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Introduction The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) is well known in the media and amongst policymakers in relation to its cult of personality surrounding the Kim family, abuses of human rights, and nuclear weapons programme. In recent years, the DPRK’s relationship with the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) has seen both flickers of engagement and periods of increased animosity. In 2017, US President Donald Trump was threatening the DPRK with ‘fire and fury’, but less than a year later met with North
Introduction President Barack Obama’s historic “Pivot” to Asia, formally announced in late 2011, would come to have little appreciable effect on US policy towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), other than a dramatic uptick in Kim Jong-un’s nuclear weapons development programme. Obama’s “strategic patience” towards Pyongyang failed to halt or slow its development of weapons of mass destruction, but it did manage to initiate greater levels of Sino-US cooperation over sanctioning the regime, the introduction of more US resources and weapons to
D EALING WITH North Korea is perhaps one of the most difficult security challenges in global politics today. 1 Totalitarian and reclusive, ideologically isolated and economically ruined, it is the inherent ‘other’ in a globalized and neo-liberal world order. And yet, North Korea keeps surviving, not least because its leaders periodically rely
Introduction Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) are both noted for their large imports of Middle East energy supplies. Alongside China, their economic relations with Saudi Arabia and the UAE grew rapidly in the 1980s. However, strategic realities in Asia continue to dominate intra-Asian relations, whether the demise of the USSR, security relations with the US, the rise of China, growing regionalism, energy considerations and new trade and investment opportunities due to the Arab Gulf Vision strategies. Always present is
of coronavirus cases in real time were not long ago scanning Twitter feeds in dread of the moment when US President Donald Trump would make good on his promise to unleash ‘fire and fury like the world has never seen’. Fortunately for life on earth, two summits, a ‘very beautiful letter’ to Trump from Kim Jong Un and a brief encounter between the two leaders in the Korean Demilitarised Zone appear to have delayed the moment of truth. However, as Nazanin Zadeh-Cummings and Lauren Harris explain in ‘The Impact of Sanctions against North Korea on Humanitarian Aid’, the
identifies the threats to American national interests ( ibid .: 25–6): 1) Russia and China, the two great ‘revisionist powers’; 2) North Korea and Iran, two ‘rogue states’ that undermine geopolitical equilibrium in Northeast Asia and the Middle East; 3) ‘Jihadist terrorist groups’ and international criminal organisations that propagate violence and traffic drugs and arms. The document offers an extensive list of actions to be undertaken by the US to achieve strategic objectives and confront rivals, from controlling borders to increasing military
states, others, like the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade], were only for the capitalist world. There was an order, which, in theory, combined Western democracy with a more-or-less regulated capitalism: the so-called liberal order – although perhaps ‘liberal’ isn’t the most precise term, either in political or economic terms. There were of course other characteristics. The promotion of human rights became one, for example, albeit selective. When South Korea was still under dictatorship, we would ask ‘What about South Korea? Shouldn’t it
. Your enemy will not be afraid of your retaliation if it has nuclear weapons and you do not, as Iran, Israel, North Korea and the US all understand. This need for parity is always an issue, classically captured by the relative stability of mutually assured destruction. But where China, Russia and the US are concerned, it doesn’t hold. Without the leverage provided by the US, whether through threats or incentives, China and Russia only need to agree to international rules when they choose to. Who could compel them to do otherwise (unless one of
experienced this, and some have dared to describe this blindness. One was Jack London, the famous American writer sent to Korea to cover the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, who wrote, confused, of ‘black moving specks’, the ‘hubbub’, in short, ‘a war of ghosts’ (quoted in Audouin-Rouzeau, 2008 : 244). And when Le Figaro sent special correspondent Tanguy Berthemet to Sévaré (Mali) as France began its 2013 military operation (Operation Serval), he reported: ‘There is a war in
involvement in a concerted campaign ( Gilbert, 2018 ). According to FireEye, the security firm that discovered the campaign, these accounts were a coordinated operation that leveraged ‘a network of inauthentic news sites and clusters of associated accounts across multiple social media platforms to promote political narratives in line with Iranian interests’ ( ibid ., 2018), including of the Israel–Palestine conflict, politics in North Korea and the UK’s departure from the EU. In Syria, there is a fervent propaganda war between the Americans