The micro patterns of the DPRK’s internal politics and external foreign policy are less well presented in the news media, and often thoroughly understood and studied only by specialists.
The ruling dynasty in North Korea began with Kim Il-Sung, who was installed as ruler prior to the founding of the DPRK as a state in 1948. He ruled until his death in 1994. During the reign of Kim Il-Sung, North Korea began developing nuclear weapons. The other nations of the world attempted to use diplomacy to persuade the DPRK to stop its efforts to build atomic bombs, but these efforts were unsuccessful.
During these same decades, the DPRK was also developing missiles to deliver these nuclear weapons to targets thousands of miles away.
As countries around the globe became more nervous about the nuclear weapons program, diplomats hoped that China could play a role in a process to dissuade Kim Il-Sung from building atomic bombs. If China weren’t able to use diplomacy to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, perhaps it would use force. Decades later, leaders around the world would still be wondering about the same question: would China help to make the DPRK somewhat humane? In the second decades of the twenty-first century, they would look back to 1994 and see the parallels, as Robert Wampler wrote in 2013:
Then, as now, the role Beijing would play in resolving the crisis was a major unknown. But a partially declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report from late January 1994 — published for the first time here and on the National Security Archive’s website — laid out Beijing’s options and possible responses, ranging from economic sanctions to war. The report notes that the Chinese needed to “reconcile their interest in stability on the Korean Peninsula and long-standing ties to Pyongyang with their interests in a denuclearized peninsula, in avoiding isolation among UN Security Council (SC) members, and in maintaining stable relations with the US, Japan and South Korea.”
While North Korea does not have good relations with any other nation, it has its least bad relations with China.
Since 1994 — at the latest — the global diplomatic community has hoped that China could be a factor in persuading North Korea to desist from its endless violations of human rights.
Kim Jong-Il inherited power in 1994 and continued the program to develop nuclear bombs. In 2006, the DPRK exploded its first atomic weapon in test. Between 2006 and 2023, North Korea has conducted a total of six such test explosions. Various intelligence agencies estimate that the country has an arsenal of between 20 and 115 atomic weapons on hand, with more being constructed on a regular basis. Its weapons continue to grow in number and sophistication, as do its missiles.
When Kim Jong-Il inherited the dictatorship in 2011, the family’s pattern of mental illness, narcissism, and brutal oppression remained unchanged. The people of the DPRK remained malnourished, uneducated, intimidated, misinformed, and subject to arrests, beatings, imprisonments, and executions at the whim of the state. The cruelties and oppression are obvious. The North Korean regime is inadvertently transparent, as Edward Luttwak writes:
The transparency is not due to anything revealed by North Korea’s string of rulers, from whom it is pointless to expect any change of policy — just because the previous one liked Japanese food and film stars, or because the current Kim Jong-un spent time in a Swiss boarding school. The regime, past and present, continues to exceed even Stalin’s Soviet Union in its pervasive secrecy, but what remains in full public view is more than enough to explain its frenetically aggressive stance.
Luttwak goes on to explain how economic calculations to divert resources into weapons programs and into the lavish lifestyle of the Kim and his cronies are unmistakable. Nobody — short-term visitor or lifelong citizen — can spend time in North Korea without understanding that this is a deliberate choice to keep the population at the starvation level, and that it is an explicit policy to demand complete unquestioning obedience and enthusiastic support from that population.
No resident of the DPRK is surprised when a neighbor, family member, or friend dies of starvation. That’s a routine occurrence. Neither are they surprised when a coworker disappears to spend decades in a prison camp — or to simply be killed.
In 2013, Frank Jannuzi reported:
Hundreds of thousands of people — including children — are arbitrarily held in political prison camps and other detention facilities, where they are subjected to forced labor, denial of food as punishment, torture and public executions. In 2011, Amnesty used satellites to document the apparent expansion of some of these prison camps. Last month, analysis of newly acquired images showed what appeared to be the blurring of lines between a political prison camp (Kwanliso-14) and the surrounding population, raising fears of new movement controls and other restrictions on people living near prison camps.
Because the DPRK government doesn’t understand Western Civilization’s habit of valuing human life, it is prone to make mistakes when dealing with the few outsiders who visit North Korea. One such incident involved an American college student whose fatal punishment was based on allegations that he might have taken a poster off a wall without permission.
The student, from the University of Virginia, was accused of stealing a poster, and sentenced to fifteen years in a labor camp. He began serving that sentence in early 2016. In June 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson secured the student’s release. The student, named Otto Warmbier, was flown home to the United States. He had been released in such poor physical condition that he died several days after returning home.
The routine attitudes and practices of the DPRK’s authorities — i.e., capital punishment for an insignificant crime, if indeed a crime it was at all — suddenly caught the world’s attention.
The North Korean officials were surprised that anybody took note of Warmbier’s death. Such officials routinely assign individuals to be executed, or to spend life in prison.
Ambassador Nikki Haley recalls explaining the situation at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council:
”To Americans, the death of one innocent person can be as powerful as the death of millions,” I told the Security Council. “Because all men and women are created in God’s image, depravity toward one is a sure sign of willingness to do much more harm.”
At that point in time, three questions coalesced and caused for a renewed global effort to confront North Korea about its crimes: first, the continued production of atomic weapons and missiles to deliver them; second, the brutal disregard for human rights manifested in the prison camps and executions; third, the attempted extermination of people who showed evidence of spiritual or religious interest.
Nikki Haley spoke about actions which could accompany the words of the diplomats. Actions were needed because words along had failed. She said to the U.N. Security Council on that day in July 2017:
In the coming days, we will bring before the Security Council a resolution that raises the international response in a way that is proportionate to North Korea’s new escalation. I will not detail the resolution here today, but the options are all known to us. If we are unified, the international community can cut off the major sources of hard currency to the North Korean regime. We can restrict the flow of oil to their military and their weapons program. We can increase air and maritime restrictions. We can hold senior regime officials accountable.
North Korean citizens were being beaten and tortured by their own government. The DPRK was constructing missiles and nuclear weapons in an ongoing program. Freedom of thought, belief, or speech was almost nonexistent.
The coordinated efforts of Nikki Haley, Rex Tillerson, and officials from both the United Nations and the United States produced a slight thaw in North Korean behavior. The coordinated diplomatic and economic efforts were called “maximum pressure” tactics, a term borrowed from the global community’s similar approach to Iran at the time. Sadly, the small improvements were short-lived, and the DPRK returned to its oppressive ways.
Merely possessing a copy of the New Testament is a crime in North Korea, punishable by life in a prison camp or by death. In 2019, citing the research of Yeo-sang Yoon and Sun-young Han, Doug Bandow explained:
Kim Il-sung, still considered the DPRK’s “eternal president,” once explained that “we came to understand that religious persons can only be broken of a bad habit if they are killed.” While North Korean policy later relaxed — it could hardly grow stricter — religion remains under siege. Indeed, as border controls have loosened, Yoon and Han note, “the North Korean regime has tightened its watch on the refugees and defectors who are deported from China because of the fear that they have been exposed to religion.”
Bandow notes that children are taught to turn their parents over to the police if the parents possess a copy of the New Testament.
By 2023, the DPRK had resumed a vigorous weapons development campaign, emboldened by America’s embarrassing withdrawal from Afghanistan, and encouraged by the fact that much of the world’s attention was directed toward the conflict in Ukraine. To fund its weapons program, North Korea engaged in high-tech theft. In June 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that “North Korea’s hacker army stole $3 billion in crypto, funding” the “nuclear program.” The newspaper went on to report that the North Korean “regime has trained cybercriminals to impersonate tech workers or employers, amid other schemes.”
At the same time, the DPRK resumed arresting anyone who demonstrated an interest in religion. Political arrests continued, targeting anyone who failed to show great enthusiasm in supporting the Kim dynasty.
