Singapore’s Foreign Minister, Vivian Balakrishnan, recently visited North Korea as part of his wider regional tour. His assessment of the country’s “strategic posture” revealed to him that it has shifted in objectives in recent years. Pyongyang no longer promotes the narrative of Korean “greatness” and “unification” in its foreign policy, and is not interested in reengagement with the foreign countries it has previously ostracised. Instead, the regime has set its sights on achieving complete self-reliance, whilst at the same time maintaining a strong military posture and increasing its arsenal of nuclear arms. It appears that the country is trying to establish a two-state reality on the Korean Peninsula with the support of Russia and China, and in order to moderate its behaviour, sustained diplomacy toward these two powers is needed.
The abandonment of reunification by North Korea is a fundamental transformation of the country. For decades, the North Korean regime maintained that reunification with the South was the ultimate goal of the country. The North Korean leadership views the South today as a hostile state with which it is better to maintain an armistice than to attempt to establish a permanent peace. Indeed, the focus on sovereignty and upholding the purity of the ideology over a grand reunification is now more paramount than ever for the regime. The latter could expose the weakness of the current regime that could lead to its downfall. As noted earlier, Russia and China are keen to maintain stability in the Korean Peninsula. Furthermore, they have little to gain from pressuring Pyongyang into compromising on its ideological stance.
This posture is primarily structural. As the leadership sees all outreach by the US to be coercive and unreliable, it naturally interprets negotiations with the two southern nations as pressure to compromise to garner concessions. Thus, anti-U.S. and anti-ROK rhetoric serves to legitimise its current stance and enhance its position domestically while enabling it to throw its military into high alert whenever it deems it necessary. Russia’s increasing partnership with Pyongyang can serve to facilitate military cooperation, thereby strengthening its position even further, while continued Chinese support can reduce Pyongyang’s incentives to engage in dialogue with the West.
Self-reliance is once again central to North Korea’s ideology, embodied in the Juche (self-reliance) and Byungjin (simultaneous development) principles that focus on creating an economically self-sufficient state and on developing a nuclear-weapons strategic force at the same time. The sanctions regime has placed a heavy strain on the North Korean economy. Yet, in order to maintain its claim to be able to survive forever, the regime is determined to withstand the pressures of the sanctions regime. In order to do so, it can draw on its existing network of external supporters, who are willing to provide the regime with sufficient support, in the form of food or fuel, in order to maintain the internal stability of the country. As a result, sanctions will have limited impact on the regime’s self-reliance.
Military deterrence is at the heart of the North’s security strategy today, and the nuclear weapon is considered a necessary tool to protect the regime from external threats. While it continues to build up its nuclear arsenals in qualitative and quantitative terms, Pyongyang has also been increasingly active in its military strategy with several recent operations in the region and beyond. Russia’s request for ammunition as well as Moscow’s growing military cooperation with the North have reinforced the regime’s confidence. It is China’s strategic ambiguity on North Korea that enables Pyongyang to continue its provocative behaviour and militarisation, without being able to invoke an international response. As a result, North Korea today is a more militarised and belligerent country that does not consider compromise necessary or possible without exposing its vulnerabilities.
In sum, North Korea’s foreign policy is becoming increasingly focused on the broader international setting and is influenced by the same rivalries and conflicts that are emerging in other regions of the world. While in the past the DPRK focused almost exclusively on its relations with the US and with South Korea, today it is clear that the two other major players on the Korean Peninsula, Russia and China, are increasingly influencing Pyongyang’s strategic posture and behaviour. Until these two powers alter their stance toward the North, it is unlikely that Pyongyang will cease its military development or agree to any form of compromise with Washington and Seoul. Instead, the Korean Peninsula is increasingly becoming locked into a two-state reality in which the prospects for denuclearisation and for confidence-building measures are fading rapidly. The biggest danger of all is that of miscalculation by the North, given the increasingly assertive nature of its military posture.
The most viable avenue for bringing North Korea’s behaviour within the bounds of acceptability is through sustained diplomatic pressure on Russia and China. These two countries are now providing North Korea the economic, diplomatic and strategic space that it requires. It is through these two countries that need to be subjected to Western pressure to bring an end to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and to bring an end to the military build-up on the Korean Peninsula. While it is true that sanctions alone are not sufficient to change North Korea’s behaviour, they can have a profound impact if all countries, particularly China, enforce them. Similarly, while military deterrence is a key component of ensuring that North Korea does not use its nuclear weapons, it is not sufficient in and of itself to fundamentally affect the political incentives that drive North Korea’s behaviour. What is required is a coordinated effort to persuade China to enforce existing sanctions more stringently and to persuade Russia to bring an end to its military cooperation with the DPRK.
In conclusion, it appears that North Korea’s posture has hardened both in terms of how the regime views itself and in terms of how the external environment affects it. While before the North was able to use reunification as a way to garner international support and as a legitimating principle, it now views the South as a hostile opponent and does not see any viable means by which the two countries could be reunified. Likewise, North Korea has long rejected engagement with the US and with South Korea, and in recent years it has returned to a focus on self-reliance, which has taken on the form of Juche and of Byungjin, or the simultaneous development of economy and of nuclear arms. And while the sanctions on the North have hurt the country’s economy, it has managed to make ends meet, in large part by receiving support from both Russia and from China. In short, it appears that the North has become a more confident and militarised country. And it is a two-state reality on the Korean Peninsula, with no end in sight to denuclearisation and to confidence-building measures. All of this points to the fact that in order to get North Korea to change its behaviour, it is necessary to focus on Moscow and on Beijing, since they are the only two external factors that are currently able to influence the North.
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Simon Hutagalung
Simon Hutagalung is a retired Indonesian Foreign Ministry diplomat and received his Master’s degree in Political Science and Comparative Politics from the City University of New York. He writes opinion pieces for Europeantimes and all opinions expressed in his article are his own.
