would be the calm before the storm and the real battle would be in Washington.⁵⁵ That a further attempt to derail negotiations would be made was no surprise, but the fact that it happened in Hanoi and not later in Washington was. It is generally supposed that the botching was deliberately engineered by Bolton with possible assistance from Pompeo. According to Japanese analyst Kuni Miyake:

When Trump was scheduled to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Vietnam, Bolton seems to have been successful in convincing—probably with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—him that he should walk out of the negotiation room unless Kim agreed to the so-called big deal based on the Libyan nuclear agreement of 2004.⁵⁶

Trump’s incomprehension about the issues, in particular what would be acceptable to the Koreans, and his susceptibility to being manipulated is clear enough, but it remains a mystery why he allowed himself to be publicly shafted. Perhaps he saw it as part of his unpredictability shtick and confirmation, in his eyes at least, that he was a smart negotiator who could walk away from a deal today to get a better one tomorrow.

The bungled summit at Hanoi led to a stalemate. It seemed that the establishment had won, that the octopus would be untrammeled by the dangers of reducing tension in Korea and invigorated by the rapidly deteriorating relationship with China, Iran, Venezuela, and Russia.

Shards of Hope in the Detritus of Hanoi

Gearing up for the 2020 presidential election, Trump needed something to tout as a foreign policy success. The confrontation with China was, predictably, producing all sorts of unwelcome consequences. The attempted coup in Venezuela had stalled. Fulminating against Iran was all very well, but Trump had a healthy fear of being dragged into another land war in the Middle East, and with a much more formidable adversary than Iraq or Afghanistan. When he was nearly maneuvered into an attack on Iran, he blinked. He became increasingly wary of Bolton and his penchant for war.⁵⁷

Kim took various steps to rescue the situation, attempting to draw the United States into meaningful negotiations but also continuing to prepare for the likelihood that the line would be broken and that the octopus, rather than being drawn into peaceful coexistence, would break free and resume the attack. On April 13 of this year, he gave a major policy speech before the Supreme People’s Assembly, in which he said, inter alia:

At the second DPRK-U.S. summit, we expressed our decision to take more prudent and trustworthy measures after setting stages and courses indispensable for the implementation of the June 12 DPRK-U.S. Joint Statement and expected a response from the U.S. to it.

But the U.S. came to the talks, only racking its brains to find ways that are absolutely impracticable.…

But as President Trump keeps saying, the personal ties between me and him are not hostile like the relations between the two countries and we still maintain good relations, as to be able to exchange letters asking about health anytime if we want.

If the U.S. adopts a correct posture and comes forward for the third DPRK-U.S. summit with a certain methodology that can be shared with us, we can think of holding one more talk.

However, what I feel now is if there will be any need to keep an attachment to the summit with the U.S. just because of the issue of sanctions relief.

Anyway, we will wait for a bold decision from the U.S. with patience till the end of this year but I think it will definitely be difficult to get such a good opportunity as the previous summit.…

Only when…written content favorable for the interests of both sides and acceptable to each other [is provided], I will sign the agreement without reserve.⁵⁸

While he set December 31 as an ultimatum date, Kim did not specify exactly what measures the DPRK would take if the United States did not return to negotiations in good faith and agree to a mutually acceptable compromise, merely warning of “another path.”⁵⁹ He cautioned that sanctions relief, though welcome, was not the essential issue. As a subsequent Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement reiterated, the hostility policy was “the root cause that pushed [North Korea] into a nuclear state.”⁶⁰

In early May, after the beginning of the first round of joint U.S.-Republic of Korea military exercises labeled Dong Maeng (Alliance), North Korea tested some short-range ballistic missiles. These did not violate the self-imposed moratorium on testing long-range missiles but were a warning that the moratorium was contingent on U.S. movement toward peace.⁶¹

If that was a stick, then maintaining and developing the personal relationship with Trump was the carrot. This was done by an exchange of letters: on June 11, 2019, Trump received what he described as “a beautiful letter” from Kim and, in return, Kim received “an excellent letter” from Trump containing “interesting proposals.” These were not specified, but Kim complimented the U.S. president for his “political judging faculty and extraordinary courage.”⁶² This strange and surprising bonhomie between what not so long ago were the “Rocket Man” and the “dotard” remains a fascinating mystery. On the Korean side, it is clearly instrumental, for all foreign leaders must try to cultivate a good relationship with U.S. presidents, whatever they might privately think of them. For Trump, it is probably more psychological than political, reflecting his sense of insecurity.⁶³ Perhaps now that Trump has a new best friend as British Prime Minister—he describes Boris Johnson as “Britain[’s] Trump,” and there can be no higher accolade—the relationship with Kim will become less significant.⁶⁴ As the veteran Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has pointed out, personal relationships can be important but they are subsidiary to political imperatives.⁶⁵ North Korea’s recently promoted First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui has described the Trump-Kim relationship as “mysteriously wonderful.”⁶⁶ Mysterious it certainly is, but given Trump’s volatility and the underlying thrust of U.S. policy, how long it will remain wonderful and to what effect is another matter.

Kim meanwhile has continued his campaign to improve relations with Russia and China to considerable success, at least in terms of political theater and symbolism. These visible aspects are very important, but the longer-term impact can be difficult to ascertain and the vital private discussions, agreements, and, more crucially, disagreements are below the surface and we can only speculate about them. For instance, the long-awaited summit between Putin and Kim that finally took place in Vladivostok from April 24 to 26 produced talk about “international security guarantees” with Russia as one of the guarantors.⁶⁷ This sent a warning to Washington—which unfortunately has a propensity not to hear, and certainly not to heed, advice—that the security of the DPRK was the key issue in which Russia, and by implication China, were vitally interested. However, security guarantees, Nuclear Weapons Free Zones, and peace treaties are ultimately only scraps of paper whose validity is contingent on political power and interest—and “a piece of paper is not going to do it.”⁶⁸ The United States can give a reasonably dependable security guarantee to the likes of Japan and South Korea because it is so much stronger than any possible challenger, and would usually quite relish the opportunity to go to war. But neither Russia nor China is in that position in relation to the United States. The credibility of their guarantees would depend on the degree to which U.S. action, say against the DPRK, directly threatened them. However, Putin and Kim no doubt also discussed how U.S. and U.S.-led Security Council sanctions could be circumvented, especially in relation to Korean migrant workers in Russia, though their economic importance is debated.⁶⁹

Xi’s visit to Pyongyang on June 20 and 21 was a diplomatic coup for Kim, being the first with President Xi on Korean soil. It was also a snub to South Korea, which had been talking for some time of a visit from Xi, only to have it postponed. Again, the symbolism of the public event was important, giving increased domestic prestige to Kim and putting pressure on the United States to move forward with negotiations. Presumably, both leaders discussed in private how to deal with the U.S. problem, which for the Chinese has greatly increased in virulence with attacks on Huawei and the trade war, though it has not reached the existential level felt by North Korea. The summit was yet another reminder that U.S. Korea policy must be analyzed within the context of the struggle to retain hegemony against China.⁷⁰

The North’s relationship with the South remained in a state of suspended animation. Moon’s inability to stand up to the United States and implement the Panmunjom Declaration was manifested in numerous ways. Continued joint military exercises, the deployment of F-35s (aimed more at China than North Korea), the failure to reopen the inter-Korean Kaesong Industrial Park, and the decision to build an aircraft carrier—an offensive weapons system par excellence—all added to the souring of the relationship.⁷¹ Although there was no formal break, Pyongyang made its displeasure known most tellingly in advising Seoul to stay out of its negotiations with Washington because its subservience had invalidated its role as intermediary, suggesting that “it’s better for the South Korean authorities to mind their own business at home.”⁷²

One of South Korea’s recurring nightmares is being sidelined in the U.S. treatment of Asia, which was one reason that Moon was so keen to assume the role of intermediary between Trump and Kim. But, again, South Korea was shunted to one side, in this case because of its failure to assert independence. Moon was not an honest broker, respected by both sides, but merely a messenger disdained by both. The most pressing political problem for Moon at the moment is the dispute with Japan over reparations for forced labor during the colonial period, which has led to Abe retaliating by imposing export controls on inputs vital to South Korea’s electronics industry.⁷³ South Korea knows full well that, as in the past, if the United States has to choose between its two Northeast Asian clients, it will choose Japan.⁷⁴ Whether these travails will break Moon or steel him to take a more independent role rather than just courting Trump is as yet unknown.

While developments with respect to Russia, China, and South Korea, and Kim’s perseverance and angling skill are important, Washington’s decisions are ultimately what count. Moreover, as previously mentioned, the U.S. “North Korea crisis” is primarily a domestic political issue. It has little military importance in itself (since the North Korea threat is bogus), but it does have serious implications for U.S. global hegemony and its forward strategy against China and Russia.

The American Octopus: Surface Convulsions, Internal Machinations

The octopoid nature of the U.S. state has manifested in various ways. To begin with, there have been continued rogue actions by state organs. In particular, a New York Federal District Court allowed the sale of the North Korean ship Wise Honest, which had been seized by the United States in May on the grounds that it had infringed Security Council sanctions. The U.S. court decreed that it could be sold and the proceeds given to the U.S. Warmbier family.⁷⁵ Otto Warmbier was a student given an inordinately long sentence for a petty but symbolic crime in North Korea, in a mechanism somewhat similar to the U.S. plea bargaining system.⁷⁶ He died, probably as the result of a botched suicide attempt, after being repatriated to the United States.⁷⁷ The unfortunate Warmbier became a cause célèbre much seized upon, not least by Trump. The actions of different parts of the U.S. state in the Wise Honest affair were clearly in violation of international law, but politically were somewhat different. The seizure might be seen as part of a deep state maneuver to derail U.S.-North Korea negotiations, while the District Court decision was probably more an expression of arrogant, exceptionalist extraterritoriality. The octopus has many tentacles.

The thing that naturally captured the most attention was Trump’s invitation to Kim to meet at Panmunjom—a stratagem very much in the Trump style. He outmaneuvered his minders (Bolton was sent to Mongolia for the day) and asserted his presidential authority, securing much media coverage in the process.⁷⁸ He became the first sitting U.S. president to stand in North Korea, a joke which no journalist should resist.⁷⁹ The pundits shook their heads and the Democratic Party presidential candidates were apoplectic.⁸⁰

On the face of it, Trump had broken the logjam and broken through the stalemate. There is some truth to this, including that the renewed contact with Kim (not quite a formal summit) opened up possibilities that Bolton’s derailing of the Hanoi summit had seemed to close off. But perhaps more important than this glittering, newsworthy, and theatrical spectacle, is a New York Times article entitled “In New Talks, U.S. May Settle for a Nuclear Freeze by North Korea,” which appeared on the same day, June 30. In it, authors Michael Crowley and David Sanger claimed that in the weeks leading up to the demilitarized zone meeting,

a real idea has been taking shape inside the Trump administration that officials hope might create a foundation for a new round of negotiations.

The concept would amount to a nuclear freeze, one that essentially enshrines the status quo, and tacitly accepts the North as a nuclear power, something administration officials have often said they would never stand for.…

While the approach could stop that arsenal from growing, it would not, at least in the near future, dismantle any existing weapons, variously estimated at 20 to 60. Nor would it limit the North’s missile capability.⁸¹

The article was important not merely because of what it said, but also because of who wrote it and for whom.

Sanger earned his nickname Scoop Sanger in the 1990s from his success in publishing journalistic scoops deriving from his role as a mouthpiece for elements of the intelligence community that wanted to influence government policy.⁸² It was Sanger who coauthored what was probably the most influential 2018 article—“In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception”—as part of the pushback against the Singapore Summit.⁸³ The obvious inaccuracies in the article and its agenda were so egregious that the executive editor of the Hankyoreh, South Korea’s leading liberal newspaper, wrote a personal open letter to his New York Times counterpart in protest.⁸⁴

The freeze proposal elaborated in “In New Talks, U.S. May Settle for a Nuclear Freeze by North Korea” has been around for some time, stretching back to the 1990s. In 2015, North Korea proposed a freeze on nuclear testing in exchange for a U.S. suspension of its huge military exercises with South Korea.⁸⁵ The Chinese took this up in their peace proposal of 2017.⁸⁶ The United States constantly rebuffed the proposal, presumably regarding the exercises not merely as an indispensable preparation for a possible invasion of the North but also presenting the most opportune time to do so when troops were mobilized, tensions were high, and an incident could easily be manufactured to blame North Korea for the outbreak of hostilities.⁸⁷

The idea of a freeze on testing overlaps with the concept of capping North Korea’s nuclear deterrent so it would continue to exist but not be expanded or exported. The main proponent of this has been Siegfried Hecker, the U.S. nuclear scientist who coined the term three nos—no more bombs, no better bombs, and no export.⁸⁸ The suggestion has been taken up by, among others, William Perry and James Mattis.⁸⁹ Hecker claims that it was first proposed to him on a visit to North Korea in 2006 by officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.⁹⁰

The capping proposal could form the basis for a resolution of the issue. From the North Korean side, it has the drawback that it probably leaves the deterrent program incomplete and not thoroughly tested. However, certainty is a luxury that North Korea can forgo in the circumstances. Since the country is, unlike China or Russia, a low-value target, it merely has to attain a level of perceived risk that would deter a U.S. attack. U.S. destruction of China would leave the world at its feet and would, in some eyes, justify considerable risk; the conquest of North Korea would achieve little and would remove a rationale for its forward position in Asia. Even the possibility that the Koreans might be able to retaliate with an ICBM would, in rational calculation, militate against attack.

The U.S. position on capping is more complex. As noted, the so-called North Korean crisis is essentially a domestic political issue (with some international implications) of perception rather than a military threat. However, this is not how it is usually portrayed, to a large degree because the officials, generals, politicians, and experts whose opinions dominate the media are dependent on the perception of external threat for their income. As a domestic political issue, it becomes a battleground between Democrats and Republicans, and those within the parties jostling for power.

Crowley and Sanger’s article is so important because it looks like kite-flying by powerful forces within the Trump administration. The run-up to the 2020 presidential election has begun. Russiagate has had a slow death, but even the Democrats have acknowledged that the Mueller investigation has failed to deliver.⁹¹ In his bid for reelection, Trump will face fierce opposition from the Democrats. Although he has the advantages of incumbency and the immigration issue, the state of the economy over the next year is uncertain and he is beset by numerous foreign policy problems. To appear to solve the North Korean crisis where his predecessors failed would be very welcome. Where Obama left the country in peril, Trump could point out that, on his watch, there have been no more North Korean nuclear and missiles tests, none will happen in the future, and the country is now safe. The fact that the United States was not in danger and that his predecessors did not fail because their policies produced desirable tension in East Asia, kept Japan and South Korea in line, and bolstered the containment of China is of no relevance and those consciously responsible would not admit it. It would be a variant of the Israel model of management of perception rather than reality. With no tests, people would forget today the weapons they had been so frightened about yesterday.⁹²

Trump would also claim that the deal with North Korea proves that he is a great negotiator and that building a relationship with Kim was something that only a person with his qualities could achieve. He ventured where lesser presidents feared to tread.

In reality, the freeze/capping proposal has been around for decades, but the United States had not responded. Times have changed and, in this very unequal contest, in North Korea’s favor. North Korea has achieved a sufficiently credible deterrent, with the ambiguity buffer allowing some maneuvering within the U.S. military establishment. North Korea’s relationships with the South, Russia, and especially China have greatly improved. It has shown reliance in the face of vicious economic and diplomatic warfare.

Kim has played the angler’s role with skill. North Korea has engaged with the U.S. octopus in a way that has evaded it in the past. What happens now depends on struggles within the octopus. Korean overtures are contingent on U.S. reciprocity and, if Washington does not begin addressing the key issues of security and sanctions, privately if not publicly, then Pyongyang will disengage, probably seeking sanctuary within the bosom of China and Russia as the new Cold War intensifies.

Convulsions in the Trump administration in September 2019 may signal a possible breakthrough in Korea policy in the run-up to the 2020 elections. The defenestration of the independent-minded Bolton and his replacement by O’Brien is significant not so much in terms of policy but in relationships. O’Brien shares Bolton’s enthusiasm for bellicose imperialism and has worked under him, but he is reportedly less personally abrasive and less adventurist.⁹³ Bolton’s dismissal was widely welcomed in much of the establishment (not least in the Pentagon, where “there were cheers”). Although O’Brien is a firm advocate for strengthening the U.S. Navy to counter China, he has shown no inclination to precipitate war.⁹⁴ He has published little on Korea and his book, While America Slept, while an attack on the Obama administration, contains little beyond standard clichéd references.⁹⁵

Bolton and Pompeo were often in dispute and, in fact, O’Brien was one of Pompeo’s suggestions for a replacement. The rumored promotion of Stephen E. Biegun, U.S. Special Representative for North Korea, to Deputy Secretary of State, replacing a Rex Tillerson appointee, also strengthens Pompeo’s hold on U.S. foreign policy.⁹⁶ This leaves U.S. Korea policy essentially unchanged but subtly different. If Pompeo decides that a capping deal will improve Trump’s reelection prospects, and if he decides that will advance his own personal ambitions, then he is in a stronger position to make this happen.

The Biegun appointment suggests a focus on Korea, which makes sense. The Trump administration is beset with problems at home with threatened impeachment and falling polls, and abroad with multiple challenges to hegemony. Despite all the brouhaha about the difficulty of negotiating with North Korea, it is in fact the most manageable of U.S. foreign policy issues. North Korea is strategic, flexible, would probably accept a “capping” compromise, and poses no military threat. With the rise of China and increased hostility, it is no longer as important as it used to be as a pretext for furthering military presence in Asia. It is essentially a matter of domestic political infighting and perception management. The establishment might be unhappy to cede a perceived success to Trump, but might cede one to Pompeo if he is seen as the best restraint on Trump and as a future “safe” president. However, whether such a peace settlement will prevail against hostility in the mass of the wider octopus remains unlikely and, at best, uncertain.

Citations

Citations

The Korean Linchpin: The Korean Peninsula's Enduring Centrality in U.S. Indo-Pacific Geostrategy - Monthly Review

Notes

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Industrial Agriculture: Lessons from North Korea

Notes

Tim Beal, “In Line of Fire: The Korean Peninsula in U.S.-China Strategy,” Monthly Review 73, no. 3 (July–August 2021): 92–111.

Beal, “In Line of Fire”; Martin Hart-Landsberg, “The Need for A New U.S. Foreign Policy Toward North Korea,” The Bullet, June 13, 2017.

John Halliday, “The North Korean Enigma,” New Left Review, I/127 (May–June 1981): 18–52; Joseph S. Nye Jr., “North Korean Enigma,” Korea Times, December 6, 2010.

Maddison Project Database, version 2018; Jutta Bolt, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Rebasing ‘Maddison’: New Income Comparisons and the Shape of Long-Run Economic Development,” GGDC Research Memorandum No. 174, Groningen Growth and Development Centre, Groningen University, Groningen, Netherlands, 2018, ggdc.net/maddison.

Gavan McCormack, “North Korea: Kimilsungism Path to Socialism?,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 13, no. 4 (1981): 50–60.

McCormack, “North Korea: Kimilsungism Path to Socialism?”

Life expectancy data from the United Nations, 2022 Revision of World Population Prospects (New York: UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2022), population.un.org/wpp.

Lucas Rengifo-Keller, “Food Insecurity in North Korea Is at Its Worst Since the 1990s Famine,” 38 North, January 19, 2023.

Andrew Natsios, The Great North Korean Famine (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001).

Natsios, The Great North Korean Famine, 92.

Woon Keun Kim, Hyunok Lee, and Daniel A. Sumner, “Assessing the Food Situation in North Korea,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 46, no. 3 (1998): 519–35.

Elizabeth Brun and Jacques Hersh, Socialist Korea: A Case Study in the Strategy of Economic Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 151.

Halliday, “The North Korean Enigma”; SeogKi Lee interviewed by Suk Lee, “Industries and Enterprises of North Korea: Facts, Concepts, and Trends,” Dialogue on the North Korean Economy (KDI Research Paper Series), Korean Development Institute, Sejong-si, South Korea, February 2022.

Halliday, “The North Korean Enigma”; Lee and Lee, “Industries and Enterprises of North Korea.”

Based on the Maddison Project Database, version 2018.

Marcus Noland, “Why North Korea Will Muddle Through,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 4 (1997): 105–18.

Based on the Maddison Project Database, version 2018.

Halliday, “The North Korean Enigma.”

Lee and Lee, “Industries and Enterprises of North Korea.”

Based on FAO data, fao.org/faostat.

Based on FAO data, fao.org/faostat.

Kim, Lee, and Sumner, “Assessing the Food Situation in North Korea.”

Kim, Lee, and Sumner, “Assessing the Food Situation in North Korea.”

See Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Ecosocialist Futures (London: Pluto Press, 2021) for further discussion.

Kim Il-Sung, Works, vol. 18, 184. Brun and Hersh quoted this article and examined the development of the four components in detail.

Kim, Lee, and Sumner, “Assessing the Food Situation in North Korea.”

Brun and Hersh, Socialist Korea, 222.

Central Intelligence Agency, Korea, The Economic Race Between the North and the South (Washington, DC: CIA National Foreign Assessment Center, 1978).

Brun and Hersh, Socialist Korea, 223.

Kim, Works, vol. 42, 306.

Kim, Works, vol. 42, 316.

Maddison Project Database, version 2018.

Based on FAO data, fao.org/faostat.

Based on FAO data, fao.org/faostat.

Soo-Young Choi, “Foreign Trade of North Korea, 1946–1988: Structure and Performance,” PhD dissertation, Northeastern University, Boston, 1991, 58.

Alexander Zhebin, “Russia and North Korea: An Emerging, Uneasy Partnership,” Asian Survey 35, no. 8 (1995): 726–39.

Choi, “Foreign Trade of North Korea,” 85–86.

Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 29.

Choi, “Foreign Trade of North Korea,” 231.

Choi, “Foreign Trade of North Korea,” 72.

Choi, “Foreign Trade of North Korea,” 210–17.

Choi, “Foreign Trade of North Korea,” 230–32.

For example, one source suggests that the Soviet Union sold crude oil at two-thirds of the world price. See Sang T. Choe, Hyun Jeong Cho, and Sang Jang Kwon, “North Korea’s Foreign Trade: An Indicator of Political Dynamics,” North Korean Review 2, no. 1 (2006): 27–37.

Zhebin, “Russia and North Korea”; Haggard and Noland, Famine in North Korea, 27.

All such treaties can be found in the Treaty Database maintained by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, treaty.mfa.gov.cn.

Haggard and Noland, Famine in North Korea, 32.

Kim, Works, vol. 44, 14.

Choi, “Foreign Trade of North Korea,” 281.

Kim, Works, vol. 43, 206.

Kim, Works, vol. 43, 207.

Ministry of Unification (South Korea), Understanding North Korea 2014 (Seoul: Ministry of Unification, 2014), 255.

Vincent Koen and Jinwoan Beom, “North Korea: The Last Transition Economy?,” Economics Department Working Paper No. 1607, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2020.

Koen and Beom, “North Korea: The Last Transition Economy?”

Choe et al., “North Korea’s Foreign Trade.”

Kim, Works, vol. 44, 8.

Kim, Works, vol. 44, 7.

Kim, Works, vol. 44, 2–6.

Kim, Works, vol. 44, 4.

This fertilizer data series is somewhat different from older FAO/WFP estimates reported elsewhere, such as in Haggard and Noland, Famine in North Korea, 33, but the scale and trend are comparable.

For example, see Haggard and Noland, Famine in North Korea, 176–82, and Cui Wen and Jin Hualin, “DPRK’s Policy for Economic Improvement and Evaluation in Kim Jeong-eun’s Era,” Journal of Yanbian University 48, no. 4 (2015): 25–32.

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization/World Food Programme (FAO/WFP), Joint Rapid Food Security Assessment: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 2019), 14.

FAO/WFP, Joint Rapid Food Security Assessment, 14.

FAO/WFP, Joint Rapid Food Security Assessment, 29.

FAO/WFP, Joint Rapid Food Security Assessment, 35.

Natsios, The Great North Korean Famine, 54.

FAO/WFP, Joint Rapid Food Security Assessment, 30.

For a detailed discussion on the different models of transition, see Zhun Xu, “Potential Reserve Army and Diverging Paths of Transition in (Former) Socialist Economies,” Science and Society 87, no. 1 (2023): 76–94.

Zhun Xu, “Farm Size, Capitalism, and Overuse of Agricultural Chemicals in China,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 31, no. 3 (2020): 59–74.

See a detailed analysis in John Bellamy Foster, “Ecological Civilization, Ecological Revolution: An Ecological Marxist Perspective,” Monthly Review 74, no. 5 (October 2022): 1–11.

Roger Atwood, “Organic or Starve: Can Cuba’s New Farming Model Provide Food Security?,” Guardian, October 28, 2017.

Based on FAO data, www.fao.org/faostat.

Miguel A. Altieri and Fernando R. Funes-Monzote, “The Paradox of Cuban Agriculture,” Monthly Review 63, no. 8 (January 2012): 23.

T. Whitney Jr., “‘Worse than the Special Period’: Cuba’s Food Situation More Desperate by the Day,” People’s World, August 16, 2023.

In Line of Fire: The Korean Peninsula in U.S.-China Strategy

Notes

Susan Ratcliffe, ed., Oxford Essential Quotations, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016), s.v. “Lord Palmerston 1784–1865, British statesman; Prime Minister, 1855–8, 1859–65.”

Jean-Pierre Lehmann, “Role Reversal: How Japan Became America’s Ally and China Fell from Grace,” East Asia Forum, May 4, 2014.

Hibiki Yamaguchi et al., “What Role Did the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Soviet Entry into the War Play in Japan’s Decision to Surrender in the Pacific War? Conversations with Tsuyoshi Hasegawa,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, September 15, 2019.

Henry R. Luce, “American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941.

Oriana Skylar Mastro, “Dynamic Dilemmas: China’s Evolving Northeast Asia Security Strategy,” Joint U.S.-Korea Academic Studies, October 7, 2016.

Charles Kraus, “Failed Diplomacy: Soviet-American Relations and the Division of Korea,” Wilson Center, May 18, 2020.

Judith Munro-Leighton, “The Tokyo Surrender: A Diplomatic Marathon in Washington, August 10–14, 1945,” Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 3 (1996): 455–73; Michael Fry, “National Geographic, Korea, and the 38th Parallel,” National Geographic, August 4, 2013.

James I. Matray, “Captive of the Cold War: The Decision to Divide Korea at the 38th Parallel,” Pacific Historical Review 50, no. 2 (1981): 145–68.

John Lewis Gaddis, “Reconsiderations: The Cold War Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point?,” Foreign Affairs, January 1974.

Catherine Lutz, “US Bases and Empire: Global Perspectives on the Asia Pacific,” Asia-Pacific Journal (2009).

Kori Schake et al., “Defense In Depth: Why U.S. Security Depends on Alliances—Now More Than Ever,” Foreign Affairs, November 23, 2020.

The U.S. position on the South China Sea and Taiwan is both fraudulent and sometimes risible. “Thus the United States for the past 21 years has been in the anomalous, but little-understood position of recognizing as the government of China a régime whose almost exclusive territorial base it refuses to acknowledge to be Chinese territory” (Jerome Alan Cohen, “Recognizing China,” Foreign Affairs, October 1971).

Lutz, “US Bases and Empire.”

Lee Soon-hyuk and Jung Nam-ku, “USFK to Become More ‘Flexible,’” Hankyoreh, February 4, 2012; Joseph Hincks, “Inside Camp Humphreys, South Korea: America’s Largest Overseas Military Base,” Time, July 12, 2018.

Jon Letman, “USAG Humphreys: The Story Behind America’s Biggest Overseas Base,” Diplomat, November 6, 2017.

Kornel Chang, “Independence without Liberation: Democratization as Decolonization Management in U.S.-Occupied Korea, 1945–1948,” Journal of American History 107, no. 1 (2020): 77–106.

Jung Hee-song, “Islanders Still Mourn April 3 Massacre,” Jeju Weekly, March 31, 2010.

Bruce Cumings, The Korean War (New York: Modern Library, 2010).

Tim Beal, “The Continuing Korean War in the Murderous History of Bombing,” Monthly Review 72, no. 8 (January 2021).

Blaine Harden, “The U.S. War Crime North Korea Won’t Forget,” Washington Post, March 24, 2015.

Sheng Yang and Han Zhang, “China Commemorates War Against US Aggression in Korea,” Global Times, October 19, 2020; Yan Xu, “Korean War Worth the Cost for China,” Global Times, October 27, 2020.

Dick K. Nanto, Mark E. Manyin, and Kerry Dumbaugh, China-North Korea Relations (Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, 2010).

Alan Romberg, “China and North Korea,” Nautilus, November 10, 2009.

Oriana Skylar Mastro, “Why China Won’t Rescue North Korea: What to Expect If Things Fall Apart,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 1 (2018).

“Multiple Home States [Korean Diaspora]” [in Korean], Ministry of Foreign Affairs, accessed May 28, 2021.

Myung-Ork Park, “North Korean Relations with China and the Soviet Union: The Impacts of Changes in the Leadership of the Two Communist Powers on North Korea” (master’s thesis, Eastern Illinois University, 1983); Nanto, Manyin, and Dumbaugh, China-North Korea Relations; B. C. Koh, “North Korea and the Sino-Soviet Schism,” Western Political Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1969): 940–62.

Antony J. Blinken, “Secretary Antony J. Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Director Yang And State Councilor Wang at the Top of Their Meeting,” State Department, March 18, 2021; Bruce Haigh, “China Wins on Points in Alaska—Making a Change in International Relations?,” Pearls and Irritations, March 22, 2021.

Jang-hie Lee, “In Name Only: The United Nations Command and U.S. Unilateralism in Korea,” Korea Policy Institute, July 1, 2020.

Seymour Melman, The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).

Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” January 17, 1961, available at ourdocuments.gov.

Jonathan Tepperman, “Can Biden End America’s Forever Wars?,” Foreign Policy, November 19, 2020.

Tim Beal, “The Western Frontier: US Sanctions Against North Korea and China,” in Sanctions as War, ed. Immanuel Ness and Stuart Davis (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952).

Bob Woodward and Mary Louise Kelly, “Interview With Bob Woodward, Part 1,” NPR, September 14, 2020.

Tim Beal, “Hegemony and Resistance, Compellence and Deterrence: Deconstructing the North Korean ‘Threat’ and Identifying America’s Strategic Alternatives,” Journal of Political Criticism 21 (2017): 57–113.

Van Jackson, “What Kim Jong Un Wants from Trump,” Politico, April 30, 2018.

Doug Bandow, “Could Tony Blinken Start a Crisis with North Korea?,” National Interest, January 21, 2021.

Son Hui Choe, “Statement of First Vice Foreign Minister of DPRK,” Montsame, March 18, 2021.

Bernard Gwertzman, “Papers Show U.S. Considered Ousting Rhee in Korean War,” New York Times, August 4, 1975; William Burr, “The United States and South Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Program, 1974–1976,” Wilson Center, March 14, 2017.

Kim Kyu-won, “At 2007 Inter-Korean Summit, Then-Pres. Roh Discussed Autonomy,” Hankyoreh, June 26, 2013; Tim Beal, “A Korean Tragedy,” Asia-Pacific Journal, August 15, 2017; Gregory Elich, “The U.S. Tightens its Grip on South Korea to Strengthen its Anti-China Alliance,” Zoom in Korea, December 11, 2019; Kim Ji-eun, Lee Wan, and Hwang Joon-bum, “Biden and Moon See Eye to Eye on N. Korea in First Phone Call Since Biden’s Inauguration,” Hankyoreh, February 5, 2021.

Yoo Kang-moon and Noh Ji-won, “US Wants to Expand the UNC’s Mission to Direct Crisis Management on the Korean Peninsula,” Hankyoreh, September 5, 2019.

“2021 Military Strength Ranking,” Global Firepower, accessed May 28, 2021; The Military Balance 2020 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2020).

The Military Balance 2020 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2020).

Gregory Elich, “Mapping the Future of the U.S.-South Korean Military Alliance,” Korea Policy Institute, December 4, 2012.

“2021 Military Strength Ranking”; Anthony H. Cordesman and Charles Ayers, The Military Balance in the Koreas and Northeast Asia (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2017).

Kim Kyu-won, “Defense Intelligence Director Says N. Korea Would Win in a One-on-One War,” Hankyoreh, November 6, 2013.

Charles Armstrong, “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam,” Critical Asian Studies 33, no. 4 (2001).

Jin-hwan Seok, “Biden Seeks Seoul’s Support on US ‘Rebalancing to Asia’ Policy,” Hankyoreh, December 7, 2013.

“ Korea Is World’s 4th-Largest Customer of U.S. Arms: Data,” Yonhap, December 16, 2019; Kim Myong-song, “Korea Biggest Buyer of American Weapons,” Chosun Ilbo, May 2, 2017.

“Nearly 80 Pct of S. Korea’s Foreign Arms Purchased from U.S.: Data,” Yonhap, October 6, 2019.

Kurt M. Campbell and Celeste Johnson Ward, “New Battle Stations?,” Foreign Affairs 82, no. 5 (2003); Leon Panetta, “Joint Press Conference with Secretary Panetta and Defense Minister Kim in the Pentagon Briefing Room,” Department of Defense, October 24, 2012.

S. Army, Reception, Staging, Onward Movement, and Integration Field Manual (Washington DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army, 1999); Lara Seligman, “Experts Question Wisdom of Canceling U.S. Exercises with South Korea, As Mattis Makes It Official,” Foreign Policy, June 26, 2018.

Yu Yong-weon, “Can THAAD Batteries Protect Seoul?,” Chosun Ilbo, July 11, 2016; Inwook Kim and Soul Park, “Deterrence under Nuclear Asymmetry: THAAD and the Prospects for Missile Defense on the Korean Peninsula,” Contemporary Security Policy, December 28, 2018.

Gregory Elich, “Threat to China: Pressure on South Korea to Join U.S. Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense System,” Global Research, July 1, 2014.

Tong Zhao, “How (and How Seriously) Does U.S. Missile Defense Threaten China?,” chap. 1 in Narrowing the U.S.-China Gap of Missile Defense (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2020); Teng Jianqun, “Why Is China Unhappy with the Deployment of THAAD in the ROK?,” China Institute of International Studies, April 1, 2015.

Robert C. Watts IV, “’Rockets’ Red Glare’: Why Does China Oppose THAAD in South Korea, and What Does It Mean for U.S. Policy?,” Naval War College Review 71, no. 2 (2018).

Yoo Kang-moon and Park Min-hee, “Trilateral Security Cooperation Collapses Amid SK-Japan Row,” Hankyoreh, August 23, 2019.

Bridget Martin, “Moon Jae-In’s THAAD Conundrum: South Korea’s ‘Candlelight President’ Faces Strong Citizen Opposition on Missile Defense,” Asia-Pacific Journal 15, no. 18 (2017); “Protesters Deter Shipments of Construction Materials onto THAAD Base in Seongju,” Yonhap, November 27, 2020.

Jina Kim, “China and South Korea’s Simmering THAAD Dispute May Return to the Boil,” East Asia Forum, February 22, 2019.

Yonhap, “Chinese Visitors Halved This Year Over THAAD Dispute,” Korea Times, December 13, 2017; Yonhap, “Lotte’s China Dream Shattered,” Korea Times, May 11, 2018; Lee Dong-hwi, “Lotte to Shut Down Chinese Department Stores,” Chosun Ilbo, July 30, 2018.

Jun Ji-hye, “THAAD Deployment Will Move Forward Despite Scandal: Pentagon,” Korea Times, November 30, 2016.

“Panmunjeom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification of the Korean Peninsula,” net [ROK Government], April 27, 2018.

“KCNA Blasts U.S. and S. Korea for Staging Large-scale Military Drill Against DPRK,” KCNA, May 16, 2018.

Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Suspends Major War Game with South Korea,” New York Times, June 18, 2018; Seligman, “Experts Question Wisdom of Canceling U.S. Exercises with South Korea”; Cheehyung Harrison Kim, “The US and South Korea Must Stop Threatening Kim Jong Un with War Drills,” NK News, March 7, 2021.

“It Will Be Hard to See Again Spring Days Three Years Ago,” Rodong Sinmun, March 16, 2021.

Michael Fullilove and Hervé Lemahieu, “North Korea Is a Dangerous Distraction,” Foreign Policy, May 23, 2018.

“The Struggle Over Chips Enters a New Phase,” Economist, January 23, 2021.

Kim Ji-eun, “US Reiterates Calls for S. Korea to Join Its Clean Network Against Chinese Tech,” Hankyoreh, October 15, 2020.

Clint Work, “Peace in Korea Won’t Eliminate the Need for American Troops,” Washington Post, September 25, 2018.

Gregory Elich, “Reminding South Korea Who Is Boss: Biden’s Enforcers Pay a Visit,” CounterPunch, March 25, 2021.

John Kifner, “John Service, a Purged ‘China Hand,’ Dies at 89,” New York Times, February 4, 1999.

W. Brands, “The Redacted Testimony That Fully Explains Why General MacArthur Was Fired,” Smithsonian, September 28, 2016.

Chester Bowles, “The ‘China Problem’ Reconsidered,” Foreign Affairs 3, no. 3 (1960).

Armstrong, “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam.”

Franz-Stefan Gady, “How the ‘Deep State’ Stopped a US President from Withdrawing US Troops from Korea,” Diplomat, June 15, 2018.

John Hay, “The Open Door Note [Submitted by U.S. Secretary of State, John Hay, September 6, 1899],” September 6, 1899.

Graham Allison, “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?,” Atlantic, September 25, 2015; Graham Allison, “The Thucydides Trap,” Foreign Policy, June 9, 2017.

Thomas J. Christensen, “There Will Not Be a New Cold War: The Limits of U.S.-Chinese Competition,” Foreign Affairs, March 24, 2021.

Ted Galen Carpenter, America’s Coming War with China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); John Pilger, “The Coming War on China,” CounterPunch, December 2, 2016; Robert D. Kaplan, “How We Would Fight China,” Atlantic, June 2005; Peter Navarro, The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Financial Times Press, 2008); James Dobbins et al., “Conflict with China: Prospects, Consequences, and Strategies for Deterrence,” Rand Arroyo Center, October 10, 2011; Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, “Competition with China Could Be Short and Sharp,” Foreign Affairs, December 17, 2020; Todd South, “What War with China Could Look Like,” Military Times, September 1, 2020.

Peter Apps, “Commentary: Here’s How a U.S.-China War Could Play Out,” Reuters, August 9, 2016.

Zhiqun Zhu, “The ‘Guyana Incident’ and Lessons for Taiwan’s International Space,” East Asia Forum, March 4, 2021.

Beal, “A Korean Tragedy.”

Tim Beal “The Angler and the Octopus,” Monthly Review 71, no. 6 (November 2019).

Kang Seung-woo, “Anti-China Alliance to Be Top Agenda Item in Korea-US Meetings Next Week, According to Experts,” Korea Times, March 13, 2021.

Kim So-hyun, “People Power Party Slams Moon’s ‘Submissive’ Attitude Towards NK,” Korea Herald, October 12, 2020; Romy Koo, “South Korean Conservatism Perpetuated by the Cho, Joong, Dong,” Foreign Affairs Review, January 14, 2021.

Yang Seung-sik, “S. Pushes Korea to Join Its Wars Overseas,” Chosun Ilbo, October 30, 2019; “Who Will Protect Korean Chipmakers in U.S.-China Wars?,” Chosun Ilbo, May 19, 2020; Victor Cha, “U.S. Must Help Korea if It Wants It to Join Anti-China Initiative,” Chosun Ilbo, June 28, 2020.

Mastro, “Why China Won’t Rescue North Korea.”

Gil Yun-hyung and Park Byong-su, “Could Japan Intervene Militarily on the Korean Peninsula?,” Hankyoreh, September 22, 2015.

“The ‘Existential Threat’ Posed by North Korea,” Atlantic Council, July 28, 2017; Ayanna Alexander, “DNI Coats: North Korea Is an ‘Existential Threat,’” Politico, February 13, 2018.

Kim Ji-eun, “Former World Leaders Call for Negotiations over North Korean Nuclear Program,” Hankyoreh, December 12, 2017.

Beal, “Hegemony and Resistance.”

“’All Options on Table’ with North Korea Says Haley, U.S. Ambassador to U.N.,” Newsweek, March 8, 2017.

Mallory Shelbourne, “McCain Calls North Korean Leader a ‘Crazy, Fat Kid,’” The Hill, March 22, 2017.

Victor Cha and David Kang, “Think Again: North Korea,” Foreign Policy, March 25, 2013; Fareed Zakaria, “We Think North Korea Is Crazy. What if We’re Wrong?,” Washington Post, July 6, 2017.

Kenneth N. Waltz, “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb,” Foreign Affairs 91, no. 4 (2012).

“Statement of DPRK Foreign Ministry Spokesman,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, December 24, 2017; “Statement by Head of the DPRK Delegation H. E. Ambassador Kim Song, Permanent Representative of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the United Nations at the General Debate of the 75th Session of the UN General Assembly,” Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Permanent Mission to the United Nations, September 29, 2020.

Jamil Anderlini, “Britain’s Colonial Crimes Come Back to Haunt Trade Negotiations,” Financial Times, March 18, 2020; John Cassidy, “Enter the Dragon,” New Yorker, December 5, 2010.

In fact, now China has rather more gunboats than Britain, which makes Boris Johnson’s imperial nostalgia fantasy of sending an aircraft carrier to make the Chinese cower “a potential act of breathtaking—and dangerous—stupidity” (Anatol Lieven, “Brexit Britain, the High Seas and Low Farce,” Prospect, February 3, 2021).

Kim Choong-ryung, “S. War on Huawei Puts Korea in a Bind,” Chosun Ilbo, May 23, 2019; Hyun Park, “How Can S. Korea Survive the US-China Trade War?,” Hankyoreh, November 22, 2020.

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The Angler and the Octopus: Kim Jong-un's Ongoing Peace Offensive

Notes

Yang Mo-deum, “Korea’s Per-Capita GDP Is Less Than 4% of S.Korea’s,” Chosun Ilbo, September 30, 2016.

For an extended historical survey and analysis of this issue, see Tim Beal, “Korea and Imperialism,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2nd ed., ed. Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope (New York: Springer, 2019).

Amia Srinivasan, “The Sucker, the Sucker!,” London Review of Books, September 7, 2017.

Jessica T. Mathews, “America’s Indefensible Defense Budget,” New York Review of Books, July 18, 2019.

Kim Jong-un, “New Year Address 2018,” Rodong Sinmun, January 1, 2018.

Ruediger Frank, “North Korea Is Not Desperate: The New Geostrategic Environment in East Asia,” 38 North, July 11, 2019.

Tim Beal, “A Korean Tragedy,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 15, no. 16 (2017); Tim Beal, “A Korean Tragedy: Update,” Zoom in Korea, September 12, 2017.

Seong Yeon-cheol and Kim Ji-eun, “President Moon Reiterates Commitment to Intense Sanctions and Pressure on North Korea,” Hankyoreh, December 1, 2017.

Kim Jong-un, “Kim Jong Un’s New Year Address,” Rodong Sinmun, January 1, 2018.

Yonhap, “South Korea Seeking Sanctions Waiver for Road Survey in North Korea” Korea Times, January 22, 2019.

“Third Plenary Meeting of Seventh C.C., WPK Held in Presence of Kim Jong Un,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs DPRK, April 21, 2018; Yonhap, “North Korea Decides to Suspend Nuclear, Missile Tests, Shut Down Atomic Test Site,” Korea Times, April 21, 2018.

“False Analogies: North Korea’s History of Missile Test Moratoria,” 38 North, May 6, 2019.

Kyodo, “US Conducts Subcritical Nuclear Test,” ABC, February 24, 2006; Ian Sample, “Is Britain Conducting Nuclear Tests?,” Guardian, February 25, 2006.

Ankit Panda and Vipin Narang, “North Korea’s Nuclear Program Isn’t Going Anywhere,” Foreign Affairs, August 13, 2018.

Jeffrey Lewis, “‘Your Mission Is to Keep All This from Collapsing into Nuclear Hellfire,’” Foreign Policy, September 18, 2018.

Mark Landler, “North Korea Asks for Direct Nuclear Talks, and Trump Agrees,” New York Times, March 8, 2018.

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons‎, 1952).

Jennifer Rubin, “Damage Control at White House to Reverse Trump’s Stunning Blunder,” Washington Post, March 9, 2018.

Victor Cha and Christian A. Katz, “What to Expect at the Second North Korea Summit,” Foreign Affairs, February 22, 2019; William J. Burns, “The Lost Art of American Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, March 27, 2019.

Stephen Costello, “Time to Internationalise Diplomacy with North Korea,” East Asia Forum, June 17, 2019.

“Pompeo Says God May Have Sent Trump to Save Israel from Iran,” BBC, March 22, 2019.

Thomas Wright, “John Bolton and Mike Pompeo Are Headed for a Clash,” Politico, May 9, 2018.

Michael J. Green, “Pyongyang Is Playing Washington and Seoul,” Foreign Policy, April 27, 2018.

Tsuneo Akaha, “Abe’s Gamble on Trump Threatens to Backfire,” East Asia Forum, July 8, 2019.

Jeffery Lewis, “The Real North Korea Summit Is Inside the Trump Administration,” Foreign Policy, February 26, 2019.

Tim Beal, “Abe Pulls It Off, but It Will End in Tears,” Zoom in Korea, October 24, 2017.

James Griffiths, “Chinese Defense Chief Says His Trip to Russia Is a Signal to the US,” CNN, April 4, 2018.

Tim Beal, “The United Nations and the North Korean Missile and Nuclear Tests,” NZ Journal of Asian Studies 9, no. 2 (2007). For a superb analysis of the role of the United States in establishing the United Nations and its strategic ambivalence to it, see Peter Gowan, “US : UN,” New Left Review 24 (2003); Joby Warrick, “How Russia Quietly Undercuts Sanctions Intended to Stop North Korea’s Nuclear Program,” Washington Post, September 11, 2017.

“Security Council Rejects Russian Request to Condemn Airstrikes in Syria,” UNSC, April 14, 2018.

Tapan Mishra, “2019 DPR Korea Needs and Priorities,” UN Resident Coordinator for DPR Korea, March 6, 2019.

Philip Rucker, “Trump: ‘We May Terminate’ U.S.-South Korea Trade Agreement,” Washington Post, April 28, 2017.

Yu Yong-weon, “S. Halts Process of Returning Full Troop Control to S.Korea,” Chosun Ilbo, September 18, 2017.

Gregory Elich, “THAAD Comes to Korea, But at What Cost?,” Counterpunch, August 16, 2016.

David Kang, “The Moon–Kim Summit Is the Main Event,” East Asia Forum, April 8, 2018.

“Blue House’s Potential Role of Mediator in NK-US Deadlock Is Significant,” Hankyoreh, March 19, 2019.

Bruce Cumings, “Fear and Loathing on the Pyongyang Trail: North Korea and the United States,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 3, no. 12 (2005).

Harold Pinter, “Art, Truth and Politics,” Nation, December 7, 2005.

“Venezuelan Foreign Minister Announces Group to Protect UN Charter’s Principles,” Telesur, February 14, 2019.

Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, “Pyongyang Joint Declaration of September 2018,” ROK Government, September 19, 2018; Nicholas L. Miller and Vipin Narang, “The Year of Living Dangerously with Nuclear Weapons,” Foreign Affairs, January 11, 2019.

Jung E-gil, “Kim Jong-un Says He Has No Plans for Unilateral Denuclearization,” Hankyoreh, September 11, 2018.

Simon Denyer, “Confusion over North Korea’s Definition of Denuclearization Clouds Talks,” Washington Post, January 16, 2019.

Morton Halperin, Peter Hayes, and Leon Sigal, “A Korean Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone Treaty and Nuclear Extended Deterrence: Options for Denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula,” NAPSNet Special Reports, April 12, 2018.

Kenneth N. Waltz, “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb: Nuclear Balancing Would Mean Stability,” Foreign Affairs 91, no. 4 (2012).

Franz-Stefan Gady, “How the ‘Deep State’ Stopped a US President from Withdrawing US Troops From Korea,” Diplomat, June 15, 2018.

Peter Hayes and Moon Chung-in, “Park Chung Hee, the CIA & the Bomb,” Global Asia 6, no. 3 (2011).

For a chronology of summits and key events, as well as a bibliography to accompany this article, see Tim Beal, “The Angler and the Octopus: Supplementary Documents to Article Published in Monthly Review,” available athttp://timbeal.net.nz 25 the “Asian Geopolitics” section.

John Bolton, “Interview: Trump-Kim Talks to be ‘A Very Short Meeting’ if Pyongyang Won’t Discuss Denuclearization,” Radio Free Asia, March 23, 2018.

Ashley Parker and Simon Denyer, “Still Angling for a Deal, Trump Backs Kim Jong Un over Biden, Bolton and Japan,” Washington Post, May 27, 2019.

Beal, “Korea and Imperialism.”

Yonhap, “Mattis: N. Korea Is Most Urgent Threat to US,” Korea Herald, December 4, 2018; Lim Min-hyuk, “S. Ambassador Urges Caution in Ending Korean War,” Chosun Ilbo, August 3, 2018; Christopher Hill, “The U.S. Needs a New North Korea Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, September 5, 2018; Alexander Smith, “Experts Dismiss North Korea’s Latest Concession to U.S.,” NBC, October 8, 2018; Hayley Miller, “Leon Panetta Says Trump’s ‘Failed’ North Korea Summit Was ‘Doomed’ from the Start,” Huffington Post, September 2, 2018.

Jacqueline Thomsen, “DOJ Charges North Korean National in Sony, WannaCry Attacks,” Hill, September 6, 2018; “US Imposes Sanctions on Three Top North Korean Officials,” Guardian, December 10, 2018.

“Seoul, Washington Need to Stop Talking up N.Korea Deal,” Chosun Ilbo, July 9, 2018.

Kim Myong-chol and Pak Chol-gu, “DPRK Perspectives on Ending the Korean Armistice,” NAPSnet Policy Forum Online, May 7, 1997.

Will Ripley, “When It Comes to North Korea, Who’s Really Being Deceptive?,” CNN, November 14, 2018.

Lewis, “The Real North Korea Summit Is Inside the Trump Administration.”

Kuni Miyake, “Is John Bolton Our Last Hope?,” Japan Times, July 8, 2019.

Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Undercuts Bolton on North Korea and Iran,” New York Times, May 28, 2019.

Kim Jong-un, “Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un Makes Policy Speech at First Session of 14th SPA,” Rodong Sinmun, April 13, 2019.

Lee Je-hun, “Kim Jong-un Sets Timeline for Third Summit with US,” Hankyoreh, April 15, 2019.

“S. Secretary of State Slammed,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs DPRK, April 18, 2019.

Ankit Panda and Vipin Narang, “Why North Korea Is Testing Missiles Again: Is a Much Larger Escalation on the Horizon?,” Foreign Affairs, May 16, 2019.

Simon Denyer, “North Korea’s Kim Receives ‘Excellent Letter’ from Trump, State Media Says,” Washington Post, June 23, 2019; Lee Je-hun, “The Resumption of Trump and Kim’s Correspondence Diplomacy,” Hankyoreh, June 24, 2019.

Isabel Oakeshott, “Britain’s Man in the US Says Trump Is ‘Inept’: Leaked Secret Cables from Ambassador Say the President Is ‘Uniquely Dysfunctional and His Career Could End in Disgrace,’” Mail on Sunday, July 7, 2019.

David Smith, “Trump Hails ‘Good Man’ Boris Johnson and Says of UK: ‘They Like Me Over There,’” Guardian, July 23, 2019.

“Sergey Lavrov’s Interview with the Newspaper Argumenty i Fakty,” Saker, July 17, 2019.

Simon Denyer and Carol Morello, “North Korea Threatens to Suspend Denuclearization Talks with the United States,” Washington Post, March 15, 2019.

Amie Ferris-Rotman and Simon Denyer, “Putin: Kim Jong Un Needs International Security Guarantees to Give Up Nuclear Arsenal,” Washington Post, April 25, 2019.

Gregory Elich, “How Real Is the Trump Administration’s New Flexibility with North Korea?,” Counterpunch, July 12, 2019.

Andrew Salmon, “Kim in Russian Far East for Putin Pow-Wow,” Asia Times, April 24, 2019.

Ellen Nakashima, Gerry Shih, and John Hudson, “Leaked Documents Reveal Huawei’s Secret Operations to Build North Korea’s Wireless Network,” Washington Post, July 22, 2019.

Yu Yong-weon, “Korea Threatens Seoul Over Purchase of Stealth Fighters,” Chosun Ilbo, July 12, 2019; Yi Whan-woo, “North Korea Criticizes Seoul over Military Drills with US,” Korea Times, July 16, 2019; Yu Yong-weon, “Korea to Build Light Aircraft Carrier,” Chosun Ilbo, July 23, 2019.

Kim Hyung-jin, “North Korea Urges South to Stop Mediating between North, US,” AP, June 27, 2019.

Seong Yeon-cheol, “Moon Meets with S. Korea Business Community for Ways to Respond to Export Controls,” Hankyoreh, July 11, 2019.

Lee Min-hyung, “Washington Unwilling to Actively Mediate Seoul-Tokyo Trade Friction,” Korea Times, July 17, 2019; “Korea Cannot Hope for U.S. Support in Spat with Japan,” Chosun Ilbo, July 16, 2019.

Lee Je-hun, “US Federal Court Approves Request to Sell Seized N. Korean Cargo Ship,” Hankyoreh, July 22, 2019.

The Sigley affair, where an Australian student was expelled rather than imprisoned over some misdemeanor, suggests that the North Korean authorities have learned a lesson. Choe Sang-hun, “North Korea Accuses Expelled Australian Student of Spying,” New York Times, July 6, 2019.

Doug Bock Clark, “The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier, American Hostage,” QC, July 23, 2018.

David Nakamura, “Beyond ‘Freedom’s Frontier,’ Trump Scores His Biggest Live Show Yet in North Korea,” Washington Post, June 30, 2019.

Seung Min Kim and Simon Denyer, “Trump Becomes First Sitting President to Set Foot into North Korea,” Washington Post, June 30, 2019.

Rachel Siegel, “Democratic Presidential Contenders Slam Trump for His Meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un,” Washington Post, June 30, 2019.

Michael Crowley and David E. Sanger, “In New Talks, U.S. May Settle for a Nuclear Freeze by North Korea,” New York Times, June 30, 2019.

Bruce Cumings, “Wrong Again,” London Review of Books 25, no. 23 (2003); Jeffery Lewis, “That Secret Iranian ‘Nuclear Facility’ You Just Found? Not So Much,” Foreign Policy, March 3, 2015; Jeffrey Lewis, “David Sanger: Two Time Loser on Kilju and Kumchang-ri?,” Arms Control Wonk, May 21, 2005.

David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception,” New York Times, November 12, 2018.

Kim Jong-gu, “An Open Letter to the NY Times,” Hankyoreh, December 4, 2018.

Choe Sang-hun, “North Korea Offers U.S. Deal to Halt Nuclear Test,” New York Times, January 10, 2015.

Chris Buckley and Somini Sengupta, “S. and South Korea Rebuff China’s Proposal to Defuse Korea Tensions,” New York Times, March 8, 2017.

David E Sanger, “Rex Tillerson Rejects Talks with North Korea on Nuclear Program,” New York Times, March 17, 2017.

Siegfried S. Hecker and Beth Duff-Brown, “Interview with Siegfried Hecker: North Korea Complicates the Long-Term Picture,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 5, 2013.

Geoffrey Fattig, “How the U.S. Could Provoke a New Korean War,” Foreign Policy in Focus, December 11, 2017; William Perry and Yi Yong-in, “Former US Secretary of Defense Favors “Three Nos” on North Korean Nukes,” Hankyoreh, October 3, 2016.

Siegfried S. Hecker et al., “Report on North Korean Nuclear Program,” Center for International Security and Cooperation, November 15, 2006.

Dan Balz, “Democrats Are Now Left with One Option to End Trump’s Presidency: The 2020 Election,” Washington Post, July 24, 2019; Marc Fisher, “On Mueller’s Final Day on the National Stage, a Halting, Faltering Performance,” Washington Post, July 24, 2019.

Crowley and Sanger, “In New Talks, U.S. May Settle for a Nuclear Freeze by North Korea.”

Peter Baker, “Trump Names Robert O’Brien, a Hostage Negotiator, as National Security Adviser,” New York Times, September 18, 2019.

Karen DeYoung, Josh Dawsey, and John Hudson, “John Bolton’s Turbulent Tenure Comes to a Trumpian End,” Washington Post, September 10, 2019; Robert O’Brien, “The Korean Crisis Demonstrates the Need for a Strong United States Navy,” Daily Caller, November 29, 2010.

Robert C. O’Brien, While America Slept (New York: Encounter, 2016).

John Wagner and John Hudson, “Trump Taps Robert C. O’Brien to Replace John Bolton as National Security Adviser,” Washington Post, September 18, 2019; Josh Rogin, “Trump Is Expected to Tap North Korea Envoy for Deputy Secretary of State,” Washington Post, September 17, 2019.