North Korea INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Figure 2. North Korea in Its Asian Setting, 1992
Since the end of the Korean War, the two Koreas have faced
each other across the Demilitarized Zone
(DMZ--see Glossary),
engaged most of the time in unremitting, withering, unregenerate
hostility, punctuated by occasional, brief thaws and increasing
exchanges between P'yongyang and Seoul. Huge armies still are
poised to fight at a moment's notice
(see Military Heritage
, ch.
5). The emergence of the Sino-Soviet conflict in 1969, the United
States opening to China in 1971-72, and the end of the Second
Indochina War in 1975, however, were some of the watershed
changes in world politics that both seemed to empty the Cold War
logic of its previous meaning and changed the great power
configuration.
The strategic logic of the 1970s had an immediate and
beneficial impact on Korea. The Nixon administration withdrew a
division of United States soldiers from South Korea. North Korea
responded by virtually halting attempts at infiltration (compared
with 1968, when more than 100 soldiers died along the DMZ and the
United States spy ship Pueblo was seized) and by
significantly reducing the defense budget in 1971. In what seemed
to be a miraculous development, the Koreas held talks at a high
level. These talks between the director of the Korean Central
Intelligence Agency and Kim Yng-ju, Kim Il Sung's younger
brother, in early 1972, culminated in a July 4, 1972,
announcement that both sides would seek reunification peacefully,
independently of outside forces, and with common efforts toward
creating a "great national unity" that would transcend the many
differences between the two systems. Within a year, however, this
initiative had effectively failed
(see Foreign Policy
, ch. 4).
United States policy again shifted, if less dramatically,
when the administration of Jimmy Carter announced plans for a
gradual but complete withdrawal of United States ground forces
from South Korea (air and naval units would remain deployed in or
near Korea). At that time, a prolonged period of North Korean
courting of the United States began. In 1978, however, the first
of the large-scale military exercises called Team Spirit,
involving more than 200,000 United States and South Korean
troops, was held. And, in 1979, the Carter administration dropped
its program of troop withdrawal in reaction to North Korea's
rapid and extensive upgrading of its army and the discovery of
North Korean-built tunnels under the DMZ; the administration
committed itself to a modest but significant build-up of force
and equipment levels in South Korea.
In the late 1970s, P'yongyang's policy towards Moscow and
Beijing was somewhat of a balancing act. Nonetheless, North Korea
began using a term of opprobrium for Soviet imperialism,
dominationism (chibaejui), a term akin to the
Chinese term, hegemonism. By and large, P'yongyang adhered
to the Chinese foreign policy line during the Carter years, while
taking care not to antagonize the Soviet Union needlessly. When
Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, North Korea forcefully and
publicly condemned the invasion while maintaining a studied
silence when China responded by invading Vietnam.
By the early 1980s, changing United States-China relations
also had repercussions in the two Koreas. China said publicly
that it wished to play a role in reducing tension on the Korean
Peninsula. In January 1984, for the first time, a major North
Korean initiative called for three-way talks between the United
States, South Korea, and North Korea. Through most of the 1980s,
China sought to sponsor talks between Washington and P'yongyang--
talks that occasionally took place in Beijing at the ministercounselor level--and encouraged Kim Il Sung to take the path of
diplomacy.
The reemergence of detente between the United States and the
Soviet Union in the mid-1980s has provided a major opportunity to
resolve the Korean confrontation. Seoul, more than P'yongyang,
has been effective in exploiting these new opportunities. As
Seoul's prestige has grown, it has clearly put P'yongyang on the
defensive, perhaps more than at any time since the Korean War.
The sharp changes in world politics in the late 1980s placed the
fate of the Kim regime in the balance. If North Korea survives
amid the failure of most other communist systems, it will be
because of the historical, nationalistic, and indigenous roots
that its leaders have sought to foster since the 1940s. Drawing
on a tradition of resistance to foreign pressure going back to
the states of Kogury and Parhae, the North Koreans demonstrated
their tenacity and their resilience during the time of the Korean
War. They will probably find the 1990s equally challenging.
* * *
For additional reading on pre-twentieth century history, see
Carter J. Eckert, Ki-baik Lee, Young Ick Lew, Michael Robinson,
and Edward W. Wagner's Korea Old and New; Han Woo-keun's
The History of Korea; and James B. Palais's Politics
and Policy in Traditional Korea. For the colonial period,
consult Carter J. Eckert's Offspring of Empire; Sang Chul
Suh's Growth and Structural Changes in the Korean Economy,
1910-1945; and Michael Robinson's Cultural Nationalism in
Korea, 1920-25. On the origins of Korean nationalism and
communism, see Chong-Sik Lee's The Politics of Korean
Nationalism; Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-Sik Lee's
Communism in Korea (2 vols.); and Dae-sook Suh's The
Korean Communist Movement, 1918-48 and Kim Il Sung.
The Korean War and its origins are covered in Bruce Cumings's
The Origins of the Korean War (2 vols.); Rosemary Foote's
The Wrong War; and Peter Lowe's The Origins of the
Korean War. On North Korea, see the volumes by Robert A.
Scalapino and Chong-Sik Lee, and Ellen Brun and Jacques Hersh's
Socialist Korea. A good study of North Korea's agrarian
socialism is provided in Mun Woong Lee's Rural North Korea
under Communism. A recent survey of North Korea's
international relations and American policy toward North Korea
can be found in Selig S. Harrison's (ed.) Dialogue with North
Korea. (For further information and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of June 1993
|