“America always targets countries that
have had an anti-colonial and anti-feudal revolution.”—Domenico Losurdo1
The DPRK’s constitution shows that the North Korean state has an orientation that is diametrically opposed to the Wall Street-directed project of empire building. The DPRK defines itself as a socialist state representing the interests of all Koreans, independent and politically, economically, culturally and militarily sovereign, self-sufficient and self-reliant in defense, and guided by the supreme national task of reunifying the country.
The ROK also seeks, so it says, “unification based on the principles of freedom and democracy,”2 namely, on its own terms, though without defining what “freedom” and “democracy” are to be taken to mean. However, given the state’s history of military dictatorship, concentration camps, extermination of leftists, and anti-Left secret police, we can infer that freedom and democracy are not intended in a universal sense, but as applying exclusively to right-wing collaborators with the US occupation. The ROK speaks of “unification” contra the DPRK’s “re-unification,” consistent with the former’s shamelessly defining the Republic of Korea as encompassing the Korean peninsula in its entirety.
The DPRK defines itself as “a revolutionary State” originating “in the struggle to achieve the liberation of the homeland.” The state, then, is conceived as developing out of the national revolution for independence. It is guided by Juche (self-reliance and independence in matters of politics, economics, culture and the military) and Songun (the primacy of self-defense in the allocation of resources). Juche is a reflection of the reality that only Koreans can vouchsafe Korea’s freedom, and Songun a sine qua non in the face of the existential threat North Korea has faced from the United States from the very moment of its birth. Absent North Korea’s policies of Juche and Songun, the patriot state would have long ago succumbed to the tyranny of the United States. Without US tyranny, the DPRK’s Juche and Songun policies would not exist.
The constitution defines working people as sovereign, with peasants, blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, and soldiers constituting the only groups invested with sovereignty, in contradistinction to those who once generated income by renting out access to land (landlords) or industrial economic assets (mainly Japanese industrialists). With sovereignty vested in laborers as a class, the party which consciously seeks to represent labor, the Workers’ Party, is accorded the lead role of organizing the country’s affairs and defending its revolution and independence from the forces that aspire to return the country to the status quo ante of servitude to an empire.3
The external relations of the DPRK emphasize principles that a country which has historically been dominated by larger powers and has carried out a national revolution would wish other countries to embrace: equality, mutual respect, non-interference in the affairs of other nations, and mutual benefit—contrary to the unequal benefit which characterized Korea’s external relations in the past, with great powers imposing relationships of domination which served their interests at Korea’s expense, a situation that carries on in the relationship of the United States to South Korea today.4
The DPRK also pledges to “promote unity with people all over the world who defend their independence, and resolutely support and encourage the struggles of all people who oppose all forms of aggression and interference and fight for their countries’ independence and national and class emancipation.”5 Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in 2017, DPRK foreign minister Ri Yong-ho expressed his country’s “strong support” and “solidarity” with Cuba in its fight to defend its national sovereignty, with Venezuela in its fight to defend its “national sovereignty and the cause of socialism,” and with “the Syrian government fighting to protect its national sovereignty and security.”6 All three countries are targets of Wall Street-driven US hostility, and Pyongyang’s support for them as a manifestation of its opposition to empire-building is yet another reason Washington seeks to bring about the end of the DPRK.
North Korea constitutionally prescribes a socialist and independent national economy. Two forms of economic enterprise are permitted: State-owned enterprises and cooperatively-owned ones. State-owned enterprises belong to the people as a whole. All natural resources, railways, air transport service, post and telecommunication establishments, as well as major factories and enterprises, ports, and banks are owned solely by the state. Land, farm machinery, and ships, as well as small and medium-sized factories and enterprises may be owned jointly by workers as cooperatives.7 By contrast, the South Korean constitution prescribes an “economic order” based on “freedom and creative initiative of enterprises”—an allusion to “free” enterprise and the power of a minority to command the labor of others—and prohibits the nationalization of private enterprises “except to meet urgent necessities of national defense or the national economy.”8
Capitalism, Joan Robinson is reputed to have once remarked, has no goal but to keep the show going. In contrast, North Korea sets “the steady improvement of the material and cultural standards of the people” as the “supreme” goal of its economic system and seeks to leverage technological gains to “free the working people from difficult, tiresome labor.”9 In contrast, employers in the capitalist worlds seek to leverage technological gains to free workers from their jobs and to free themselves from the burden of having to pay wages and salaries. The DPRK works toward a communist society in which technological advancement is harnessed to reduce the burden of ceaseless toil on everyday working lives in order to afford people time to realize their potential as creative human beings.
North Korea’s constitution limits the work day to eight hours and mandates a shorter work day for people engaged in “arduous tasks.”10 The eight-hour workday’s elevation to a matter of constitutional principle establishes the bona fides of the country’s claim to have consciously formulated a people-centered system—designed to meet the needs of people, rather than people existing to keep a system of capital accumulation going—that contrasts sharply with the capital-centered economy of the ROK.
“South Koreans work the second-longest hours among OECD countries,”11 with “many salaried workers at manufacturing companies working for more than 60 hours per week.” Many “do not take their paid vacations.”12 A person working a forty-hour workweek without vacation puts in 2,080 hours per year. In 2014, South Koreans worked an average of 2,124 hours, more than a full week in excess of a forty-hour workweek without vacation, implying that many South Koreans aren’t taking vacation at all; or are taking vacation, but are working punishingly long hours; or both. And that figure was down from the year 2000, when South Koreans averaged 2,512 hours at work per year, 40 percent higher than the number of hours US workers put in on the job and 80 percent more than Germans worked.13 South Koreans, then, work some of the longest hours in the industrial world—which means that conditions haven’t substantially improved from when Japan occupied Korea, and Koreans were compelled to toil long hours in Japanese-owned mines and factories.
Have long hours made South Koreans marvels of productivity? Apparently not. Despite their lengthy hours on the job, Koreans of the south are less productive than workers in other OECD countries.14 ROK citizens work long hours, ultimately, not to make their lives better, but to enlarge the inherited fortunes of the pampered sons and daughters of the founders of the country’s handful of giant conglomerates which dominate South Korea’s economy. And the privileged children of the country’s corporate elite use their accumulated wealth—accumulated for them by long-toiling South Koreans—to dominate those spaces of the country’s political life left open to indigenous South Korean influence by the otherwise smothering influence of the United States. As a consequence, corporate royalty exists on a legal and material plane high above that of the overworked South Korean hoi polloi.
The DPRK proscribes child labor, building a minimum working age of 16 years into its highest legal document.15 In contrast, South Korea’s constitution recognizes that child labor exists in the south, but simply pledges that “special protection shall be accorded working children.”16 The ROK’s “Labor Standards Act sets the minimum age for employment at 15 years but provides that children between the ages of 13 and 15 may work if granted a work permit by the Ministry of Employment and Labor.”17
North Korea’s constitution prescribes the organization of the country’s economic life in accordance with a rationally developed plan. Planning aims at developing the economy in order to provide a steadily rising standard of living, while at the same time providing for the defense of the country against the unremitting threat of external aggression. Threats against the country are significant, indeed, existential, and originate in the hostile activities of a world power, the United States, which is many orders of magnitude more powerful militarily than North Korea. Even the ROK alone, with twice the population of North Korea and a GDP that is 45 times larger—and therefore the capability to field a much larger and more formidably equipped military—is a threat of considerable magnitude to the DPRK. In light of this, the DPRK’s embrace of economic planning—a measure of coordination that Germany turned to in WWI, as did other countries in times of national emergency and war—may be seen as both a matter of necessity and choice. In fact, absent an ideological commitment to socialism, the framers of the DPRK constitution may well have committed the country to an economy guided by a consciously formulated plan as the best way to meet its defense requirements. Central planning in North Korea may, then, be overdetermined—a product of multiple independent and mutually reinforcing causes.
Contrary to a naïve, but widely held misconception about socialist countries, North Koreans are neither told what jobs they must work at nor paid the same wage. Instead, the DPRK constitution guarantees that all “able-bodied citizens may choose occupations in accordance with their wishes and skills” and further requires that North Koreans be “paid in accordance with the quantity and quality of their work,” a basic socialist principle.18 Lenin gave the principle a biblical flourish, quoting Paul the Apostle: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”19 Moreover, the state requires all Koreans to work, and maintains a program of full-employment. North Koreans are “provided with stable jobs and working conditions” and “unemployment is unknown.”20
* * *
The major aim of Washington’s Korea policy is to maintain a puppet state on the peninsula for the purposes of furnishing the Pentagon with two advantages: (1) a geostrategically important space from which to menace China and Russia as potential threats to a global economy open to US businesses on Wall Street’s terms, and (2) access to a large body of “colonial” soldiers, trained and equipped by US advisers, interoperable with the US military, and under US command, which can be used in furtherance of US military projects in East Asia (and beyond). These goals explain Washington’s hostility to the DPRK. The DPRK is the major organized force in pursuit of a mission of Korean independence that is fundamentally at odds with the goals of the United States on the peninsula. That the DPRK is socialist is also a reason for US hostility, but inasmuch as North Korean socialism reduces Wall Street’s sphere of exploitation only marginally, it is but a nugatory cause of Washington’s inimical stance toward the country; the opportunity cost to corporate America of the DPRK’s people-centered economy is miniscule, since the opportunities for profit-making in northern Korea are insignificant on a world scale. In the simplest terms, the major reason US policy toward the DPRK is “the end of North Korea” is because Washington wants the Korean peninsula as a military outpost in East Asia, and the DPRK wants its country back.
Before moving on, a final point should be addressed about Washington’s aims. Some argue that US policy toward the DPRK is not the demise of the country, but only its permanent weakening. Weakening the DPRK, the argument goes, allows Washington to attribute North Korea’s crippled state to the DPRK’s alternative, state-owned, enterprise-dependent economic model (rather than to the measures the United States has taken to weaken it). Undermining the DPRK, and then attributing its consequent difficulties to its economic model, has the advantage of strengthening the grip on the public mind of the US-led program of anti-communist slander, producing the mass misconception that alternatives to the US-superintended global economy are a “dead-end” (as Obama called them). It also keeps the DPRK functioning (though barely), so that it can be used as an alleged menace to justify a continued US military presence on the peninsula, and to generate billions of dollars in sales for the US arms industry. Citing North Korea, US president Donald Trump encouraged Japan and the ROK to purchase “massive amounts of military equipment” from the United States.21 The idea is that if the DPRK didn’t exist, it would have to be invented, otherwise the United States would be bereft of a pretext to station troops on Korean soil and the tributary states of the US empire would have difficulty justifying the transfer of their citizens’ tax dollars to US weapons manufacturers.
To be sure, a pretext for permanently deploying troops to a foreign country is helpful in eliciting the consent of the people affected, but this argument implicitly assumes that there are no pretexts other than defense of South Korea from North Korean aggression for stationing US military personnel on the peninsula. On the contrary, the United States stations troops in scores of countries, none of which are divided, and yet pretexts for extending the Pentagon’s reach to all these countries have never been difficult to construct. A sufficient pretext is a reference to a threat of some kind. Japan isn’t divided, and there is no independent Japanese state from which a dependent US ally must be defended, yet there are 54,000 US troops in Japan.22 The pretext for their presence is the need of the United States to protect an ally from external threat. Were the intra-Korean threat to the ROK eliminated, Washington would simply justify the placement of US military personnel and equipment on the Korean peninsula as a necessity of maintaining the security of an important ally against potential threats from China, or even Russia. Hence, there exists sufficient material to construct more than one pretext for US military occupation of Korea.
* * *
There are two broad methods Washington has used to weaken and undermine the DPRK, with a view to eventually destroying it: isolation and unremitting military pressure. Both are measures of economic warfare. Both are intended to bring about the economic collapse of North Korea. Isolation is achieved through a network of sanctions whose purpose is to deny the DPRK vital economic inputs, forcing it to rely on more expensive surrogates, or to suffer crippling shortages. Unremitting military pressure—that is, the unceasing threat of attack—keeps the DPRK on a permanent war footing, diverting critical resources from its civilian economy to military preparedness. The goal is to place the DPRK on the horns of a dilemma: allocate expenditures to the military sufficient to deter an attack and bankrupt the economy, or allocate sufficient expenditures to the civilian economy to allow it to thrive (as much as is possible with restricted access to inputs) at the expense of self-defense. Neither choice is palatable, and both lead eventually to disaster. As we’ll see, the DPRK decision to build a nuclear weapons capability is a solution to the dilemma with which the United States has presented Pyongyang. Unremitting US hostility is the distal cause of the DPRK’s decision to develop nuclear weapons.
The history of US sanctions on the DPRK is as old as the DPRK itself. From the moment the DPRK was founded in 1948, Washington has tried to block Pyongyang’s access to vital economic inputs in order to make the state fail. As a rival to Washington’s puppet state in Korea, and hostile to the US project of turning the peninsula into a stationary US aircraft carrier, the DPRK had to be destroyed.
The United States has attempted to bring about the quietus of other communist states and has used economic warfare in an effort to achieve this goal. Washington’s initial offensive against China, beginning in the late 1940s, was “conducted predominantly on the economic front.” Washington sought to plague China with “‘a general standard of life around and below subsistence level’, ‘economic backwardness’, and a ‘cultural lag’.” The Truman administration declared that there must be “‘a heavy and long protracted cost to the whole social structure.’ A ‘state of chaos’ and ‘catastrophic economic situation’ must ultimately be created, leading China ‘toward disaster’, ‘collapse’.” Successive administrations pursued the same policy, expanding the embargo to include “medicine, tractors and fertilisers.” Walt W. Rostow, an anti-communist economist and principal player in the 1960s US foreign policy establishment, applauded US economic warfare for having retarded China’s economic development by decades. “Metaphorically speaking,” remarked political scientist Edward Luttwak, “it might be said that a ban of Chinese imports is the nuclear weapon that America keeps pointed at China.”23
Sanctions have effects equivalent to a nuclear attack. In 1999, the political scientists John Mueller and Karl Mueller wrote an important paper in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, in which they argued that economic sanctions “may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history.”24 The scholars tallied deaths due to the use of weapons of mass destruction as follows: “The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki together killed more than 100,000 people, and at a high estimate suggests that some 80,000 died from chemical weapons in World War I. If one adds the deaths from later uses of chemical weapons in war or warlike situations … as well as deaths caused by the intentional or accidental use of biological weapons and ballistic missiles, the resulting total comes to well under 400,000.”25 By contrast, the Allied economic blockade of Germany during the Great War is estimated to have caused almost twice as many deaths through hunger and malnutrition26 while “as many as 576,000 Iraqi children may have died” from food scarcity-related diseases caused “by economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council, according to two scientists who surveyed the country for the Food and Agriculture Organization,” whose findings were reported in the Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association.27
“So long as they can coordinate their efforts,” the two political scientists wrote, “the big countries have at their disposal a credible, inexpensive and potent weapon for use against small and medium-sized foes. The dominant powers have shown that they can inflict enormous pain at remarkably little cost to themselves or the global economy. Indeed, in a matter of months or years whole economies can be devastated.”28 And part of the devastation can be a death toll which exceeds that producible by a nuclear attack.
Perhaps Cuba is most comparable to the DPRK as a target of US economic warfare. “Of all the methods devised to obtain a change of regime, none seemed as compelling as the use of political isolation and economic sanctions,” wrote the historian Louis A. Perez Jr. “Officially designated as an ‘economic denial program’, sanctions expanded into a full-blown policy protocol designed to induce economic hardship in Cuba. It should not be supposed that the Cuban people were unintended ‘collateral damage’ of U.S. policy. On the contrary, the Cuban people were the target. Cubans were held responsible for, and made to bear the consequences of, the programs and policies of their government.”29
Sanctions were designed to create economic chaos, in order to promote disaffection and “inflict adversity as a permanent condition of daily life.” According to US assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann, US economic warfare aimed to “exert a serious pressure on the Cuban economy and contribute to the growing dissatisfaction and unrest in the country.” US President Dwight Eisenhower defined the aim of sanctions as the creation of “conditions which will bring home to the Cuban people the cost of Castro’s policies and of his Soviet orientation.” Eisenhower anticipated that “as the situation unfolds, we shall be obliged to take further economic measures which will have the effect of impressing on the Cuban people the cost of this communist orientation.” The US president concluded that, “If they are hungry,” Cubans “will throw Castro out.”30 Perez added:
The intent was to “weaken [the Castro government] economically,” explained one State Department briefing paper, to “promote internal dissension; erode its internal political support … [and] seek to create conditions conducive to incipient rebellion.” Sanctions were designed to create “the necessary preconditions for nationalist upheaval inside Cuba,” the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research explained, to obtain the downfall of the Castro government “as a result of internal stresses and in response to forces largely, if not wholly, unattributable to the U.S.” The idea was to use “economic pressures . . . in order to engender more public discomfort and discontent,” explained Assistant Secretary Rubottom, in the form of “a relentless, firm pressure, [and] a steady turning of the screw.” The “only foreseeable means of alienating internal support,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory concluded in 1960, “is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” Mallory recommended that “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba, . . . [to deny] money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of government.”31
Washington has aimed its sanctions at governments which adopt alternative, state-owned, enterprise-dependent, economic models which compete with Washington’s Wall Street-centric model of an open (to US exploitation) world economy. One of the objectives of carrying out economic warfare against competing economic models is to sabotage them, so that they appear to be inferior alternatives to Washington’s preferred model. Essential to this approach is to conceal the damage Washington’s economic warfare has wrought on an economy and to attribute the targeted state’s economic travails to the adoption of the wrong economic model.
The experiment with socialism, it is said, showed that public ownership and planning of the economy simply doesn’t work. Didn’t socialism fail in the USSR and Eastern Europe? Not at all. If success is defined as full employment and an unremittingly growing economy, then Soviet socialism was an unqualified success. From the moment in 1928 that the Soviet economy became publicly owned and planned (i.e., socialist), to the point in 1989 that it was steered by Mikhail Gorbachev in a free market direction, Soviet GDP per capita growth exceeded that of all other countries but Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. GDP per person grew by a factor of 5.2, compared with 4.0 for Western Europe and 3.3 for the Western European offshoots (the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand).32 In other words, over the period in which its publicly owned planned economy was in place, the USSR’s record in raising incomes was better than that of the major industrialized capitalist countries. The Soviet Union’s robust growth over this period is all the more impressive considering that the period includes the war years when a major assault by Nazi Germany left a trail of utter destruction in its wake. The German invaders destroyed over 1,500 cities and towns, along with 70,000 villages, 31,000 factories, and nearly 100 million head of livestock.33
Soviet economic growth was highest until 1970, at which point expansion of the Soviet economy began to slow. However, even during this so-called (and misnamed) post-1970 period of stagnation, GDP per capita grew 27 percent.34 And importantly, during the years of socialism, the Soviet economy never contracted. Contraction only came in the final years, when the Gorbachev government abandoned central planning and embraced markets as a method of regulating all economic activity.
In reality, the experience of the Soviet Union demonstrates that socialism did, indeed, work. However, the great powers went to extraordinary lengths to sabotage it so that it wouldn’t. From its infancy, the Soviet Union was menaced by a program of sabotage no different from that which Washington has directed at the DPRK. In 1920, the Bolsheviks complained that “Russia, thanks to her Soviet form of economy, could supply Europe … with double and triple the quantity of foodstuffs and raw materials that Tsarist Russia used to supply. Instead of this, Anglo-French imperialism has compelled the Toilers’ Republic to devote all its forces to self-defense.”35 Throughout the Soviet Union’s seven decades of existence, a substantial fraction of its budget was allocated to the military as an imperative of self-defense against aggressive capitalist powers, first imperial Britain and imperial France, followed by the Axis powers (especially Nazi Germany), and then the United States. In all these cases, the USSR had to play catch-up against hostile powers which had economies many times larger, and were therefore capable of fielding militaries many times stronger at a lighter cost burden relative to GDP. Without the crippling effects of incessant military pressure, the Soviet economy would very likely have posted even stronger growth.
North Korea finds itself in the same situation as a victim of military pressure imposed by a stronger foe. But there’s a critical difference. The Soviet Union was a vast continental country containing almost all the inputs a modern industrial economy needed to thrive, including oceans of oil. It was therefore virtually invulnerable to blockade and could draw on its own natural resources to fuel its economy. In contrast, Cuba and the DPRK, small countries with limited resources, depend on trade to obtain vital economic inputs. Consequently, Washington is in a better position to create havoc on the Cuban and North Korean economies than it was on the Soviet economy, and to attribute the resulting chaos to socialism.
This point is “essential to the US purpose, for central to US objectives” is “the need to maintain the appearance that the collapse of” the DPRK or Cuba, should they collapse, is “the result of conditions from within” and “the product of government economic mismanagement … thereby avoiding appearances of US involvement.”36 According to Perez:
In Cuba, [the] “United States sought to produce disarray in the Cuban economy but in such a fashion as to lay responsibility directly on Fidel Castro. The goal of the United States … was to make ‘Castro’s downfall seem to be the result of his own mistakes’. [The US ambassador] in Havana early stressed the importance of appearance: ‘It is important that the inevitable downfall of the present Government not be attributed to any important extent to economic sanctions from the United States as a major factor.’ The United States … sought ‘to make it clear that when Castro fell, his overthrow would be due to inside and not outside causes’! This was the purport of a lengthy memorandum by George Denney, Director of State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The idea was to eliminate Castro ‘without resort to invasion or attributable acts of violence and violations of international law’, specifically by ‘creating the necessary preconditions for nationalist upheaval inside Cuba … as a result of internal stresses and in response to forces largely, if not wholly, unattributable to the US’. Denney continued: If the Castro Communist experiment will appear to have failed not on its own merits but as a result of obvious or inadequately disguised US intervention, or as a consequence of the fraudulent invocation … of a unilateral and lopsided Monroe Doctrine, the validity of Castro’s revolutionary course might remain unquestioned. This Castro Communist experiment constitutes a genuine social revolution, albeit a perverted one. If it is interrupted by the force of the world’s foremost ‘imperialist’ and ‘capitalist’ power in the absence of a major provocation, such action will discredit the US and tend to validate the uncompleted experiment … Direct US assistance should be avoided … Excessive US or even foreign assistance or involvement will become known and thus tend to sap nationalist initiative, lessen revolutionary motivation and appeal, and allow Castro convincingly to blame the US.”37
An egregious example of blaming the target of sanctions for the sanctions’ effects was provided in 2010 by Amnesty International. The Western human rights organization released a report that condemned the DPRK government for failing to meet “its obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the right to health of its citizens,” citing “significant deprivation in [North Koreans’] enjoyment of the right to adequate care, in large part due to failed or counterproductive government policies.” The report documented rundown healthcare facilities which operated “with frequent power cuts and no heat” and medical personnel who “often do not receive salaries, and many hospitals [that] function without medicines and essentials.” Horrific stories were recounted of major operations carried out without anesthesia. Whether the report was accurate or not is difficult to determine, but if we assume, for the sake of argument, that it was, the assessment suffered from a glaring flaw: it made not a single reference, direct or indirect, to the US-led campaign of economic strangulation that has lasted the better part of a century and has been designed to make the DPRK—along with its healthcare system—fail.38 The report’s conclusion was tantamount to attributing the economic devastation caused by the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union to the alleged failures of Soviet policy, rather than the scorched earth policy of Nazi Germany, with the Nazi invasion treated as if it had never happened.
US sanctions against the DPRK have included the following:
In recent years, US sanctions have been complemented by “efforts to freeze assets and cut off financial flows”40 by blocking banks that deal with North Korean companies from access to the US banking system. The intended effect is to make the DPRK a banking pariah that no bank in the world will touch. Former US President George W. Bush was “determined to squeeze” North Korea “with every financial sanction possible” until its economy collapsed.41 The Trump administration took up the same cudgel and wielded it with even fiercer determination.
Washington has also acted to deepen the bite of sanctions, pressing other countries, including the DPRK’s chief trading partner, China, to join its campaign of economic warfare against a state it faults for maintaining a Marxist-Leninist system and non-market economy.42 This has included the sponsoring of a United Nations Security Council resolution compelling all nations to refrain for exporting dual-use items to North Korea (a repeat of the sanctions regime that led to the crumbling of Iraq’s healthcare system in the 1990s). Dual-use items are goods that have important civilian uses but might also be used for military purposes. In Arab nationalist Iraq, medical “diagnostic techniques that use radioactive particles, once common in [the country, were] banned under [UN] sanctions, and plastic bags needed for blood transfusions [were] restricted.”43 On October 14, 2006 the United Nations Security Council banned the export to the DPRK of any goods, including those used for civilian purposes, which could contribute to WMD-related programs—the very same sanctions that led, at minimum, to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths in the 1990s when the export of potentially weapons-related material, also essential to the maintenance of sanitation, water treatment, and healthcare infrastructure, was held up or blocked.
Kaesong, a vast industrial park of South Korean factories situated near the armistice line (on the DPRK side) that employed North Korean workers, provides an example of how all-encompassing the dual-use sanctions net has been cast. “U.S. officials blocked the installation of a South Korean switchboard system at Kaesong on the ground that the equipment contained components that could have been adapted for military use. As a result, the 15 companies that operated at Kaesong shared a single phone line, and messages often had to be hand-delivered across the border.”44 While dual-use sanctions may appear to be targeted, just about any item required for the provision of basic healthcare, sanitation, and education—chlorine, syringes, x-ray equipment, medical isotopes, blood transfusion bags, even graphite for pencils—can be construed to have military uses and therefore banned for export. One Western official who worked on her country’s North Korea desk spent much of her time reviewing material for export to the DPRK to determine whether it could be used for military purposes, including corrugated metal for roofing. Since virtually any item has potential military uses, virtually every export item was blocked.
The DPRK is so heavily sanctioned—the most sanctioned country on earth, according to George W. Bush—that for years US officials doubted that additional sanctions could make any difference. Obama, echoing his predecessor, called the DPRK “the most isolated nation on earth,” and, furthermore, “doubted whether new sanctions would change its behavior.”45 The New York Times noted that North Korea “is under perhaps the heaviest sanctions on earth,”46 while the Wall Street Journal added that “North Korea is already an isolated nation, so there isn’t much more economic pressure the U.S. can bring to bear,”47 while historian Bruce Cumings observed that the DPRK has “been isolated by the United States since the regime was formed in 1948.”48
While economic warfare hasn’t brought about the capitulation of Pyongyang that Washington has long sought, it’s clear that the US-led campaign of economic warfare has set back the DPRK’s economic development. According to a former DPRK diplomat, the decades since the dissolution of the socialist bloc, which North Korea relied on for trade, have been the most difficult:
This had a major impact on our economy. And with the disappearance of the USSR, the US moved to a policy of intensification, believing that our days were numbered. The US intensified its economic blockade and its military threat. They stopped all financial transactions between the DPRK and the rest of the world. The US controls the flow of foreign currency: if they say that any bank will be the target of sanctions if it does business with the DPRK, then obviously that bank has to go along with them. The US issued such an ultimatum to all companies: if they do business with North Korea, they will be subject to sanctions by the US. This is still in place. The US government thought that if they cut economic relations between the DPRK and the rest of the world, we would have to submit to them. The only reason that we have been able to survive is the single-hearted unity of the people. The people united firmly around the leadership. We worked extremely hard to solve our problems by ourselves.49
In June 2017, the foreign ministry of the DPRK released a statement on US economic warfare. US sanctions, the ministry said, had “grown utterly vicious and barbaric” and represented an attempt to “obliterate the rights to existence and development of the state and people of the DPRK, destroy modern civilization and bring [North Korea] back into medieval darkness.” The ministry cited a “prohibition on the export of underground resources including coal” and sanctions on dual-use items as measures that were “having adverse consequences for the people’s livelihood and normal economic activities.” So all-encompassing were sanctions that even the importation of “frozen chicken, cosmetics packaging and zipper tab production equipment and materials as well as frequency stabilizers and voltage regulators to be used at fishery stations” was blocked. UNICEF attempted to import “24.4 tons of malaria mosquito repellent” with no success. Over a dozen “mobile X-ray units and the reagent for diagnosis of tuberculosis” were held up for delivery by six months because they were designated as dual-use items. “In January 2017, a hundred thousand ampoules of ephedrine being imported by a health company of the DPRK” were blocked.50 One DPRK source estimated that the damage done by economic sanctions and blockade to 2005 is astronomical.51
On top of economic warfare, North Korea has faced unceasing US military hostility. The US military has had a continuous presence on the Korean peninsula since 1945, and only for a brief period of roughly 12 months, from the summer of 1949 to the summer of 1950, have there been less than tens of thousands of US troops on Korean soil. Over the same period, the US has had an unceasing and major military presence in nearby Japan. US warships patrol the DPRK’s maritime borders, and US warplanes, including B-2 (Swan of Death) strategic bombers fly menacingly close to its airspace, prowling at times only 12 nautical miles from the North Korean coastline. Washington kept battlefield nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula from the late 1950s to the early 1990s and refuses to renounce the first strike use of strategic nuclear weapons against North Korea—and refused to do so even before Pyongyang acquired its own nuclear weapons capability! Indeed, US nuclear doctrine allows for the use of nuclear weapons in response to any North Korean attack, conventional or otherwise, against any country the United States deems to be an ally or partner.52
North Korea hasn’t been the only country to face Washington’s hostile treatment. What Felix Greene wrote in 1970 of China and Cuba remains true of North Korea today:
The United States imposed a 100 percent embargo on trade with these countries; she employs great pressure to prevent her allies from trading with them; she arms and finances their enemies; she harasses their shipping; she threatens them with atomic missiles which she announces are pre-targeted and pre-programmed to destroy their major cities; her spy ships prowl just beyond these countries’ legal territorial waters; her reconnaissance planes fly constantly over their territory. And having done all in their power to disrupt these countries’ efforts to rebuild their societies by means of blockades to prevent essential goods from reaching them, any temporary difficulties and setbacks these countries may encounter are magnified and exaggerated and presented as proof that a socialist revolutionary government is ‘unworkable’.53
Faced with much larger, hostile adversaries, Pyongyang has been forced to channel a crushingly large percentage of its GDP into defense. In absolute numbers, the DPRK’s military expenditures are small—an estimated $3.4 billion to $9.5 billion per annum,54 roughly on par, as already noted, with the budget of the New York City Police Department. In contrast, the ROK’s military budget was $36 billion in 2017 and was scheduled to increase to $38 billion in 2018—four to eleven times larger than the DPRK’s.55 But as a percentage of its economy, North Korea’s military outlays are colossal. Estimates vary, but Pyongyang’s military expenditures are thought to fall somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of the DPRK’s gross domestic product.56 That puts North Korea in a class all its own. In 2015, the average country spent 2.2 percent of its GDP on its military. The United States spent 3.3 percent and the ROK 2.6 percent.57 However, Pyongyang’s large military expenditure relative to GDP is not out of the ordinary for a country at war. In World War II—a war in which the United States faced no existential threat—US military expense as a percentage of GDP reached as high as 38 percent.58 Considering that the DPRK is in both a de jure and de facto state of (cold) war with the United States, South Korea, and other US satellites, and that the military threat to North Korea posed by these forces is existential, the country’s significant military outlays as a percentage of the GDP are far from anomalous. But they are onerous. South Korea is able to spend a very modest percentage of its GDP on its military and still vastly outspend its northern neighbor in absolute terms because it has a much larger economy. The greater relative size of South Korea’s economy is partly a function of differences in population size. South Korea has roughly twice the population of North Korea. Partly it’s a corollary of decades of US-led economic warfare against the DPRK, which has stunted North Korea’s economic development. And partly it’s a consequence of Washington taking unusual steps to accelerate South Korea’s economic growth so that it would outpace its northern rival.
According to Bruce Cumings, during the Cold War, the “United States was willing to indulge certain countries, especially places like [South] Korea sitting on the fault lines of the Cold War, so that they could become self-supporting and compete in world markets.”59 One of the ways Washington indulged the ROK was through direct injections of aid. “Official sources say that about $12 billion of the [US] treasury went to [South] Korea in the years 1945-1965”60—about $108 billion in today’s dollars. The DPRK also received aid from the socialist bloc, but on nowhere near the same scale. In 1965, when South Korea’s exports totaled only $200 million, Seoul received loans and grants from Japan of $500 million and direct investment from Japanese enterprises of $200 million—an injection of $700 million in total, more than three times the amount of the ROK’s exports, about $5.4 billion in today’s dollars.61
Seoul’s deployment of hundreds of thousands troops to Vietnam on behalf of Washington’s war of aggression on Ho Chi Minh’s liberation forces netted the ROK billions of dollars in aid. Washington paid Seoul lucre of $7.5 million for every mercenary division it committed to the war. From 1965 to 1970, the South Korean mercenary army earned the state about $1 billion, equal to nearly $8 billion in 2018. Mercenary lucre accounted for an estimated 7 to 8 percent of South Korea’s GDP and for almost one-fifth of its total foreign earnings.62 Additionally, Vietnam became a bonanza for South Korean firms, upon whom Washington showered a wealth of war-related contracts, especially for steel and transportation equipment. As already noted, almost all of the ROK’s steel production during this period was absorbed by the US war effort in Vietnam.63
At the same time, Washington allowed Seoul to pursue an economic development model that Obama would later decry as a dead-end. US policy turned a blind eye toward the ROK’s pursuit of “a state-led neomercantalist program of protectionism at home and export-led growth abroad, which relied above all on the openness of the vast [US] market”—“the essence of the ‘Asian development state’,” as Bruce Cumings described it. The South Korean economy was to be an engine “of economic growth by any means necessary, because of the great value [it] had in providing an alternative model of development in the global struggle with communism.”64 And yet the model very much resembled the paradigm of state-directed economic development favored by the USSR and China.
When Park Chung-hee came to power in 1961, he immediately called for economic self-sufficiency65 and implemented a program of import substitution—that is, replacement of foreign imports with domestic production. Keen to secure export markets for corporate America, Washington had traditionally looked unfavorably upon countries which substituted domestic goods for US exports as a development strategy, but equally keen to facilitate South Korea’s economic development, the United States offered Park almost unqualified support for this otherwise routinely deplored policy.66 Park also introduced a succession of five-year plans prepared by an Economic Planning Board,67 recalling the five-year plans of the USSR, and multi-year plans of the DPRK. Moreover:
[t]he government owned all the banks, so it could direct the life blood of business—credit. Some big projects were undertaken directly by state-owned enterprises—the steel maker, POSCO, being the best example—although the country had a pragmatic, rather than ideological, attitude to the issue of state ownership. If private enterprises worked well, that was fine; if they did not invest in important areas, the government had no qualms about setting up state-owned enterprises … and if some private enterprises were mismanaged, the government often took them over, restructured them, and usually (but not always) sold them off again.68
Every measure of economic development Washington deplored, and punished countries for pursuing, Washington approved, in order to ensure that South Korea developed faster than its communist rival to the north. Chang Ha-Joon, author of Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, added that:
[The South] Korean government also had absolute control over scarce foreign exchange (violation of foreign exchange controls could be punished with the death penalty). When combined with a carefully designed list of priorities in the use of foreign exchange, it ensured that hard-earned foreign currencies were used for importing vital machinery and industrial inputs. The [South] Korean government heavily controlled foreign investment as well, welcoming it with open arms in certain sectors while shutting it out completely in others, according to the evolving national development plan. It also had a lax attitude towards foreign patents, encouraging ‘reverse engineering’ and overlooking ‘pirating’ of patented products.69
A revisionist retelling of the story of South Korea’s economic take-off locates the cause of the ROK’s robust growth in Seoul’s acceptance and vigorous pursuit of the very same open-economy, pro-foreign investment, free-trade, free-enterprise model that today Washington insists every country adopt. And yet the truth is quite the opposite. The United States temporarily bestowed upon the ROK the dual advantages of significant economic aid accompanied by exemption from the stifling constraints on former colonial countries of Washington’s open-economy model. The intended aim was to hothouse the South Korean economy. At the same time, the United States undertook to do whatever it could to cripple the economy of its puppet state’s northern rival, both directly, through economic warfare and unceasing military threat, and indirectly, by seeking to weaken, undermine, and eventually destroy the socialist bloc on which the DPRK depended for trade. And, then, when these efforts had come to fruition, and the South Korean economy began to grow at a faster clip than that of North Korea, Washington masked the exogenous role its policy had played in the divergence and attributed the outcome to endogenous variables—the alleged failures and inadequacies of communism, on the one hand, and the merits of South Korea’s capitalism, on the other.
Hence, owing to the United States nurturing the South Korean economy and sabotaging that of the DPRK, so that a yawning chasm opened up between the two of them, Seoul is able to (and does) fund its military on a far grander scale than is within the capability of its northern rival. With military expenditures of only 2.6 percent of its GDP the ROK is able to outspend the DPRK in absolute terms many times over. It is impossible for Pyongyang to match this level of expenditure. Indeed, despite allocating as much as one-quarter of its GDP to defense, North Korea is still vastly outspent by Seoul. Far from posing a military threat to the ROK, the DPRK is so militarily weak by comparison that it is forced to sacrifice its civilian economy in order to mount even a fragile defense. The process is self-amplifying. The more Pyongyang sacrifices its civilian economy to its military, the more the gulf widens between the two countries’ economies. The only hope for the DPRK is to break the vicious cycle.
The vicious cycle is supported by incessant military pressure exerted by Washington and its auxiliary South Korean military on North Korea via annual large-scale war games, the largest on the planet, and Washington’s unremitting threat of overwhelming attack.
The United States has carried out annual anti-DPRK war game exercises with South Korea since 1976, in the form of what today are called the Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercises, conducted during the summer, and the Key Resolve exercises, conducted in the late winter and early spring.
The Key Resolve exercises of March and April 2016 were the largest ever, involving 300,000 South Korean troops and 17,000 US military personnel. The exercises were structured around a hypothetical invasion of North Korea for the purpose of “recovering” the entire territory of the peninsula. Troops rehearsed “decapitation”—which is to say, killing North Korean leaders—and seizing the DPRK’s ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons arsenal.70 In advance of the simulated invasion, the United States flew four advanced F-22 stealth fighter jets over South Korea.71 Every element of the exercise, from the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of troops, to the Pentagon bringing advanced weaponry onto the peninsula, was intended to force the North Koreans to exhaust their limited resources by inducing them to react to the threat by pouring money into mobilization of their own forces to prepare for a possible attack.
In 2013, the White House approved a detailed plan, called ‘the playbook,’ to ratchet up tension with North Korea during that year’s Key Resolve exercises. The plan called for low-altitude B-52 bomber flights over the Korean peninsula. These were carried out in early March. A few weeks later, two nuclear-capable B-2 stealth bombers dropped dummy payloads on a South Korean missile range. The flights were deliberately conducted in broad daylight at low altitude, according to a US defense official, to produce the intended minatory effect. “We could fly it at night, but the point was for them to see it.”72 A few days later, the Pentagon deployed two advanced F-22 warplanes to South Korea, also part of the ‘play-book’ plan to intimidate Pyongyang. The White House, according to the Wall Street Journal, knew that the North Koreans would react by threatening to retaliate against the United States and South Korea. Pentagon officials acknowledged that North Korean military officers are particularly agitated by bomber flights because of memories of the destruction wrought from the air during the Korean War.73
The summer 2017 Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercises also involved a series of visits to the Korean peninsula by advanced US strategic bombers to practice “attack capabilities,” accompanied by ROK and Japanese warplanes. At the same time, Washington directed a Navy aircraft carrier group to the region—all to North Korea’s consternation, the Wall Street Journal noted.74 The exercises involved 50,000 ROK soldiers, 17,500 US troops (of which 3,000 came from outside the peninsula) along with the participation of military personnel from seven US satellite countries (including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Columbia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK) In addition, almost half a million ROK public employees participated in the simulation.75
War game exercises are provocative for the obvious reason that the mobilization of large numbers of troops and equipment is indistinguishable from the marshaling of armed forces for an invasion. How can the DPRK military leadership know whether the arrival of a US Navy aircraft carrier group in nearby waters, flights by strategic bombers, and the mobilization of 350,000 troops, is a rehearsal for an invasion, or the start of one? These mobilizations, note the DPRK, may “go over to an actual war any time”76 and are an opportunity for a preventive attack.77 Consequently, twice a year (at minimum), the DPRK is forced onto a war footing to defend itself against a possible invasion, placing an enormous strain on its economy. At other times, as in 2017, US exercises become unremitting, with different mobilizations following in rapid succession, forcing the KPA to maintain an unflagging and exhausting state of readiness. While the United States and South Korea, with much larger economies, can easily afford biannual simulations of an attack, and can also readily afford to launch a string of successive troop and equipment mobilizations, for Pyongyang, the cost of mobilizing to deter an attack is crippling. As the Wall Street Journal noted:
North Korea upped the tempo of its training flights sixfold, to 700 a day, on the first day of the 2013 U.S. and South Korean “Key Resolve” annual maneuvers. That naturally sent Seoul’s analysts to their calculators, concluding triumphantly that the North was either draining its war reserve or starving its civilian economy of fuel … When the U.S. and Japanese navies are operating in nearby waters, the North must keep its jets in the air and defenses mobilized. When U.S. and South Korean … troops are on the move near its border, it must activate troops in response. … The U.S. and its allies can maintain their mobilization virtually indefinitely. North Korea can’t. Motor fuel is a sore point, but so are food, equipment, and sanitation and health care for troops in the field.78
In late October and early November of 2017, the Pentagon directed three US carrier strike groups to sail to the waters east of Korea, which Koreans know as the East Sea and the Japanese call the Sea of Japan. A US naval force this large hadn’t been assembled in ten years, and if the North Koreans regarded the anomaly as a premonitory sign of an impending attack, it’s likely that this was the reaction Washington intended to produce. In the midst of what would almost certainly look to North Korean military authorities to be the marshaling of a massive strike force for an attack, a formation of US B1-B strategic bombers took off from Anderson Air Force Base at Guam, passed over Okinawa, and headed toward Jeju Island, off the southern tip of Korea. From there the bombers turned north, picked up an escort of US and ROK jetfighters, and proceeded directly toward the DPRK. Almost certainly, alarm bells went off at KPA headquarters. We can assume the DPRK’s aging jet fighters were scrambled, using up scarce aviation fuel. Before reaching the armistice line, the bombers quickly changed course, and diverted to a US firing range, where they dropped a dummy payload, and then headed home.79 Later, the DPRK media referred to the bomber flight as a “surprise nuclear strike drill,” but during the flight, North Korean generals would surely have wondered whether they were witnessing a drill or the start of a nuclear attack. the Wall Street Journal noted that US bombers had “buzzed” North Korea, an indisputable act of intimidation—and clearly a provocation—from a state that never tires of accusing North Korea of engaging in provocative acts. During the Reagan years, the United States had used a similar approach to unnerve the Soviets. “A squadron [of nuclear bombers] would fly straight at Soviet airspace, and [Soviet] radars would light up and units would go on alert. Then at the last minute the squadron would peel off and return home.”80
The objective of anti-DPRK mobilizations by the United States, the ROK, and other US tributaries, is to exhaust the North Korean economy—to hobble it so badly that it fails, or to force the North Koreans to let down their guard. That’s certainly the conclusion Pyongyang has drawn. The “U.S. seeks to steadily escalate tension on the Korean Peninsula,” according to North Korea’s official news agency, KCNA, “through ceaseless joint military exercises and thus make the DPRK exhausted and slacken its alertness.”81 The United States, says Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the ruling Workers’ Party, “is plugging the DPRK into an arms race through ceaseless war drills and arms build-up in a sinister bid to throw hurdles in its efforts to develop its economy and improve the standard of its people’s living and force them to live under a touch-and-go situation and thus seek an opportunity for a pre-emptive attack upon it.”82 It’s difficult to argue with this assessment.
US officials regularly dismiss North Korean complaints that the US-led war games are provocations, by pointing out that the annual mobilizations for war are routine. But the recurring nature of the exercises hardly makes them less provocative—just routinely provocative. No mistake should be made that the exercises could ever be seen by any country against which they were directed as non-threatening, or even that Washington truly believes they can be sincerely characterized as such. This can be seen in the US reaction to far less menacing war games carried out by US adversaries. NATO officials argue that Russian exercises “right up against the borders, with a lot of troops,” are “extraordinarily provocative”83 and “destabilizing.”84 When Russia carried out war games in Belarus in the summer of 2017—which involved less than 40,000 troops and civilians,85 a small fraction of the number of military and civilian personnel who took part in the 2016 Key Resolve exercises on the Korean peninsula—Russian President Vladimir Putin was accused of “saber-rattling” and the exercises were said to raise “fears of aggression.”86 NATO members, “particularly the Baltic States, worried that the drills were a precursor to a potential invasion of their territories.”87 Western analysts expressed fear that Russia’s exercises heightened “the risk of an accident or miscalculation that could touch off a crisis.”88 Additionally, concerns were raised that an “error by an alliance or Russian soldier, such as misreading a drill as an aggressive act, could quickly escalate into a crisis if one side were to respond with force. An incident such as a crashed jet fighter could also raise questions about whether an accident or aggression by the other side occurred.”89
All of these concerns are legitimate. But they apply just as strongly to US-ROK mobilizations, if not more so, considering that the US-led exercises are on an altogether larger scale, and therefore the possibility of error is all the greater. According to the Hankyoreh, a liberal South Korean newspaper, “The biggest concern among experts is that the growing scale of joint military exercises has increased the potential for misunderstanding by Pyongyang. Robert Litwak, director of international security studies for the Wilson Center, told the Hankyoreh in a March [2017] interview that exercises [may look] like a defensive maneuver for us, [but] from North Korea’s perspective, they may think we’re preparing an attack when you start bringing B2 fighters’.”90 And yet fostering the impression in Pyongyang that the United States and its Korean puppet state are preparing an attack is precisely the intention. The point isn’t to practice the defense of South Korea against an attack from North Korea (which isn’t going to happen anyway, since North Korea hasn’t the resources to mount a successful invasion) but to keep Pyongyang off balance and pouring its limited resources into deterring an attack from the US-ROK (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Columbia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and UK) side.
The United States also used a strategy of induced military overburden against the Soviet Union. The Reagan administration spent massively on an arms build-up in the 1980s, in an effort to force the Soviet Union to spend itself into bankruptcy in an effort to keep up.91 As the Soviets struggled to keep pace, their more limited resources were diverted increasingly to arms spending. Improvements in living standards were slowed and investment and consumption expenditures were forced to take a back seat to military outlays. US cold warrior Robert McNamara explained the strategy:
The Soviet Union came out of the Second World War with a brilliant military victory. With heavy casualty and high economic expenditure … this country had three priorities for its plan after the war. 1. Renewing the country’s infrastructure completely so the Soviet people could reach the promise of communism; 2. Rebuilding and renewing the country’s defense in the face of the stalking capitalist world; 3. Gaining new friends in the world, especially in Eastern Europe and the Third World. …
If the United States succeeds in engaging the Soviet Union in an arms race, then all these plans would go out the window. … Our goal was very simple: the second priority would, if possible, replace the first priority. In other words, first increasing the military expenditure and last, improving the people’s standard of living … and of course this would affect the third priority as well.
What is the meaning of this? It means that if the Soviet Union is dragged into an arms race and a massive portion of its budget, 40 percent if possible, is allocated to this purpose, then a lesser amount would be left for improving the people’s lives, and therefore, the dream of communism, which so many people are awaiting around the world, would be postponed and the friends of the Soviet Union and the supporters of the idea of communism would have to wait a long time. … On the basis of this calculation, the arms race may even threaten Soviet ideology in Moscow.92
US military pressure, combined with economic strangulation, has indisputably threatened the citadel of Korea’s movement for emancipation. But the DPRK still stands. The state has, in recent years, adopted a policy aimed at strengthening its ability to defend itself, while at the same time reducing the military drain on its civilian economy. The policy is called byungjin (parallel development.) It relies on nuclear weapons as a deterrent, allowing the DPRK to spend less on its armed forces, and more on its civilian economy. And the policy appears to be working. Astonishingly, despite the escalation of Washington’s efforts in recent years to ruin North Korea, the country’s economy grew by an estimated 3.9 percent in 201693—more than either the US or South Korean economies grew. The deterrent value of nuclear arms affords North Korea the space it needs to rebalance it spending away from its military to economic growth. It is perhaps for this reason that the CIA concluded that no amount of pressure would force the DPRK to give up its nuclear program.94 Nuclear weapons are the key to both the DPRK’s survival and to its overcoming the obstacles to its economic development that the United States has placed in its way.
1 Domenico Losurdo, “Beyond Mere Sentiment,” Revista Opera, November 6, 2017.
2 Constitution of the Republic of Korea.
3 The Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Address of Ri Yong-ho to the United Nations General Assembly, September 23, 2017.
7 The Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
8 Constitution of the Republic of Korea.
9 The Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
10 Ibid.
11 “Koreans’ average work hours still second-longest in OECD,” The Korea Herald, November 2, 2015.
12 Ahn Ju-yeop, quoted in The Korea Herald, November 2, 2015.
13 Korea Herald, November 2, 2015.
14 Ibid.
15 The Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
16 Constitution of the Republic of Korea.
17 Republic of Korea: Laws Governing Exploitative Labor Report, https://www.dol.gov/ilab/reports/pdf/southkorea_CL.pdf
18 The Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
19 V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution. (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 85.
20 The Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
21 Mark Landler and Julie Herschfeld Davis, “Trump tells Japan it can protect itself by buying US arms,” The New York Times, November 8, 2017.
22 Motoko Rich, “A pacifist Japan starts to embrace the military,” The New York Times, August 29, 2017.
23 Losurdo, Class Struggle, 288.
24 John Mueller and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs (New York: NY), May/June 1999.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Barbara Crossette, “Iraq sanctions kill children, UN reports,” The New York Times, December 1, 1995.
28 Mueller and Mueller.
29 Louis A Perez Jr, “Change through impoverishment: A half-century of Cuba-US relations,” nacla.org, December 14, 2015. https://nacla.org/news/2015/12/13/change-through-impoverishment-half-century-cuba-us-relations.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 See: Allen, Robert C., Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); David M. Kotz, “Socialism and Capitalism: Lessons from the Demise of State Socialism in the Soviet Union and China,” Socialism and Radical Political Economy: Essays in Honor of Howard Sherman, ed. Robert Pollin, (Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2000), 300-317; Kotz, David M. Kotz, “Socialism and Global Neoliberal Capitalism” Presentation, The Works of Karl Marx and Challenges for the XXI Century, Havana, Cuba, May 5-8, 2003; David M Kotz, “What Economic Structure for Socialism?” Presentation, The Works of Karl Marx and Challenges for the XXI Century, Havana, May 5-8, 2008; David M Kotz, “The Demise of the Soviet Union and the International Socialist Movement Today.” Presentation, International Symposium on the 20th Anniversary of the Former Soviet Union and its Impact, Beijing, China, April 23, 2011; David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution From Above: The Demise of the Soviet System, Routledge, 1997.
33 Leffler.
34 “Socialism and Capitalism: Lessons from the Demise of State Socialism in the Soviet Union and China,” in Socialism and Radical Political Economy: Essays in Honor of Howard Sherman, ed. Robert Pollin, Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2000, 300-317; David M. Kotz, “Socialism and Capitalism: Lessons from the Demise of State Socialism in the Soviet Union and China,” Socialism and Radical Political Economy: Essays in Honor of Howard Sherman, ed. Robert Pollin, (Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2000), 300-317; Kotz, David M. Kotz, “Socialism and Global Neoliberal Capitalism” Presentation, The Works of Karl Marx and Challenges for the XXI Century, Havana, Cuba, May 5-8, 2003; David M Kotz, “What Economic Structure for Socialism?” Presentation, The Works of Karl Marx and Challenges for the XXI Century, Havana, May 5-8, 2008; David M Kotz, “The Demise of the Soviet Union and the International Socialist Movement Today.” Presentation, International Symposium on the 20th Anniversary of the Former Soviet Union and its Impact, Beijing, China, April 23, 2011; David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution From Above: The Demise of the Soviet System, Routledge, 1997.
35 Manifesto, Second Congress of the Communist International, II. The Economic Situation, August 1920.
36 Louis A Perez Jr, “Fear and loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of US policy toward Cuba,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 34, (2002): 237-254.
37 Perez Jr, 2002.
38 Amnesty International, “The crumbling state of health care in North Korea”, July 2010. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA24/001/2010/en/13a097fc-4bda-4119-aae5-73e0dd446193/asa240012010en.pdf
39 Dianne E. Rennack, “North Korea: Economic sanctions”, Congressional Research Service, October 17, 2006. http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl31696.pdf
40 Mark Landler, “Envoy to coordinate North Korea sanctions,” The New York Times, June 27, 2009.
41 David E. Sanger, “U.S. to roll out tepid welcome for president of South Korea,” The New York Times, September 14, 2006.
42 According to Rennack, the following US sanctions have been imposed on North Korea for reasons listed as either “communism,” “non-market economy,” or “communism and market disruption”: prohibition on foreign aid; prohibition on Export-Import Bank funding; limits on the exports or goods and services; denial of favorable trade terms.
43 Mueller and Mueller.
44 The Washington Post, November 16, 2005.
45 Alistair Gale and Kwanwod Jun, “North Korea says its successfully conducted hydrogen-bomb test,” The Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2016.
46 David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth and Eric Schmitt, “U.S. asks China to help rein in Korean hackers,” The New York Times, December 20, 2014.
47 Danny Yadron, Devlin Barret and Julian E. Barnes, “U.S. Struggles for Response to Sony Hack,” The Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2014.
48 “North Korea warns of new tests as nuclear standoff intensifies,” Democracy Now!, October 11, 2006. https://www.democracynow.org/2006/10/11/north_korea_warns_of_new_tests.
49 Yongho Tahe, Minister of the Embassy of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in London, “Understanding and defending North Korea,” invent-the-future.org, November 15, 2013.
50 “Press statement of DPRK foreign ministry,” KCNA, June 16, 2017.
51 Tim Beal, “The Korean peninsula within the framework of US global hegemony,” The Asia-Pacific Journal/ Pacific Focus, Volume 14, Issue 22, no. 3, November 2016.
52 Nuclear Posture Review, 2010.
53 Felix Greene, The Enemy: What Every American Should Know about Imperialism. (New York: Vintage, 1970), 292.
54 Alastair Gale and Chieko Tsuneoka, “Japan to increase military spending for fifth year in a row,” The Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2016.
55 “Defense budget projected to rise 6.9% from last year’s total,” The Hankyoreh, August 30, 2017.
56 Holman W. Jenkins Jr., “Nukes won’t save North Korea,” The Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2017; Cumings, Korea’s Place, 444; Gale and Tsuneoka.
57 The World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS
58 S.C.M. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 52.
59 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 305.
60 Ibid., 306.
61 Ibid., 321.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 322.
64 Ibid., 332.
65 Ibid., 353.
66 Ibid., 305.
67 Ibid., 314.
68 Chang Ha-Joon, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 14.
69 Chang, 14.
70 Alastair Gale, “South Korea accuses North of hacking as tensions escalate,” The Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2016; “Korea-US drills to maps out N.K. endgame scenario,” The Korea Herald, February 18, 2016.
71 Gale.
72 Jay Solomon, Julian E. Barnes and Alastair Gale, “North Korea warned,”The Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2013.
73 Julian E. Barnes, “U.S. pledges further show of force in Korea,” The Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2013.
74 Jonathan Cheng, “North Korea compares Donald Trump to Adolph Hitler,” The Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2017.
75 “U.S. will be to blame for consequences from joint military drill: KPA Panmunjom Mission,” Rodong Sinmun, August 23, 2017; Jonathan Cheng, “War games begin as U.S., South Korea brace for North’s fury,” The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2017; Choe Sang-Hun, “South Korea faces an uncomfortable reality: A nuclear neighbor,” The New York Times, August 21, 2017; “Number of American troops participating in Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise to decrease,” The Hankyoreh, August 19, 2017.
76 “KCNA commentary lays bare U.S. scenario for invading DPRK,” KCNA, September 8, 2015.
77 “US-S. Korean Ulji Freedom Guardian joint military drills under fire,” Rodong Sinmun, August 14, 2015.
78 Holoman W. Jenkins, Jr., “Nukes won’t save North Korea,” The Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2017.
79 “US surprise nuclear strike drill in S. Korea,” KCNA, November 2, 2017; Jonathan Cheng, “U.S. bombers buzz North Korea as Trump’s Asia trip looms,” The Wall Street Journal, November 2, 2017.
80 Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union. (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994), 8-9.
81 “KCNA commentary lays bare U.S. scenario for invading DPRK,” KCNA, September 8, 2015.
82 “US-S. Korean Ulji Freedom Guardian joint military drills under fire,” Rodong Sinmun, August 14, 2015.
83 Julian E. Barnes and Anton Trolanovski, “Nato sets forces to counter Russia,” The Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2016.
84 Gregory L. White and Olga Razumovskaya, “Vladimir Putin appears in public for first time after 10-day absence,” The Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2015.
85 Emily Ferris, “The True Purpose of Russia’s Zapad Military Exercises: Why Moscow Wanted to Send a Message to Minsk,” Foreign Affairs (New York, NY), October 4, 2017.
86 Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt, “Russia’s military drills near NATO border raise fears of aggression,” The New York Times, July 31, 2017.
87 Ferris.
88 Nathan Hodge, “Russia says war games are ‘purely defensive’,” The Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2017.
89 Julian E. Barnes, “Planned Russian exercises in September sow NATO worries,” The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2017.
90 “US experts argue in favor of scaling down S. Korea-US military exercises,” The Hankyoreh, June 20, 2017.
91 Sean Gervasi, “A full court press: The destabilization of the Soviet Union,” Covert Action Quarterly, (1990), 21-26; 14.
92 Robert McNamara, quoted in Bahman Azad, Heroic Struggle, Bitter Defeat: Factors Contributing to the Dismantling of the Socialist State in the USSR, (New York: International Publishers, 2000), 138.
93 Rick Gladstone and David E. Sanger, “Security Council tightens economic vice on North Korea, blocking fuel, ships and workers,” The New York Times, December 22, 2017.
94 Gladstone and Sanger.