North Korea was organized in 1945 as a Stalinist satellite state, an extension of the USSR, under the rule of dictator Kim Il-sung, chosen by the Soviets to run the puppet state for them. It formally became the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in 1948.
The DPRK represented the harshest form of Stalinism, and maintained this posture after the death of Stalin in 1953, and after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Identified as one of the most repressive regimes on earth, North Korea routinely arrests, beats, tortures, imprisons, and executes its citizens for the slightest offenses. People have been sentenced to decades in prison for merely possessing a Bible. Women have been forced into slavery.
The militaristic nature of the DPRK led to the surprise attack in 1950 on South Korea. The resulting Korean War caused the deaths of millions, and was a direct consequence of the actions of the Kim Il-sung regime. In 1994, he died, and his son Kim Jong-il inherited the role of dictator.
During the reign of Kim Jong-il, North Korea energetically pursued the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons and the missiles needed to deliver them to nations around the world. The DPRK wanted not only to bully South Korea, but rather also to bully any country on the globe.
The intelligence agencies of various nations soon discovered North Korea’s atomic weapons program. Diplomats used both the carrot — promised rewards for desisting from weapons development — and the stick — promised economic punishments for continued construction of nuclear weapons. Neither approach succeeded.
Eventually, the DPRK revealed its new weapons to the world. While the exact timing was a surprise, North Korea’s acquisition of atomic weapons had been an inevitability for some years.
One reason for the date of unveiling of the DPRK’s nuclear capabilities was the fact that the world’s attention had been elsewhere. Problems in Iraq and Syria dominated both diplomatic talk and the news media. Like his father and his son, Kim Jong-il didn’t like it when he wasn’t on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. At atomic explosion would quickly fix that.
In October 2006, Vice President Richard Cheney — better known as Dick Cheney — learned of North Korea’s surprise. He recalls:
In the fall of 2006, as violence in Iraq was still escalating, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test, setting off an explosion at the Punggye test site some two hundred forty miles northeast of Pyongyang. When the blast was detected, it was Sunday evening, October 8, in Washington, D.C. The next morning President Bush went before the cameras in the Diplomatic Reception Room to condemn the test and issue a warning.
An atomic weapon “test” is not actually testing anything: the scientists know how it will work. It is a gesture designed to intimidate other nations.
President George W. Bush perceived that the DPRK posed two problems. First, its own nuclear arsenal. Second, its ability to sell nuclear weapons to rogue states and to terrorist groups. During a televised address, he said:
The North Korean regime remains one of the world’s leading proliferators of missile technology, including transfers to Iran and Syria. The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable for the consequences of such action.
Bush’s concerns were justified. The DPRK wasted little time before it began selling nuclear technology to bad actors. Dick Cheney writes:
Six months later we received intelligence that a threat of this nature had materialized. I learned about it in detail one afternoon in mid-April 2007, in National Security Advisor Steve Hadley’s office. I was seated in one of Steve’s large blue wing chairs and he was to my left. Two Israeli officials were on the sofa to my right. Meir Dagan, director of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, pulled materials from his briefcase and spread them on the coffee table in front of us. For the next hour, Dagan showed us photos of a building in the Syrian desert at a place called al-Kibar. It was a nuclear test reactor.
Intelligence agencies were able to confirm that both supplies and expertise from North Korea were being used to start a nuclear weapons program in Syria. In September 2007, the Isreali military destroyed the site.
That was a significant setback to the Syrian atomic weapons program; indeed, possibly the end of that program. The site, also known as Dair Alzour, was investigated by United Nations officials, who confirmed the nature and purpose of the site.
While the Syrian threat was neutralized, the North Korean threat grew.
A decade later, the situation had not changed substantially. North Korea was still belligerent, threatening other nations. Its nuclear arsenal was larger, and it had developed missiles capable of traveling greater distances. In 2011, Kim Jong-un had become the dictator upon the death of his father, Kim Jong-il.
The world’s diplomats had shown that diplomacy would not affect the DPRK. Spoken and written words were largely meaningless coming from the North Koreans or going to them. The DPRK would agree to any terms and sign any agreement, even as it was violating the treaty it was signing.
An effective policy toward North Korea would consist of actions, not words.
In January 2017, Nikki Haley became the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. She recalls her assessment of the North Korean situation at that time:
The Trump administration’s approach to North Korea, more than any other country except Iran, represented a fundamental break from the past. For over twenty years, both Republican and Democratic presidents had tried various strategies to stop the regime’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. These strategies consisted mostly of trying to bribe Pyongyang into good behavior. What was worse, these bribes were not conditional. North Korea had to do nothing but promise to change its behavior in order to receive aid from the United States. Only after the regime had gotten what it wanted did the United States realize that their promises would not be kept.
As ambassador, Nikki Haley helped to enact economic measures against North Korea. Various nations, by refusing to accept goods exported from the DPRK, reduced North Korea’s import income by more than $1 billion dollars.
She also helped to coordinate a diplomatic framework allowing joint operations by the militaries of various nations. These operations were a show of force in direct response to DPRK missile launches.
Nikki Haley’s actions were part of the new approach to North Korea. Substantive actions made more of an impression on Kim Jong-un than diplomatic verbiage. She writes:
The Trump administration took a fundamentally different approach. The policy of “strategic patience” proclaimed by President Obama was over. We would no longer rely on a policy of appeasement to try to persuade the Kim regime to give up its nuclear program. U.S. presidents had been kicking the can down the road on North Korea for years. There was no longer any road to kick the can down.
When it became clear to Kim Jong-un that his actions would have consequences, and that those consequences would be more than mere words, he became amenable to change. Some historians mark 12 June 2018 as a turning point: on that date, the first meeting between Kim Jong-un and President Trump resulted in a significant decline in the number of missile tests conducted by the DPRK.
The Singapore summit was the first ever meeting between a U.S. president and a North Korean leader.
Kim Jong-un was convinced that, in contrast to the previous decades, there would now be advantages for the DPRK if it behaved more peacefully. Two more summit meetings followed, one in Hanoi in February 2019 and one on 30 June 2019 on the border between South Korea and North Korea.
North Korea is still a problem. Kim Jong-un is still a problem. But it has been shown that progress can be made if specific concrete actions are taken. In diplomatic relations with the DPRK, words alone will never be enough.
