Along with its deployment of new types and larger numbers of vehicles that can deliver nuclear weapons, the government of North Korea presented its neighbor the Republic of Korea (ROK) with a new worry this year.
Paramount leader Kim Jong-un made official a revised view of North Korea’s relationship with the South, one that Pyongyang had gravitated toward over the previous several months.
Kim renounced minjok, the idea of Koreans as a single nation or ethnic group inhabiting both halves of the Peninsula. Rather, he said, South Korea is now a foreign state and the chief enemy of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
Although liberal and conservative governments in Seoul have implemented policies toward North Korea that varied from hardline to relatively sympathetic, Kim said he is disappointed with both varieties.
He complained that the ROK seeks to overthrow the DPRK government. Nevertheless, he added, “We will never unilaterally unleash a war if the enemies do not provoke us.”
The change is jarring. One DPRK watcher compared it to the Pope telling Catholic Church members to stop believing in a Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
Nevertheless, the policy change is symbolic and attitudinal rather than substantive.
For many years already, a scenario in which Pyongyang under the Kim dynasty rules over South Korea has been almost inconceivable. This would require that either
- a) the South Koreans decide they would prefer to junk their current socio-political system and standard of living and live like North Koreans, or
- b) the US abandons its responsibility to defend the ROK and Seoul decides not to deploy nuclear weapons of its own to counter the DPRK’s.
What really matters is what the new non-reunification policy portends for North Korea’s future behavior toward South Korea. Two experienced and reputable analysts, for example, quickly concluded Pyongyang has decided to go to war against the ROK in the near future.
Evaluating the impact of the new policy on regional peace requires trying to uncover what drove Kim to renounce reunification. Among the explanations offered by outside observers, four are plausible. They are not mutually exclusive.
Soft power
The first plausible explanation is that Kim fears South Korea’s soft power.
Repudiating reunification sends an unambiguous message to DPRK citizens that friendly relations with South Korea are no longer politically correct.
Popular interest in South Korean culture is rising in North Korea as elsewhere. While the global popularity of BTS, “Gangnam style” or K-dramas has economic and prestige benefits for the ROK, the impact of Korean soft power upon the DPRK has strategic consequences.
The DPRK government has demonstrated extraordinary sensitivity to the “Korean Wave,” called in North Korea Nam Choson Baram (“South Choson wind” – Choson is the preferred North Korean name for Korea as a whole).
In December 2020 the DPRK enacted the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act, which prescribes harsh punishment for North Korean citizens found imitating South Korean cultural practices or consuming South Korean media.
There are multiple reports since the pandemic of the DPRK executing North Koreans for distributing movies and television programs from South Korea. In January the BBC publicized a video from 2022 showing the public sentencing of two teenage boys to 12 years of hard labor for the crime of watching South Korean TV shows.
Exposure to depictions of life in South Korea, which is vastly wealthier, erodes respect among North Koreans for their government’s claimed accomplishments. Admiration for South Korea’s opulence and culture can only increase the hope of some North Koreans that the ROK “absorbs” the DPRK, something Kim has repeatedly said he fears.
Seeing affinity for things South Korean as a threat to regime security, designating the ROK a foreign enemy is a logical step for a government that wants to signal to its people they should forget about ever being able to enjoy the South Korean lifestyle.
Election year in the US and South Korea
The second explanation is a desire to gain US and ROK attention during what is an election year in both countries.
Recently the DPRK has deepened its strategic cooperation with Russia, which puts pressure on Beijing to court the DPRK as well to avoid falling behind Russia’s level of influence over a country that borders China. Pyongyang seemingly gave up on reaching an agreement with Washington after the collapse of the Trump-Kim talks in Hanoi in 2019.
But Kim’s stronger relations with the China-Russia Bloc do not mean he is no longer interested in gaining concessions from Washington and Seoul.
The DPRK government wants the USA to lift economic sanctions, recognize North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, halt joint military exercises with the ROK, and discontinue the routine visits of nuclear-capable US ships and aircraft to South Korea.
Georgetown University Professor Victor Cha says empirical data demonstrate that “North Korea has increased its level of provocations during US election years.”
This year will see not only elections for the US president and most congressional seats in November, but also elections for South Korea’s National Assembly in which President Yoon Suk Yeol’s People Power Party hopes to gain a legislative majority.
South Korea is a source of possible economic handouts, and Pyongyang wants to intimidate the Yoon Administration into backing away from its hawkish posture toward North Korea.
Since DPRK missile tests have become so frequent they have lost much of their political shock value, Kim might see the renunciation of reunification as an alternative means of making North Korea a higher priority issue for Washington and Seoul.
Rally ’round the flag
The third explanation is based on what international relations scholars term a diversionary foreign policy: national leaders talking up an external crisis to divert public attention from failures of government at home and to mobilize popular patriotic support through a “rally ’round the flag” effect.
Economic hardship is generating public discontent with the DPRK government. An already-weak North Korean economy declined for three consecutive years during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A February 2023 report by Radio Free Asia said ordinary North Koreans resent seeing that Kim’s 9-year-old daughter is well-fed and well-dressed while most North Korean children are under-nourished – and are punished if they show interest in “capitalist” fashion.
Kim warned his people in late 2023 that economic problems will worsen in 2024. The country continues to suffer chronic food shortages. In January, Kim acknowledged his government’s “inability to provide even basic necessities such as basic foodstuffs, groceries and consumer goods to the local people.”
Recasting neighbor South Korea from a temporarily estranged cousin to a permanent enemy makes the DPRK’s national security situation appear more dangerous, inviting North Koreans to bond with the Kim regime in a struggle for survival against their common outside enemies. This may have been at least part of Kim’s intention.
Dehumanizing adversaries
The fourth possible explanation is that Pyongyang wants to reduce sympathy for the enemy.
The policy of striving for reunification rested on the notion that the southern half of the Korean Peninsula is part of the homeland of North Koreans and that its inhabitants are members of the larger Korean family. At the same time, Pyongyang spoke of “mercilessly” slaughtering South Koreans and contaminating their land with nuclear strikes.
Analysts such as Hong Min, a senior fellow at the Korea Institute of National Unification, argue that Pyongyang’s ideology presented the North Korean people with a contradiction. “The logic of ideology fell apart,” Hong says. But “abandoning the unification discourse and defining the ROK as a hostile foreign state at war without diplomatic relations resolves that contradiction.”
The first three possible explanations do not support the conclusion that Kim has decided to start a war against the South.
Desiring to insulate itself against South Korean cultural influence reflects a fundamentally defensive mindset rather than a desire to annex the South, even if that was possible.
Perhaps Kim realizes that his regime would likely be unable to govern South Koreans, who are competitive, enterprising and twice as numerous as North Koreans – and many of whom remember throwing off their own dictatorship late last century.
The DPRK has many times told Seoul and Washington that the peninsula has moved closer to war, not as a prelude to attack but as a tactic to bring about negotiations.
Similarly, when the intended audience is the North Korean public, cultivating a sense of external crisis as a distraction does not require actually going to war against the hyped-up enemy. Pyongyang routinely claims that war is imminent, for example, when the US and the ROK hold joint military exercises. The message for DPRK citizens is sufficiently clear: Powerful enemies are bent on destroying us, so respect your government for holding them at bay.
Number 4 is scary …
The fourth possible explanation – dehumanizing adversaries to make it psychologically easier to kill them – is indeed frightening.
There are, however, three good reasons to believe the non-reunification policy does not indicate Kim has decided to launch a war against the ROK.
First, the North Korean government was comfortable for decades with the apparent contradiction of telling its people they should look forward to reunifying with South Koreans but should also be prepared to kill them. Pyongyang started threatening to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire” 30 years ago.
This is the same contradiction citizens of the People’s Republic of China live with in regard to Taiwan. The contradiction was never an obstacle to the DPRK going to war against the South. Dropping reunification, therefore, is not convincing evidence that Pyongyang plans to attack.
Second, statements from DPRK leaders and media consistently reaffirm that any North Korean use of force will be in response to an aggression against the DPRK. Pyongyang doesn’t want war, so it is careful to avoid inviting a pre-emptive war by its adversaries.
Third, the idea that Kim plans to start a war with South Korea faces the problem of explaining how Kim could expect himself and his country to survive such a war, in which he would be fighting against a combined force that far outclasses the DPRK’s conventional and nuclear capabilities.
Although not a sure harbinger of war, Pyongyang’s renunciation of reunification does nothing to improve inter-Korean relations, and it seemingly undermines the basis for modest peace-building activities such as family reunions humanitarian aid.
It reaffirms that the regime currently governing North Korea is irreconcilable with South Korea as we now know it. Nevertheless, this being North Korea, no policy is irreversible.
Denny Roy is a senior fellow at the East-West Center, Honolulu.
