The Prospects For North Korea Survival

North Korea’s economic and security policies imperil both itself and its neighbours. The economy has been contracting for almost a decade, and the regime appears unwilling or unable to arrest the decline. Instead, Pyongyang has resorted to begging for international aid. This approach alone cannot work: fundamental reform is needed; without it, the regime cannot survive. In the meantime, the North’s problems will be destabilising for the region. Pyongyang has secured short-term international humanitarian assistance, but in the long term the South is its best hope for investment and economic help. Despite Pyongyang’s defensive approach to the South, limited commercial arrangements are in place, and may moderate the North’s policies and help to ease the unpredictable consequences of Pyongyang’s collapse. Pyongyang has tried to improve relations with the US in a bid to ease economic sanctions and attract investment. However, the nuclear deal reached with the US in October 1994 – under which the North agreed to give up its ambiguous nuclear programme – is in difficulties. In this paper, David Reese argues that, despite these problems, the North’s neighbours must persevere with engagement policies. At the same time, South Korea and the US must maintain their security posture on the Peninsula. South Korean President Kim Dae Jung’s attempts to establish commercial links with the North need time and patience, and should not be derailed by relatively minor incidents. Both Seoul and Washington must ensure that they coordinate their policies to prevent the North from playing one off against the other. Selectively easing sanctions on a case-by-case basis could allow the North to earn desperately needed hard currency. Although it is difficult for Washington and Seoul to maintain political support for engagement, both should make further efforts to draw the North into making significant policy changes. The US and South Korea should ensure that they involve the interested regional parties in efforts to draw the North into the international community. China has a key role to play in developments on the Peninsula. Both Seoul and Washington should therefore ensure that they work closely with Beijing. While historical sensitivities make it difficult for Japan to play a leading role, Tokyo would be central to the North’s economic recovery, and must not be marginalised. Russia also has a contribution to make to the broader security guarantees which could develop from accommodation between North and South. Ultimately, the course of events on the Peninsula will depend primarily on the North. Pyongyang shows little sign of being prepared to engage constructively with the US and South Korea. As its economy deteriorates, its options will narrow further. Until domestic forces in North Korea shift, the US and its allies should expect a protracted phase of desultory and sometimes destabilising diplomatic manoeuvres by Pyongyang.

David Reese argues that, despite North Korea's problems, the North's neighbours must persevere with engagement policies. At the same time, South Korea and the US must maintain their security posture on the Peninsula.

Featuring contributions by some of the leading experts in Korean studies, this book examines the political content of Kim Jong-Il's regime maintenance, including both the domestic strategy for regime survival and North Korea's foreign relations with South Korea, Russia, China, Japan, and the United States. It considers how and why the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) became a "hermit kingdom" in the name of Juche (self-reliance) ideology, and the potential for the barriers of isolationism to endure. This up-to-date analysis of the DPRK's domestic and external policy linkages also includes a discussion of the ongoing North Korean nuclear standoff in the region.

A country of stark contradictions and puzzles, North Korea exhibits uncanny resilience in the face of external shocks and internal woes, raising important questions of theoretical and real-world significance. What has made it possible for North Korea to defy the classical realist axiom, 'The strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept'? What is the nature of the North Korean threat in post-Cold War Northeast Asia? What kind of bargaining leverage does Pyongyang exercise in system-maintaining survival strategies? What are North Korea's prospects for sustaining such survival strategies in the uncertain years ahead? This volume offers a major reappraisal of the changing relationship between North Korea and its neighboring powers in the post-Cold War era in both theoretical and practical terms. The contributors examine the complex interplay of global, regional, and national forces that have influenced and shaped the changing patterns of conflict and cooperation in North Korea's relationships with China, Russia, and Japan and with the United States. Within the context of Northeast Asian geopolitics, the book tracks, explains, and assesses North Korea's survival strategies in both the security and economic domains, as well as the prospects of these strategies in the coming years.

In September 2017, North Korea shocked the world by exploding the most powerful nuclear device tested anywhere in 25 years. Months earlier, it had conducted the first test flight of a missile capable of ranging much of the United States. By the end of that year, Kim Jong Un, the reclusive state's ruler, declared that his nuclear deterrent was complete. Today, North Korea's nuclear weapons stockpile and ballistic missile arsenal continues to grow, presenting one of the most serious challenges to international security to date. Internal regime propaganda has called North Korea's nuclear forces the country's "treasured sword," underscoring the cherished place of these weapons in national strategy. Fiercely committed to self-reliance, Kim remains determined to avoid unilateral disarmament. Kim Jong Un and the Bomb tells the story of how North Korea-once derided in the 1970s as a "fourth-rate pipsqueak" of a country by President Richard Nixon-came to credibly threaten the American homeland by November 2017. Ankit Panda explores the contours of North Korea's nuclear capabilities, the developmental history of its weapons programs, and the prospects for disarming or constraining Kim's arsenal. With no signs that North Korea's total disarmament is imminent over the next years or even decade, Panda explores the consequences of a nuclear-armed North Korea for the United States, South Korea, and the world.

Viewed from afar, North Korea may appear bizarre, or positively irrational. But as Nicholas Eberstadt demonstrates in this meticulously researched volume, there is a grim coherence to North Korea's political economy, and a ruthless logic undergirding it--one that unreservedly subordinates economic welfare to augmentation of political power. Thus, paradoxically, even as official policies and practices consign the DPRK economy to a perilous realm between crisis and catastrophe, the country's leadership maintains unchallenged domestic control and has actually managed to increase its international influence.Through painstaking collection of hard-to-uncover data and careful analysis, Eberstadt provides a quantitative tableau of North Korea's terrible failure in its economic race against South Korea; its stubborn adherence to policies all but guaranteed to stifle growth and undermine economic performance; and the longstanding official effort to ignore, or mitigate, pressures for economic reform.Eberstadt is skeptical of optimistic accounts from South Korea and elsewhere suggesting that the North Korean leadership is interested in resolving the current nuclear impasse, and getting on with the business of reform and development. So long as Pyongyang's rulers entertain the ambition of reunifying the Korean peninsula on its own terms, Eberstadt argues, economic reforms worthy of the name will be subversive of state authority--and vigilantly resisted by Pyongyang's rulers. This authoritative volume has received widespread attention from Asian specialists, well as those concerned with nuclear proliferation and world peace, and international relations professionals in general.

In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. Based on vast expertise, this book reveals how average North Koreans live, how their leaders rule, and how both survive

Featuring contributions by some of the leading experts in Korean studies, this book examines the political content of Kim Jong-Il's regime maintenance, including both the domestic strategy for regime survival and North Korea's foreign relations with South Korea, Russia, China, Japan, and the United States. It considers how and why the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) became a "hermit kingdom" in the name of Juche (self-reliance) ideology, and the potential for the barriers of isolationism to endure. This up-to-date analysis of the DPRK's domestic and external policy linkages also includes a discussion of the ongoing North Korean nuclear standoff in the region.