Iran and North Korea do not have a shared history. They do not have a common culture, and very few individuals speak the others’ language. Levels of religiosity, at least for the two regimes if not the two societies as well, appear to occupy opposite ends of the spectrum from theocracy to atheistic governance.1 Indeed, it is difficult to find any singular meaningful sociological or historical trend that would allow classification of the two regimes together. It is therefore rather peculiar that the two regimes could find themselves in a similarly unique, long-standing, and strategic dispute with much of the international community.
The lack of shared historical development does not preclude a parallel historical development on certain trends that produces analogous thematic challenge to international security and order. We do not argue that North Korea and Iran’s interactions with each other in recent decades concentrated on military cooperation, especially ballistic missile development, is historically significant or has shaped either regime in a fundamental way. Instead, we note that North Korea and Iran independently decided to pursue a similar path following revolution, war, and macro-political developments in response to specific domestic and international conditions. In other words, their political leaders made similar strategic choices in some limited but important areas over the years that put the two states in the same basket on certain measures today that distinguishes them from all other countries in the world.
This is not an effort to explain away these choices or excuse them. Leaders are ultimately responsible for their choices, but recognizing the decision-making environment both internally and externally helps understand the decision. We believe that understanding these decisions in context is an important element in crafting approaches to yield different decisions from both regimes on these long-standing challenges. The remainder of this chapter focuses on that parallel history.
Iran and Korea have very different political histories even at the most abstract level where similarities are most easily drawn. Prior to their interactions with colonial powers, Iran was a multiethnic feudal system with a weak central government whose basic authority hardly extended beyond the capital. Iran’s Qajar Dynasty (1796–1926) in the 19th century lacked a bureaucracy and a standing army, and provincial and local authorities carried out basic functions of government, including punishing capital offenses. The landed aristocracy dominated, and the Qajars ruled by exploiting social divisions and channeling aristocratic disputes into court where they could arbitrate. The state hovered above society but did not penetrate it.2
Korea, by contrast, was an ethnically homogenous, centralized political system. Though the strength of the government ebbed and flowed over the course of Korean history, most power resided in central authorities. Ethnic homogeneity and a lack of natural groupings precluded a lasting factionalism. Charismatic leaders attracted followers, but these groupings tended to rise and fall with the individuals rather than have any staying power or broader historical significance. The national capital took on a special place in Korean politics, the economy, and society. Efforts to gain a position in the national government dominated the youth of elites, who spent years studying for a government-administered exam that determined if one would gain a government position, which had lasting consequences for one’s social status.3 Koreans did not need to learn about European concepts of the nation-state to operationalize it as the Korean nation, and its powerful central government had been fused for many centuries. Inclusion in the Korean nation stemmed from ethnicity, not a constructed concept of citizenship as found in many multiethnic states.
In the 19th century, the two states encountered foreign powers interested in colonization. As Iran’s weak government encountered European powers, specifically Russia and Britain, it faced several shocks. Namely, the new enlightenment thinking, jobs, and middle class in addition to treaties deemed humiliating for terms disadvantageous to the Iranians upended the fragile political situation in Iran. Diplomatic concessions and capitalism showed the Iranians the power that the foreigners wielded and their own limitations in comparison.4
Korea’s first encounter with colonial powers was equally impactful. Korea likewise confronted enlightenment ideas and unequal treaties with foreign powers during a time of domestic weakness near the end of the lengthy Choson Dynasty (1392–1910), specifically at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. A weakened Korea signed its first unequal treaty with Japan in 1876, the Treaty of Kanghwa. Western powers, including the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, Russia, France, and Austria-Hungary, followed Japan with their own treaties with Korea. Japan and seven Western powers signed unequal treaties with Korea in the course of just thirteen years. Enlightenment thought and calls for fundamental reforms started to gain some traction as traditionalists heralded Confucian orthodoxy; social cleavages, uprisings, riots, coup attempts, and palace intrigue ensued. Foreign powers sought to shore up their interests in a weakened Korea. In particular, Russia and Japan vied for supreme interest on the Korean Peninsula, which they ultimately settled by war. Japan won the war and, by extension, recognition by the other foreign powers, but not Koreans, to its rights to form a protectorate over Korea that paved the way for Japan to annex Korea as part of Japan only five years later.5 In the Korean historical narrative, too much reliance on outside powers risks undermining the country’s strategic interests as the great powers negotiate among themselves the fate of the peninsula.
Iran’s experience with European colonialism and the Great Game, coupled with its national sense of historical greatness, reinforced xenophobia and uncertainty about its proper place in world politics. Also, the Great Game gave the Iranians experience in playing the European powers against one another as a means to maintain Iran’s national identity. Likewise, the Koreans opposed European and Japanese meddling in their internal politics, viewing it as an affront to their great ancient civilization. More specifically, the Russians and British deposing with ease Iran’s opposition factions in the early 1900s convinced many Iranians of the need for a unified nationalism.6 Likewise, Koreans’ response to European colonial ambitions and Japan’s annexation of Korea essentially created Korean nationalism.7 These are living histories, augmented by more recent revolutionary changes in both countries, keenly remembered and felt in Iran and Korea.
Both Iranians and Koreans have good reason to rue their early experiences with foreign powers, as does most of the colonized or quasi-colonized world. The British government’s conversion to an oil-driven navy substantially increased its demand for petroleum during the First World War. Russia’s need to feed its forces in Iran’s northern breadbasket region, as well as the practice of pulling peasants from the fields to fight in the war, precipitated a famine that killed up to 2 million Iranians – about 20 percent of the population at the time.8 Although North Korea also suffered a devastating famine much later in its history, its cause is more directly linked to its own government’s policies than to those of a foreign country, and it was not one the formative experiences of the state.9 But from this low point of an Iranian “failed state” with substantial Russian and British influence inside the country in 1920, Reza Khan built a highly centralized polity. The Shah’s means were brutal, but effects were clear. He navigated between British and Russian – and later, American and Soviet – influences for decades and pulled off some important and deceptive diplomatic moves with important implications for his country.
The Shah’s hallmark achievement was state building. He did not tolerate political dissent, favored his home region for development, reduced parliament to a rubber stamp organization, pursued extrajudicial killings of perceived political opponents, and crafted a regressive taxation structure that enriched capitalists on the backs of the poor. He crushed the power of tribes and persecuted religious leaders. In the process, he built a state.
Iran’s military grew ten-fold and the central government’s bureaucracy seventeen-fold during Reza Shah’s rule. The Iranian military that numbered 22,000 personnel in 1921 became a force of 127,000 by 1941. He expanded the Iranian government to eleven ministries with 90,000 secular civil servants. Oil, tax collection, and customs duties provided government revenues, which helped fund the military and other state-building efforts. The Shah instituted a draft to create citizens, where he mandated the usage of the Persian language and forced members of different ethnic groups to interact. He institutionalized the religious establishment but showed he would not tolerate clerics challenging his power. Following a fallout with clerics in 1935, a local preacher denounced the Shah and took refuge in a shrine. Some of the Shah’s troops refused to violate the shrine, and the Shah executed them. Others entered the shrine, killing about 100 people in the process. Following the 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion during World War II in search of oil resources, Reza Shah abdicated and died in exile in 1944. His son continued the story of Iranian history, but Reza Shah’s legacy had already been secured.10
While Reza Shah was building an Iranian dictatorship, Korea fundamentally lost its statehood. In 1910, Japan annexed Korea, and Korea’s experience with dictatorship in the first part of the 20th century would be with a foreign one. The Japanese occupation, which sustained efforts to eradicate Korea’s national identity, imposed material and physical hardship on the Korean people. Importantly, Koreans did not defeat imperial Japan in 1945. Although one should not ignore roles of individual Koreans in the war effort and resistance to Japan, ultimately the Allies, and especially the United States, defeated Japan in the Pacific War. Consequently, Koreans again were not instrumental in crafting the postwar order, which was left to the primary victors. An emerging great power rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union ultimately led to the division of the peninsula, and Koreans under the suzerainty of great power benefactors at the time established their own governments on the northern and southern parts of the peninsula in 1948.
Through the end of World War II and as war raged in Korea in the early 1950s, Iran lacked a strong government, and Iran’s budding constitutionalist movement introduced Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq to history. Mossadeq is not a prominent historical figure in the West today. Most foreign policy generalists would not recognize his name. But he occupies a central, albeit controversial and intellectually fractured, place in Iranians’ view of their own contemporary history. Mossadeq was Iran’s best first effort at something that could potentially have developed into representative government, and the United States orchestrated a coup against the fledgling leader in 1953.
By its own historical accounting, the Central Intelligence Agency played a decisive role with support from British intelligence to remove Mossadeq and bolster the Shah’s preeminent role in Iranian politics. The Shah and internal Iranian players were in disarray, and there is no indication that the Shah would have regained his position of prominence without U.S. intervention. The United States, concerned primarily with Cold War geopolitics and Iran’s possible move toward the Soviet Union, and secondarily motivated by oil and economic considerations, took the extraordinary move of supporting this coup.11
In the recounting of a former Iranian diplomat who worked on the nuclear negotiations, 1953 is a watershed year for Iranians and relevant to Iran’s contemporary foreign policy considerations. On the first page of the first chapter of his book on Iran and the United States, the Iranian official highlighted the 1953 coup marked a shift in Iranians’ thinking of the United States. The United States shifted from a “benevolent international power whose intent was to support the independence and sovereignty of a weaker nation threatened by [Russian and British] imperial powers” to a post–World War II superpower concerned about energy security and Soviet influence. After 1953 the U.S.–Iran relationship “entered a new chapter characterized by a patron-client relationship and intrusive involvement by the US in Iran’s domestic affairs … the coup changed the psyche of Iranian society and destroyed Iranians’ positive image of the United States.”12 History is never so neat in reality, but this historical memory, regardless of its nuanced accuracy, is important to understand the Islamic Republic’s thinking. In Tehran’s contemporary view, the United States will meddle in Iran’s internal affairs to advance its own foreign policy interests without reference to sovereignty principles; this meddling is a foundational element of America’s global position, this Iranian narrative holds.
In the 1950s, the United States encouraged Iran to reform its government and sought to support Iranian moderates; its aid relationship gave it a certain amount of leverage to push the Shah’s regime in this direction. Washington used a contrasting approach with Kim Il Sung’s government. Seen through the lens of Cold War geopolitics, North Korea was aligned with the Soviet bloc and the rival of the American-backed regime in the South. The North did not receive U.S. economic aid like Iran at the time; it confronted a variety of economic sanctions instead. American leverage in Iran realized some modest movement on political reform with the Shah’s government. Political change in Kim Il Sung’s government, on the other hand, was in the direction of greater political control. Kim Il Sung consolidated his power and by the early 1970s was at the head of a fully-fledged totalitarian regime.13 By the end of that same decade, the Shah lost all political control through revolution. The Kimist regime showed an ability to penetrate and control society to a much greater extent than the Shah’s regime.
The current North Korean and Iranian regimes were both born out of revolutions with at least some anti-imperialist element, but these were very different revolutions. The northern part of Korea was home to a variety of small group leaders who fought against the Japanese occupation; Kim Il Sung’s band of roughly 300 guerrilla fighters was just one of those groups. But the Japanese defeat in the Second World War left a political vacuum in which Kim Il Sung and his followers gained an important place, eventually winning Soviet backing.14
Like Korea, Iran found itself in a state of poverty in the wake of the Second World War. Unlike North Korea, however, Iran quickly sought to rid itself of Soviet influence and rely more on the United States. Iran became the largest recipient of American foreign aid by 1956.15 Meanwhile, North Korea defined itself as anti-Japanese and anti–United States, even as its rival Korean state in the south became a recipient of massive foreign aid from the United States. The Kim regime and the Shah’s regime found themselves on opposite ends of the Cold War that would condition domestic political and economic institutions, ideology, and decisions as well as external policy.
During the critical postwar period when much of the contemporary international order was crafted, the Shah’s Iran and Kim Il Sung’s North Korea were far apart on virtually every meaningful social, economic, and political measure. They were born into the same world but into very different families. North Korea’s government was an intensely anti-American and socialist state with an industrializing economy; it was committed to reunifying the Korean nation and maintained firm state control over society. The Shah’s government relied heavily on the United States and on a traditional nexus of a landed aristocracy and a strong army; Iran built an extractive, oil-based economy; did not need to worry about national reunification like the Koreans; and developed a very different state–society relationship. Iran has a history of social mobilization, of which the summer 2009 postelection protests were the latest example.16 Iran has a relatively active civil society, various centers of power with readily identifiable interests, and a powerful and politically active clergy. In short, comparing the regimes of Kim Il Sung and the Shah is an exercise in authoritarian contrasts.
It is important to understand these histories as they occurred in time in order to see the effect of critically important global forces, such as the reshaping of power relationships in the aftermath of the Second World War. But the Iranian and North Korean revolutions did not occur at the same time. The 1979 Iranian revolution was not a product of a major global event like the Second World War, which altered the international order more than any other force in the 20th century and created an opportunity for significant political change. Instead, it was a product of forces operating primarily in and around Iran in the 1970s.
Iran suffered from the paradox of oil wealth. The sudden influx of much greater oil revenues resulting from the sharp increase in oil prices during the 1970s distorted Iran’s economy, government, and social structure. Whereas North Korea’s revolution came out of the deprivation during the Japanese occupation, the Iranian revolution was prodded along by excesses of oil wealth. The Shah spent wastefully and extravagantly on defense and on modern civilian goods, which only accelerated after the 1973 oil crisis spiked Iranian government revenues. But the Shah’s efforts to buy modernity and modern conveniences outpaced Iranian infrastructure, and Tehran experienced frequent blackouts due to an overtaxed electrical grid while much of the countryside still did not even have electricity.17 The Shah’s squandering of Iran’s newfound wealth not only deprived Iranians of real development, but actually created new hardships. The Shah’s spending crowded out the civilian economy, driving up prices as his demand for goods outpaced increases in supply in a classic inflationary case. It was easy to view the Shah’s economic mismanagement as wasting an important opportunity for the nation even without ideological or religious conviction that could otherwise motivate the Islamic revolution.
Rather than shift course, the Shah attempted to silence dissent by relying increasingly on his secret police and terror. Though the Shah formed the SAVAK security apparatus in 1956 and committed human rights abuses against his own people that helped fuel the 1979 revolution, the Iranian leader relied on these coercive instruments later in his tenure as his control became more fragile.18 He formed a single political party in 1975 reminiscent of truly totalitarian regimes like Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, effectively banning the political opposition, to ensure that dissenters lacked a political vehicle with which to threaten his control.
However, unlike Kim’s experience in North Korea, the Shah’s plan failed to meet his own objectives. As more Iranians flocked to Tehran from the countryside in search of economic opportunity, they often found themselves with upturned lives and turned to religion to find some grounding. Though the Shah espoused secularism and unleashed his terror on clerics as well, clerics retained an independent power base. The Shah could not completely intimidate this group, and by removing alternative political parties in 1975, he enhanced the importance of the mosque as a center of political opposition. The Shah’s attempt to repress the clerics ultimately proved unsuccessful in preventing them from forming a tenuous alliance with several social actors in order to come out into the streets in force and start the Iranian revolution.
One such cleric was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was committed to two core principles: opposition to the Shah and opposition to his backer, the United States. Khomeini was a charismatic figure with support from a network of radical clerics in mosques around the country. He sought a utopian political order, but one very different from Kim Il Sung’s vision for North Korea. Khomeini supported the idea that Islamic scholars should effectively operationalize divine law to create a moral order, whereas Kim Il Sung talked of the need for a reunified nation and for his countrymen to follow his personal, sage guidance. Iran’s revolution was primarily a domestic revolt against the Shah and his American backers, whereas the North Korean revolution was the product of a nationalistic fight against a foreign colonial power, which shifted from being primarily anti-Japanese to anti-American following World War II. These distinct revolutionary foundations would produce very different regimes. The two leaders did share, however, an intense anti-Americanism.
The North Korean and Iranian regimes not only used the United States as a convenient scapegoat for domestic problems in their respective countries, but also seemed genuinely convinced that the United States threatened their security.19 The Iranians remembered the 1953 coup backed by the CIA, and the North Koreans remembered the American role in the 1950–1953 Korean War. These events were different, but both stylized memories followed the same pattern: the Americans meddled in their internal affairs and frustrated a great national goal.
The Islamic Republic’s narrative holds that the U.S.-sponsored 1953 coup ended Mossadeq’s constitutionalist reform movement and ushered in the Shah’s dictatorship, whereas the North Korean government’s narrative explains that American intervention in the Korean War prevented national reunification.20 Both governments trace the origins of many of their contemporary problems back to these foundational developments and worry – with an inflated sense of national self-importance – that the Americans naturally are plotting against them now.
The outcome of the Iranian revolution of 1979 was the establishment of a new political system that put into power a government guided by Shi‘i Islamic principles. Ayatollah Khomeini, a key figure in the Shiite hierarchy, was able to seize upon the willingness of key parts of the Iranian population, namely the traditional religiously oriented classes (religious leaders, merchants, and artisans) as well as Western-educated intellectuals and professionals, to join in opposing the Shah’s government. Both groups feared Iranian military and economic dependence on the United States and the Westernization of Iranian society and education. This shared fear enabled both groups to unite and topple the Shah, whose modern reforms were viewed as an attack against their livelihood and religion.
Khomeini saw the politicization of Shi‘i Islam as the most effective way to gain popular support and legitimize demands for reform. Islam became the indigenous, notably non-Western, unifying symbol that not only gave meaning to the reform movement but also helped legitimize it. Khomeini led the revolution against the Westernized Shah, which enabled the Shiites to step onto the stage of world politics and allowed Khomeini to pursue a political plan aimed at the Islamization of Iranian society. Following the revolution and a national referendum, Iran officially became an Islamic republic on April 1, 1979. The constitution, ratified in December 1979, institutionalized clerical power and created a theocracy.21
Although Shi‘i Islam had been historically the state religion of Iran, it was not until the revolution that the clerics took on a central role of directly conducting the affairs of the state.22 In 1982, Khomeini insisted that Iran’s courts strictly base their decisions on Islamic regulations rather than on secular legal codes.23 In Islam, all just law derives from God. Shari‘a, the sacred law of Islam,
is an all-embracing body of religious duties, the totality of Allah’s commands that regulate the life of every Muslim in all its aspects; it comprises on an equal footing ordinances regarding worship and ritual, as well as political and (in a narrow sense) legal rules.24
Thus, a legal framework was developed that stressed the preeminence of eternal and divine law. Furthermore, Khomeini asserted that because only jurists could authoritatively interpret the texts that establish the normative legal custom (sunna), only the jurists were qualified to lead the affairs of the nation.25 Members of the Shi‘i ‘ulama began to serve as cabinet ministers, parliamentary deputies, and in many other powerful government roles.26
Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran remains the quintessential example of Shi‘i political rule. Because all power and authority are seen to come from God, no distinction is made between mosque and state. The divine law (Shari‘a), which is believed to have been revealed to mankind through the Prophet and the imams, takes precedence over all human law. Social, economic, and political affairs are guided by Shari‘a. Moreover, the entire community of the faithful (the umma) takes precedence over any constituent parts thereof, whether they are individuals, families, tribes, or nation-states. Thus, the Islamic Republic of Iran can be characterized as a system of Islamic populism in which the ultimate authority resides in God and His representatives on earth, and important power rests with the people, who are able to participate in elections and politics.27 Some scholars of Iran and Shi‘ism have not only described the Islamic Republic of Iran as a system of Islamic populism, but also have argued that Khomeini was a populist rather than a fundamentalist.28
Khomeini mobilized the people of Iran using a religious political philosophy that stressed equality and justice. He often spoke in terms of class conflict and emphasized the unjust plight of the oppressed (mustaza‘fin), who were the victims of the arrogant (mustakbarin).29 Ayatollah Khomeini’s statements and writings are filled with references that stress the preeminence of divine law over human law. Because human law is subject to the whims and passions of man, Khomeini argued, only shari‘a can be the guide to the straight path.30
Although the learned clerics and jurists have a special authority and significant influence in the Islamic Republic as guides and guardians of the faithful, there remains room for popular participation. Khomeini emphasized the National Islamic Majlis, a legislative body chosen by the Iranian people in national elections, as an institution through which the people could exert influence.31 As will be seen in the following chapter, the Islamic Republic has established certain quasi-democratic institutions that are meaningful positions even if still subject to more powerful, nondemocratic institutions.
North Korea’s body politic lacks the transcendental promise and motivator to rule society found in the Islamic Republic. Its leaders could not promise eternal reward for the ultimate sacrifice, for example, as leaders in Tehran leveraged amid staggering casualties in the Iran–Iraq War. Instead, the Kim regime relied more on monopolizing information and cultivating an intense Korean nationalism. Despite religious leaders in the Kim family’s recent history, Kim Il Sung and his son and grandson have considered religion a threat rather than an asset and aggressively persecuted believers of all stripes, especially Christians, as threats to the state.32
Indeed, even today, the Iranian Supreme Leader’s public speaking differs considerably from the North Korean leader’s exhortations in instructing moral action. Supreme Leader Khamenei spends a great deal more time on moral lessons, as one may expect from a religious leader, while fusing political messages as outgrowths of those moral teachings. The Kims attempted to create a similar moral narrative to encourage action, but it is notably more superficial and self-serving.
Whereas Iranians may have been motivated by a certain developed ideology, the North Koreans largely had to craft it. From a simple nationalistic struggle against colonial powers, the group of Kimist fighters had to shift from guerillas to political leaders to maintain power over the long term. Within three years of Japan’s defeat in World War II, the Kimists jockeyed for position internally and with the Soviets. Kim took on certain aspects of Soviet ideology, such as a commitment to land redistribution and socialist economics, but he was at his core still a revolutionary fighter and Korean nationalist. After taking the still-tenuous reins of power with the establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in 1948, Kim turned to directing his superior military forces against the newly established Republic of Korea (ROK) occupying the southern half of the Korean peninsula. Kim Il Sung would reunite Korea, unnaturally divided by the superpowers who knew little about the peninsula, he reasoned.
After launching the Korean War in June 1950, Kim almost emerged victorious within months, routing the ill-prepared South Korean military. Kim’s forces pushed South Korean forces, bolstered by a relatively small group of American forces, to the southeast corner of the peninsula and came close to unifying the Korean nation under his leadership. U.S. reinforcements stationed in Japan ultimately changed the tide of war and pushed the defensive perimeter from around the southeast Korean port city of Busan up to near the Sino-Korean border, prompting Chinese military intervention. With a large and determined military power in China backing the small but motivated North Korean belligerents in the first major post–World War II conflict, the two sides ultimately ended the war in a stalemate. The war did not change substantially the borders of the ROK or DPRK, nor did it produce a unified Korean state. However, the human tragedy, memories of the trauma, and political and economic implications would be the lasting legacies of the Korean War.
War, although devastating to both sides, had a particularly taxing impact on the North Korean populace – and was a domestic political boon to the Kim Il Sung faction. The war destroyed three-fourths of North Korean homes, hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, and dramatically reduced North Korea’s industrial and agricultural output. Seventy percent of trains and 85 percent of ships were gone, and every indicator of an industrial society was reduced.33 Still, the war helped solidify Kim Il Sung’s rule and gave him an excuse to purge internal rivals.
The establishment of the DPRK preceded the Korean War by two years, and the war did not help form the state. Rather, the state helped form the war. Nevertheless, war distracted the regime from difficult governance questions. The population existed to serve the war machine as far as the regime was concerned, as is historically common in times of totalizing conflict. Absolute defeat in war would mean the end of the regime, and political leaders focus almost exclusively on winning on the battlefield and keeping the population with them.
The Korean War and the Iran-Iraq War had similar effects on state–society relations in North Korea and Iran. In both cases, the new regimes marginally predated the war, which were not conflicts of independence or national formation but had the effect of helping both regimes consolidate power. Both wars killed large numbers of Iranians and North Koreans, among others, with an especially high toll for young men who volunteered or were conscripted into the force. Sociologically, this creates a large number of orphans and fatherless households, and the state steps in to serve as a type of replacement and creates an intensely loyal, if not particularly balanced, group of young people who later tend to fill out the ranks of the internal security apparatuses.
Iran’s Supreme Leader often references the Iran-Iraq War and hails those “martyred” during the devastating war.34 The North Korean leaders have done likewise for the country’s heroes who died in the “Fatherland Liberation War,” or Korean War. For North Korea, the war was fought between the DPRK and the United States; the ROK government was only the United States’ “puppet”; Iran likewise sees the United States as ultimately behind Saddam Hussein’s decision to initiate the Iran-Iraq War, as American leaders failed to condemn the attack sufficiently in the Iranian view, continued arms sales to Iraq, and turned a blind eye to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons and war crimes.35 In consolidating power, the anti-American element in both the Iranian and North Korean governments’ early principles took on greater importance.
After the 1953 ceasefire on the Korean peninsula, the Kim regime had to transition to maintain its power. Revolutionary fighters who could not claim victory in unifying the nation and who no longer served to eject colonial powers needed a raison d’etre. North Korea stuck with what it knew and added more ideological elements to craft a ruling narrative. The foreign colonial problem remained, they argued. The Japanese were clearly defeated and continued to live in ruin in the 1950s,36 but the Americans replaced the Japanese as the new colonialists ready to topple the DPRK and its quest for a better future for Koreans, the North Korean held. Only the Americans frustrated North Korea’s otherwise inevitable drive toward unification and quick resolution of the Korean War, the North Koreans would argue.37 Consequently, the constant threat of the United States and the nationalistic motivator of Korean unification became the natural original twin pillars of North Korea’s claim to domestic legitimacy, injecting an additional foundational motivation not found in the Iranian context.
Kim Il Sung’s emphasis on nationalism combined with a local-level focus for postwar economic reconstruction would combine to form the basis of Kim’s Juche ideology that he first articulated two years after the war’s armistice. Kim purged rivals, including members of the former South Korean Workers Party, pro-Soviet, and pro-Chinese factions, while reengaging on the land reform and collectivization drive that he began in 1946 after Japan’s defeat. He sought to establish his own preeminent power in the North Korean system, focus on the uniquely Korean attributes, and limit foreign influence, including Soviet and Chinese.
Kim opposed Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” that questioned Stalin’s tactics in 1956 as a threat to his own mode of rule; indeed, Khrushchev’s reforms inspired Kim’s contemporaries to conspire against him while he was traveling abroad. Kim crushed the threat to his rule upon his return. North Korea committed to an economic campaign similar to China’s Great Leap Forward in 1958, albeit with more mixed results than China’s disastrous experiment. Nevertheless, Kim emerged from the 1950s in a stronger domestic political position with a country that saw substantial economic gains since the Korean War.
With another Korean government in the south also claiming legitimacy over the entire Korean Peninsula, the competition for legitimacy and memories of the Korean War quickly yielded to a more formalized inter-Korean rivalry. Both Korean governments wanted to showcase itself as superior to the other. The North Koreans enjoyed a comparative advantage on economic and industrial growth at the time as a legacy of Japanese investments during the colonial period, geography with the agricultural lands focused in the south leaving the north better suited for industry, and initial postwar reconstruction economic gains. Although that trend would ultimately be reversed dramatically, the North Koreans enjoyed this legitimacy advantage for a time and began turning again toward Kim’s obsession with reunifying the Korean nation under his authority.
However, the North Koreans decided to focus their ideological efforts and claims to domestic legitimacy on nationalism, not economic construction. The South Korean government was merely a group of puppets with the United States pulling the strings, they repeatedly claimed. The South Koreans accepted U.S. military personnel stationed permanently on their soil, whereas the North Koreans required its foreign backers to leave. The North Koreans were the true Korean government for Koreans and by Koreans, they would note routinely.
Socialist economics rounded out the ideology, seemingly in deference to geopolitical realities and relative indifference to economic affairs by the Kim regime, but it never became a sacrosanct piece of the regime’s founding or ideology. North Korea has remained consistent in its strategic prioritization of revolution and military strength over markets and economic growth, not only in practice, but also in ideology.38 Kim Il Sung’s 1955 Juche speech allowed the North Koreans to put the pieces together in the first expression of the Juche ideology, which evolved to fit regime needs over the years.
Pyongyang adeptly managed the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s and became increasingly belligerent and violent again in the inter-Korean competition. Beijing and Moscow attempted to court and pressure North Korea with economic and political supports into a reliable satellite, but Pyongyang leveraged the great powers’ concern about “losing” North Korea to its advantage. In 1961, the DPRK signed a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the USSR. Without telling Moscow about its plans, it signed a similar treaty with China only five days later. North Korea also courted the Non-Aligned Movement countries from the late 1950s to the 1970s, focusing on its emphasis on national independence from the great powers. With both the socialist bloc and non-aligned countries as uneasy partners, North Korea was far from isolated internationally.39
North Korea also increased military investments and targeted South Korea with military incursions. From 1964 to 1967, defense spending as a proportion of government expenditures rose from 6 percent to 30 percent. North Korea formed one of the largest armies in the world – four times larger than the Soviet army on a per capita basis. Kim also decided to use this military might, initiating a raid on the South Korean presidential office that nearly succeeded in assassinating the South Korean chief executive, seizing the USS Pueblo (which it still maintains as a museum today), and shooting down an American reconnaissance plane over the Sea of Japan, killing all thirty-one crew on board. The two Koreas also contributed to opposite sides of the Vietnam War, with the DPRK encouraged and the ROK unsettled by the ultimate unification outcome of that protracted conflict.40
North and South Korea feared superpower abandonment in the early 1970s. The United States withdrew about one-third of its troops stationed in South Korea in 1971, suddenly opened to China in 1972, and “lost” Vietnam by withdrawing from the conflict that ultimately allowed the North Vietnamese to unify the country by force. Seoul naturally was concerned about its primary security backer taking substantial steps that, if applied to Korea as well, could threaten the very existence of its regime.41 But Pyongyang’s leaders were also concerned. They long had an uneasy relationship with their great power backers and also were not particularly comforted by superpower rapprochement, especially with neither Korea having a say in the matter. The two Koreas decided to take matters into their own hands and signed the 1972 Joint Declaration, emphasizing the role of Koreans in a peaceful unification and a fundamental recognition of Korea as one nation. Each government’s decision to adopt a new constitution later the same year, combined with a general impasse in inter-Korean relations, showed the North-South competition was alive and well.42
In North Korea’s 1972 constitution, Kim Il Sung took a position formally above the Korean Workers Party, putting him in a unique legal space among his socialist peers. While Kim Il Sung enjoyed the apex of his power, his son, Kim Jong Il, operated in the space of the politically relevant arts. Kim Jong Il directed North Korea’s most celebrated theater performance and later film, The Flower Selling Girl. The show, which earned prominence not only in North Korea, but also abroad as a genuine masterpiece among socialist theater, told the story of a family exploited by landowners and Japanese colonialists. A teenage girl who sells flowers to support her family is transformed. After her family meets tragedy, the girl blossoms and finds meaning in supporting the anti-Japanese partisan resistance movement by selling flowers. Kim Jong Il’s follow-on film, Sea of Blood, developed similar themes with a focus on a revolutionary mother who, facing the violent and repressive Japanese colonialism, finds meaning as a seamstress supporting the Korean partisans.43 As Kim Jong Il took on increasingly important roles in the North Korean bureaucracy in the 1970s to learn the mechanics of government, he showed a personal mastery of North Korean ideological narratives that would prove important in maintaining control over the country.
The 1980s was about the formal rise of Kim Jong Il and the decline of the Soviet Union for North Korea. The DPRK’s founder officially designated his son, Kim Jong Il, as heir at the Sixth Korean Workers Party conference in 1980. The younger Kim took on more responsibilities until he was all but running the country in advance of Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994. The Soviets showed hints of less generous terms for trade and aid in the 1980s, but the Soviet collapse and its recognition of the Republic of Korea in 1990 was a final blow.
North Korea tragically decided to enter the terrorism business for a time, abducting Japanese nationals starting in 1977 and extending through the early 1980s, bombing South Korean officials in Rangoon in 1983, and bombing a civilian South Korean airliner in 1987. Nevertheless, inter-Korean contacts and exchanges picked up in the mid-1980s amid South Korea’s Nordpolitik policy. Meanwhile, South Korea progressed toward democracy amid significant social mobilization and hosted the Olympics in 1988.44 By the time the two Koreas signed their important 1992 “Basic Agreement,” the strategic inter-Korean competition was all but over. The North would keep up the facade, but the South had won.45
North Korea was a particularly difficult place to live in the 1990s. On the losing end of the Cold War in stunning contrast to its South Korean rival, North Korea lost access to its Soviet backer. Its energy-intensive industry no longer enjoyed cheap crude oil offered at Soviet friendship prices and effectively ceased to function. North Korea shifted from being a primarily industrial economy to an agricultural one during the 1990s. North Korea’s mountainous terrain is not well suited for agriculture, and the North’s extraordinary efforts to change this basic fact put the country on the constant precipice of insufficient food supplies, compounded by inadequate logistics and infrastructure to minimize agricultural waste. North Korea defaulted on its debt earlier in its history and was not creditworthy. It offered a particularly negative business environment for foreign companies and was left to its own devices and international humanitarian aid to address the economic crisis that would culminate in famine.
The North intensified its confrontation with the United States over the nuclear issue in 1993, claiming a need for energy, and ultimately gaining both energy and humanitarian aid from a variety of interested neighbors.46 Amid economic crisis and high-stakes negotiations with the United States, North Korea’s only known top leader died in 1994, forcing the succession issue long in the background to the front.
In transitioning from the state’s founder to his son in North Korea, the regime’s second leader, Kim Jong Il, confronted a generational divide among elites, a need to establish his bona fides as the next leader, and even potential challengers. Kim Jong Il promoted his associates, divided portfolios, and generally reshuffled personnel to ensure those individuals most loyal to him maintained positions of power. That loyalty base would be required as Kim Jong Il’s regime confronted the crises of the loss of its primary political and economic backer, famine, and confrontation over its nuclear program. Within a decade of formally taking the top role, the Kim regime had weathered reports of purges, power struggles, and even coup and assassination attempts.47
On a social level, the most lasting legacy of the 1990s and the economic collapse was not the high diplomacy over nuclear weapons, but the economic collapse and famine that claimed the lives of 1 to 2 million North Koreans in the late 1990s.48 The North recovered from crisis levels with outside help and experimented with different economic incentives and quasi-ideologies. However, North Korea had no hope of catching up economically with its southern neighbor. The one area the North has seen significant technological advances in, however, is on its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, but stated hopes that these scientific advances would translate into economic opportunities have not borne fruit.
North Korea emerged from famine and saw modest economic growth from a low base after the turn of the century. The state attempted to codify some of the coping mechanisms that emerged during the famine, including legalizing and regulating markets. Money became increasingly important and a reflection of social status. The regime even attempted to rationalize prices and wages in 2002 to make the black market exchange rates somewhat closer to official exchange rates. By 2005 the state tried to rein in some of these changes by reinstituting the Public Distribution System (PDS) as the means of providing staple foodstuffs to the populace. Once again, workers would receive ration cards from their work and receive rations from a state-run distribution center, but government efforts to control markets continued to remain elusive. In 2009 the regime revalued the North Korean Won, wiping out the cash savings of those merchants who could not store wealth in hard currency. The policy move was a debacle, and rare and uncoordinated protests arose throughout the country. Inflation spiked, and low confidence in the North Korean currency bottomed out as trade increasingly moved to hard currencies – and, for a time, barter with all its inefficiencies.
Pyongyang focused on grand economic projects in advance of the 100th anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth in 2012, including setting a goal of building 100,000 new apartment units in the capital. North Korean economic goals are exaggerated often, but they do represent directives, and Pyongyang saw a building boom as soldiers and even university students were mobilized to act as construction workers under unsafe conditions. North Korea has continued projects in the sports and entertainment fields since 2012 and tried to attract foreign investment through Special Economic Zones with little success. Economically, the DPRK has recovered from the famine and settled into a state of anemic economic growth, chronic food shortages and food insecurity, and little prospect for a substantially changed picture in the near term. North Korean authorities were forced to deal with economic crises in the 1950s and 1990s, but economic functionaries are not senior leaders in the regime, and the economy has never been the focal point of the DPRK. Making the North Korean people prosperous has never been a top goal of the DPRK – or the Islamic Republic.
Kim Jong Il also began the 21st century with the first inter-Korean summit with a progressive South Korean president who emphasized exchanges, cooperation projects, and aid for its northern neighbor to increase North Korea’s dependence on the South, socialize the North to the benefits of cooperation over confrontation, and address humanitarian challenges of fellow Koreans. The controversial policy improved inter-Korean relations and paved the way for humanitarian projects such as family reunions for elderly Koreans long separated by the demilitarized zone (DMZ), tourism projects where South Koreans could visit a mountain resort on the North Korean coast, and business ventures where South Korean small and medium-sized enterprises could enjoy the benefits of cheap North Korean labor to manufacture basic goods amid substantial South Korean government political risk insurance subsidies. However, the engagement did not fundamentally alter the conventional military or nuclear threats posed by the North, and the South Korean electorate eventually turned against the approach after a decade of progressive administrations in South Korea.
North Korea showed its willingness to lash out against the South again in 2010 by torpedoing a South Korean naval vessel, killing all forty-six sailors on board; shelling a South Korean island close to the North Korean shore in 2011, killing two marines and two civilians that had an even larger effect on the South Korean populace than the more deadly incident the year before49; and conducting cyber-attacks and sending surveillance drones into South Korea.
Denuclearization discussions in the 2000s, meanwhile, progressed in a stop-and-go fashion. Though detailed in Chapter 5, the United States focused on North Korea’s nuclear program, and the United States, North Korea, South Korea, China, and Russia inked some agreements to restrict North Korea’s nuclear development in 2005 and 2007. However, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has continued to progress, following a series of nuclear tests, expanding fissile material production, and continued long-range missile flight tests. North Korea’s nuclear weapons development continues as various players in the international community attempt to convince, incentivize, cajole, and pressure North Korea to end or curtail this activity.
Kim Jong Il introduced his third son, Kim Jong Un, at the Third Korean Workers Party Conference in September 2010. Kim Jong Un, who was then twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, took the spotlight as North Korea’s next leader. His father died suddenly just over two years later, ushering in the third generation of succession. Outside analysts would struggle to gain insights into the new leader from afar while watching personnel shifts and institutional dynamics as the only known mechanisms to analyze North Korean internal politics.
Kim Jong Un promoted and removed a variety of senior officials at the very top of his formal and informal ruling structures, but none was more dramatic than the purge, public denunciation, and execution of his powerful uncle, Jang Song Thaek.50 Kim Jong Un had a shorter grooming period than his father and enjoyed less governmental experience prior to taking on the top job.51 But he also had more charisma than his reclusive father, restarted giving annual New Year’s Day speeches instead of printing them in the newspaper, showcased the DPRK’s first couple to North Korean society, resurrected the mass party conference, and abolished certain ruling institutions his father put in place such as the National Defense Commission. Kim Jong Un would have his own ruling style even if he would continue to pursue the same basic economic, national security, and inter-Korean policies.
Despite the prevalence of the North Korea–Iran comparison, historical similarities are quite abstract. Both regimes were formed and led by a charismatic demagogue and had some level of rhetorical commitment to class conflict. But Khomenei’s religious motivations and justifications cannot be found in North Korea. Khomenei launched his revolution against the material mismanagement and secularism of a domestic leader, whereas Kim Il Sung rallied support from nationalists committed to ejecting hated foreign colonialists. Khomenei was a religious scholar with a well-formed idea of government, whereas Kim Il Sung was an uneducated guerrilla fighter who was only required to think about governance after Japan’s defeat by the Allies. Khomenei tapped into religious zeal (especially during the Iran-Iraq war) to justify his policies and to rally domestic support, whereas Kim Il Sung used naked nationalism to achieve similar domestic political goals. Kim Il Sung created an ideological system based on this anti-imperialist sentiment and incorporated opportunistic economic theories, but he did not have the benefit of a great world religion to justify his role or to enable him to make transcendental promises of rewards in the next life. Kim had to invest even more in efforts to promote ideological indoctrination and suppress dissent in order to secure his rule.52 These differences have produced two political systems with different foundations and distinct modes of rule.
However, two commonalities are important to note early. First, neither regime was founded on a commitment to nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons development is, at best, a critical component of national security and a nod to internal constituencies, but it is not an integral part of either country’s founding ideals or pillars of legitimacy. It is an element of these countries’ histories and a sizable component of their contemporary political agendas, but they are not fundamental to the regimes. The role or potential role of nuclear weapons is a substantial national security policy issue in both countries, which intersects with domestic politics. It is not an ideological problem.53
Second, both governments began with revolutionary movements and were organized forces before the founding of the state. Iran’s clerical structure and Korea’s Workers Party and military structure came before the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, respectively. This is meaningful as it allows the Iranian and North Korean revolutionary leaders to institutionalize revolutionary and anti-American goals in state structures and profoundly affects state formation.54 Religious leaders in Iran and party officials in North Korea provide strategic guidance and the reference points for policy, not technocrats. As we will see in the next chapter, state institutions like the Iranian presidency or the North Korean Cabinet Premier do not rule the country. Rather the Supreme Leader in Iran and the appropriate Kim in North Korea have the final word. The formative history of these two regimes led to a certain type of authoritarian governance at odds with many Western expectations. Although this does not make Iran and North Korea unique among authoritarian regimes, it is important to bear this in mind when analyzing the two countries.55
1Below the Supreme Leader, Iran is led by both clerics and lay people. It is not appropriate to call it a pure theocracy, but it approaches this type of governance more than most governments in the world today. Likewise, North Korea is not completely devoid of religion. The government is extremely hostile to most forms of organized religion, especially Christianity, but it tolerates certain forms and places of worship deemed consistent with Korean cultural practices, especially Buddhism.
2Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 8–33.
3Gregory Henderson, Korea: The Politics of the Vortex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
4Abrahamian, pp. 25–37.
5Carter J. Eckert, et al., Korea Old and New: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 199–241.
6Kenneth Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 4–24.
7Eckert et al. 1990
8Pollack, pp. 24–25. For a slightly varied account, see Abrahamian (p. 60) who notes Iran’s bad harvest, cholera and typhus outbreaks, the 1919 influenza pandemic, and wartime disruptions contributed to 2 million Iranian dead between 1917 and 1921.
9Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). See also Hazel Smith, Hungry for Peace: International Security, Humanitarian Assistance, and Social Change in North Korea (Washington, DC: USIP Press, 2005), pp. 66–157. For a contrasting view on the North Korean famine more in line with the North Korean explanation, see Meredith Woo-Cumings, “The Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons,” ADB Institute Research Paper 31 (January 1, 2002), www.adbi.org/research%20paper/2002/01/01/115.political.ecology/.
10Abrahamian, pp. 62–99.
11Donald Wilber, Central Intelligence Agency Clandestine Service History, “Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran, November 1952–August 1953,” originally published internally in 1954 and declassified in November 2000. For an introduction and full text of the 200-page report, see http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/. Mark Gasiorowski, “The CIA Looks Back at the 1953 Coup in Iran,” Middle East Report, Fall 2000, pp. 4–5. John Limbert, Negotiating with Iran: Wrestling with the Ghosts of History (Washington, DC: USIP Press, 2009), pp. 59–86.
12Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Iran and the United States: An Insider’s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 15, 24.
13Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-sik Lee, Communism in Korea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972).
14Charles Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
15Mark Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004).
16Suzanne Maloney, Iran’s Long Reach: Iran as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World (Washington, DC: USIP Press, 2008).
17Pollack, p. 109.
18Mousavian 2014, pp. 25–29.
19Ray Takeyh, Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic (New York: Times Books, 2006), pp. 15–20.
20The North Korean official recounting actually goes further, claiming to its domestic audience that the United States actually started the Korean War despite clear historical evidence to the contrary.
21Hans Küng, Islam: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), p. 442. John L. Esposito, Islam the Straight Path (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 179–86. Marvin E. Gettleman and Stuart Schaar, The Middle East and Islamic World Reader (New York: Grove Press, 2003), p. 259.
22James A. Bill and John Alden Williams, “Shi‘i Islam and Roman Catholicism: An Ecclesial and Political Analysis,” in Kail Ellis (ed.), The Vatican, Islam, and the Middle East (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1987), pp. 130–31.
23William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), p. 411.
24Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 1.
25Esposito notes that Ayatollah Khomeini took this argument a step further, considering a government ruled by the jurist-scholar to be “the best form of government prior to the return of the Hidden Imam.” John L. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path. 3d ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 233.
26Bill and Williams, pp. 130–31. William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), p. 411. Peter G. Riddell and Peter Cotterell, Islam in Context: Past, Present, and Future (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academics, 2003), p. 208.
27Bill and Williams, pp. 132, 202.
28Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), p. 17. Manochehr Dorraj, From Zarathustra to Khomeini: Populism and Dissent in Iran (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1990). Haideh Moqhissi, Populism and Feminism in Iran: Women’s Struggle in a Male Defined Revolutionary Movement (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
29See for example Moosavi Khomeini, Imam Khomeini’s Last Will and Testament (Washington, DC: Iranian Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1989), p. 28.
30See for example Moosavi Khomeini, Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, translated by Hamid Algar (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1981), p. 56. “Islamic government is a government of law. In this form of government, sovereignty belongs to God alone and law is His decree and command.”
31Bill and Williams, p. 96.
32One exception is Buddhism, where North Koreans tolerate certain religious places as cultural, not religious, sites.
33Charles Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), pp. 53–54.
34Khamenei, March 28, 2011.
35Mousavian, pp. 84–85.
36For a view of postwar Japan, see John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999).
37For more on the Korean War’s history, see William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). For more on the founding of the North Korean state, see Dae-sook Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
38Heonik Kwon and Byung-ho Chung, North Korea Beyond Charismatic Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), pp. 81–82.
39Armstrong, pp. 80–144.
40Armstrong, pp. 134–48. See the Wilson Center Collection for a series of translated primary documents on “The ‘Second’ Korean War, 1967–1969,” http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/119/the-second-korean-war-1967-1969.
41U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, “ ‘Memorandum of Conversation’ Between President Park Chung Hee and U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger,” August 27, 1975, Declassified December 10, 2009. U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, “Memorandum of Conversation,” ROK Minister of Defense Suh Jyong-chul and U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, August 26, 1975, Declassified July 24, 2006. Available through the Wilson Center Digital Archive. Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 64–68.
42South Korean Foreign Ministry Archive, “Conversation Between Kim Il Sung and [KCIA Director] Lee Hu-rak,” May 4, 1972. South Korean Foreign Ministry Archive, “Conversation Between Kim Il Sung and [KCIA Director] Lee Hu-rak,” November 3, 1972. Ahmet Ozbudun, “Letter to UN Chef de Cabinet Narasimhan,” March 16, 1973. South Korean Foreign Ministry Archive, “Conversation Between Kim Il Sung and [KCIA Director] Lee Hu-rak,” May 4, 1972.
43Kwon and Chung, pp. 51–57.
44Armstrong, pp. 158–255.
45Oberdorfer, pp. 183–248.
46For a comprehensive review of the energy aid provided to North Korea starting in the late 1990s, see Robert Carlin, Joel Wit, and Charles Kartman, A History of KEDO, 1994–2006 (Stanford, CA: Center for International Security and Cooperation, 2012). For a critical view of this aid relationship, see Nicholas Eberstadt and Alex Coblin, “Dependencia, North Korea Style,” presented at The Asan Institute for Policy Studies on November 6, 2014 and available online at www.aei.org/publication/dependencia-north-korea-style/”
47Ken Gause, North Korea Under Kim Chong-il: Power, Politics, and Prospects for Change (Santa Barbra, CA: Praeger, 2011), pp. 6–20. James Brooke, “Reports of Massive Blast Emerge from Secretive North Korea,” The New York Times, April 22, 2004.
48Hazel Smith, North Korea: Markets and Military Rule (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 209–34.
49Peter Beck, “North Korea in 2010: Provocations and Succession,” Asian Survey 51:1 (2011), pp. 33–40.
50For an early assessment of the Kim Jong Un period, see Ken Gause, North Korean Leadership Dynamics and Decision-Making Under Kim Jong-un: A First Year Assessment (Alexandria, VA: CNA, 2013), www.cna.org/sites/default/files/research/NK_Leadership_Dynamics.pdf.
51Jae-Cheon Lim, “North Korea’s Hereditary Succession: Comparing Two Key Transitions in the DPRK,” Asian Survey 52:3 (2012), pp. 550–70.
52For further discussion of North Korean ideological thought, see Han-shik Park, North Korea: The Politics of Unconventional Wisdom (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002). See also Brian Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (New York: Melville House, 2010).
53For a distinct view, see Nicholas Eberstadt, “Confronting the North Korea Threat: Reassessing Policy Options,” Hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 31, 2017. Eberstadt argues that North Korea’s nuclear weapons are necessary for Pyongyang to divide the United States and the ROK, which is fundamental to North Korea’s unification strategy. Because unification is a fundamental ideological imperative, North Korea’s nuclear weapons have taken on a de facto ideological imperative themselves. We concur that unification is central to North Korea’s ideology, but nuclear weapons are a once-removed criterion in this logic. North Korea’s nuclear weapons can be seen as enhancing U.S.-ROK alliance solidarity in face of the common threat or opening opportunities for wedges in the alliance over distinct policy approaches to the nuclear problem, so we should not conflate perceived casual relationships between external variables like nuclear weapons that may affect a core ideological goal with that ideological goal itself.
54For a cross-national study of the origins of authoritarian regimes with a party structure predating the state, including its impact on regime stability, see Benjamin Smith, “Life of the Party: The Origins of Regime Breakdown or Persistence Under Single-Party Rule,” World Politics 57 (April 2005), pp. 421–51. In David Art’s phrase, “power comes first, and institutions are constructed to preserve it.” David Art, “What Do We Know about Authoritarianism After Ten Years?” Comparative Politics, April 2012, p. 361.
55We are indebted to the comments of an anonymous reviewer for this final point.