North Korea: State of Paranoia

Both Albania and Romania were reclusive regimes that deviated from standard Soviet Marxism–Leninism. Neither had engaged in any significant form of reform. Both had strong personality cults; had experienced prolonged periods of industrial, agricultural and financial decline; and had comparatively low levels of engagement with the West. Albania was also a country that pursued a form of Military First policy, with large amounts of expenditure directed to the army, which was broad-based and appeared to be in a permanent state of war readiness. Albania and Romania maintained strong police states and monitoring of their citizens’ activities. Romania suffered a severe debt crisis engendered by extensive borrowing from the West. Ceauşescu was overthrown and executed in December 1989. The Albanian government fell in 1990.

German reunification is often cited as the potential blueprint for the reunification of Korea.

The 1972 Communiqué and the exchanges between North and South, though they raised expectations among many South Koreans that reunification might be imminent, only revealed the two starkly different societies that had emerged since 1953.

The history of Korean unification falls essentially into four phases of concerted talks. These have been relatively short, and punctuated by periods of confrontation and insults: 1972–73; 1984–85; 1990–91; and the current period since the North–South Summit in 2002.

Former Washington Post journalist Chalmers Johnson has claimed that,
Even though it remains a small, failed communist regime whose people are starving and have no petroleum, North Korea is a useful whipping boy for any number of interests in Washington. If the military needs a post-Cold War opponent to justify its existence, North Korea is less risky than China.

Successive presidents, including Barack Obama, have known that Korea is not worth many votes in the American heartland.

Reportedly Choe Hak-rae, then publisher of Hankyoreh Shinmun, a newspaper sympathetic to North Korea, asked Kim why Pyongyang was spending its scarce resources on ballistic missiles instead of education or in other civilian areas that would directly benefit the DPRK’s population. Kim’s reply was that ‘The missiles cannot reach the US and if I launch them, the US would fire back thousands of missiles and we would not survive. I know that very well. But I have to let them know I have missiles. I am making them because only then will the US talk to me.’

Subsequently thirty-four meetings took place between the North and the US between December 1988 and September 1993.

Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972 was an event of world historical importance, profoundly changing global geopolitics, radically affecting relationships in the Communist bloc, as well as signalling a change in Washington’s Cold War tactics. Nixon’s triangular diplomacy of engaging both Moscow and Beijing had a major effect on North Korea too.

Sinuiju SAR was to be a closed-off capitalist area within North Korea: using US dollars as its currency; operating its own legislature, courts and police force; issuing its own passports; operating gambling premises; with its own flag; and hopefully benefiting from some inward investment as well as a fifty-year mandate – all in a loose tax environment, though Pyongyang would retain diplomatic and defence functions.