Opinion | The revival of North Korea as a geopolitical player

By Tom Fowdy

In Victor Cha's 2012 book "The Impossible State", he added a chapter titled "The End is Near" wherein he predicted the end of the North Korean state following the death of its then-leader, Kim Jong Il. Cha's book, a NeoConservative who served in the Bush Administration, simply reflected the conventional wisdom of Washington D.C "scholars" since the end of the Cold War in 1991, that being the DPRK was a Communist relic whose collapse was imminent, and would ultimately meet the same fate as the Soviet bloc regimes in Eastern and Central Europe, East Germany specifically. As an isolated country with a moribund economy, how would it be possible for North Korea to continue?

It is now 2024. At the time of writing, North Korea has just tested what appears to be an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) over the East Sea, while it also purportedly has sent troops to fight Ukrainian forces in Russia's Kursk region, having already been supplying the war with artillery and signing a new treaty of alliance with Moscow. The mainstream media desperately attempts to play the issue to pry Russia and China, its traditional backers, apart. Yet if the above might suggest anything, North Korea, this "impossible state" which also faces overwhelming international sanctions regarding its nuclear program, has defied the odds pertaining to its own collapse and somehow became a major geopolitical player in the world.

While the thinking of the immediate post-Cold War was laden with American-centric hubris and supremacy, hence Francis Fukuyama's notorious "end of history" thesis that championed the final victory of liberal ideology, it is not unreasonable within that historical context to assume North Korea's days were numbered. The country was facing a period of severe isolation as China and Russia leaned towards the West, the Boris Yeltsin administration having cut it off completely. Likewise, it had effectively lost its decades-long struggle to be the "number one" Korean state against its southern counterpart who became wealthy and prosperous.

Therefore, alone and unwilling to reform its political system, the DPRK suffered total economic decimation and subsequent famine, leading to an outpouring of refugees, why wouldn't its absorption by the south be likely? And what kind of future could such a country, with a political system described as totalitarian, possibly have? After all, the scholarship also noted how the world was creeping in, how informal trade with China was growing, and cultural influence by the South. While the DPRK resisted formal change at the top level, it was nonetheless "creeping in" informally. But despite this, the DPRK leadership had no intention of loosening their grip on political power, and in fact far from a "liberal victory" the world would gradually change in ways that favored their objectives.

First, the events of the George W. Bush administration convinced Kim Jong Il that attempting to negotiate in good faith with the United States, who would likely seek to terminate his regime by military action, was futile, not least as promises made in the 1990s to the DPRK were not fulfilled precisely because it was assumed they would collapse. Likewise, an extraordinarily weak DPRK had no leverage whatsoever to keep Washington at bay. The invasion of Iraq and Bush's "axis of evil" speech set off a chain of events that saw North Korea conduct its first nuclear weapons test in 2006. For the closing years of Kim Jong Il's life, the DPRK used its nuclear weapons simply to barter aid from the US.

But his son, Kim Jong Un, would have different ideas. Young, inexperienced and threatened by the myriad of "informal changes" in North Korea, Kim decided on a path of complete confrontation with the United States through rapidly developing nuclear missile capabilities. He also subsequently purged the reformist factions within his state apparatus including the execution of his uncle. This would ultimately bring him to loggerheads with the Trump administration in 2017, who tried to cripple his regime through maximalist sanctions and threats of war, demanding he denuclearise. Despite some warm engagement between the two from 2018-2019, Trump failed.

Then the world changed, again. The COVID pandemic, coupled with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, rewrote the geopolitical climate as a new normal of geopolitical conflict emerged between China, the United States and its allies, and Russia. Kim Jong Un used the pandemic to close his state off to the entire world, before exploiting these new political fault lines to advance his capabilities, re-establish a new alliance with Moscow, evade sanctions and support its war. Thus, against all odds, North Korea managed to revive itself in a way that few people could have imagined even a decade ago, never mind in the 1990s. The Cold War relic which was "doomed to collapse" is now deemed to be participating in Europe's biggest conflict since World War II.

As I always say, sometimes history and politics are often unpredictable, with single "what ifs" changing everything.

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

Read more articles by Tom Fowdy:

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