North Korea Iran And The Challenge To International Order

This book examines and compares the political situations in North Korea and Iran, and the contemporary security challenges posed by their illicit nuclear aspirations. While government officials, including a series of American presidents, strategic policy documents and outside analysts have repeatedly noted that North Korea and Iran occupy a similar challenge, the commonality has largely been left unexplored. This book argues that North Korea and Iran are uniquely common in the world today in their illicit nuclear aspirations in violation of their legal commitments made under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The work evaluates alternative arguments, some of which sustain that the two states should be grouped together based on other metrics, such as nuclear powers that sponsor terrorist organizations or nuclear states that violate human rights, and find alternative explanations do not hold up to empirical scrutiny. Drawing on newly declassified documents and Iranian and North Korean sources, the book provides a comprehensive and comparative assessment of the two states’ social, historical, economic, and domestic political structures and situation to make these determinations. Furthermore, it reviews the nuclear issue stemming from Iran and North Korea and the efforts to constrain these programs. The book concludes with specific policy recommendations that apply diplomatic lessons learned from dealing with Iran to North Korea and vice versa. This book will be of interest to students of nuclear proliferation, international security, foreign policy and International Relations.

North Korea possesses nuclear weapons, while Iran is poised to acquire them in the next decade. How the United States and other nations seek to roll back these burgeoning nuclear powers is among the most urgent issues of the day. At stake is regional security in the Persian Gulf and Northeast Asia, America's standing abroad, and prospects for nuclear non-proliferation. This book offers complementary international perspectives on these threats and the peaceful responses to grapple with the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. Leading authorities provide balanced analyses—together with new chronologies and maps—that make the volume an invaluable reference for all those interested in understanding options available in dealing with Iran and North Korea. The contributors to this volume offer complementary international perspectives on the critical security issues that stem from the challenges posed by Iran and North Korea. No other work combines the analysis of the two countries and explores the threat posed by each to regional stability and world order. The book examines how and why attempts to curb the nuclear programs and broader political ambitions of each nation have failed. It also examines how each nation, in its own way, has managed to defy the world's preponderant power, the United States, as well as other major powers and the United Nations. And it offers analysis on where the fractured and oscillating relations with these two nettlesome actors are heading and the long-term implications of their current trajectories for nuclear proliferation, deterrence, alliance management, regional security, and world order.

"The book examines the relationship between nuclear proliferation and regional order in East Asia and the Middle East, looking at what factors shape the perceptions and responses of relevant regional actors to North Korea and Iran, why some of these regional actors cooperate with the United States while others do not, and the consequences of shifting relations among these countries"--

Diplomatic expert Patrick McEachern unpacks the contentious and tangled relationship between the two Koreas in an approachable question-and-answer format.

This book examines theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of middle powers with reference to South Korea’s bilateral relations with Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Iraq. It maps the development, political and diplomatic trajectories between South Korea and Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Iraq against the historical backdrop of ROK-US alliance and the rise of China. Jeong provides a nuanced analysis of the intersectionality of political economy and foreign policy analysis contextualizing state-building processes in ROK and the Middle Eastern countries. This accessible book is intended for students and scholars in area studies and international affairs, career diplomats, and South Korean businesses in the Middle East. It should also prove of practical value for journalists and policy makers who are interested in studying the nexus of domestic, regional and international factors that have configured South Korea’s Middle East policy.

Over recent decades South Korea’s vibrant and distinctive populist culture has spread extensively throughout the world. This book explores how this "Korean wave" has also made an impact in North Korea. The book reveals that although South Korean media have to be consumed underground and unofficially in North Korea, they are widely watched and listened to. The book examines the ways in which this is leading to popular yearning in North Korea for migration, defecting to the South or for people to just become more like South Koreans. Overall, the book demonstrates that the soft power of the Korean wave is having an undermining impact on the hard, constraining cultural climate of North Korea.

This book offers a case study in foreign policy change: It examines why the Bush administration suddenly redirected its nuclear nonproliferation policy toward North Korea in the aftermath of North Korea's first nuclear test in October 2006, abandoning its former confrontational approach in favor of a more accommodating line. Existing explanations of this course reversal draw on the security implications of a growing crisis on the Korean Peninsula, U.S. domestic politics, and changing decision-making dynamics within the Bush administration. Employing before-after comparison, the study refutes these accounts - and it offers an alternative explanation: The Bush administration altered its nonproliferation policy toward North Korea toward a cooperative course because after the nuclear test, it perceived fundamentally improved prospects for fruitful cooperation on North Korea's denuclearization.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks starkly recast the U.S. debate on "rogue states." In this new era of vulnerability, should the United States counter the dangers of weapons proliferation and state-sponsored terrorism by toppling regimes or by promoting change in the threatening behavior of their leaders? Regime Change examines the contrasting precedents set with Iraq and Libya and provides incisive analysis of the pressing crises with North Korea and Iran. A successor to the author's influential Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy (2000), this compelling book clarifies and critiques the terms in which today's vital foreign policy and security debate is being conducted.