Dr Edward Howell, whose columns in the Spectator and the Telegraph are among the few intelligent and readable things left in those outlets, has produced an excellent account of North Korea and its place in the global nuclear order. Here is a book which the University Press would do well to issue in an affordable edition. It throws light on the foreign policy of a horrific but little-understood regime, and does so with a blend of exposition, theory, and analysis.
At the start of the Second World War, Churchill said that the key to understanding Russia was to understand Russian national interests, and today the same statement may be applied to North Korea. Dr Howell understands this, and in order to explain the nuclear ambitions of the Kim regime in Pyongyang, he begins by outlining the history and self-perception of the Korean peninsula. Three successive dynasties ruled Korea between 57 BC and 1912 AD. It was annexed by Imperial Japan in 1910. There followed a period of enforced Japanification. Cultural artefacts were destroyed, newspapers were censored, and Korean institutions were replaced by Japanese ones.
Korean nationalism, which was bound to be anti-Japanese for the same reason that later Algerian nationalism was anti-French, took off after the Versailles Conference but never became a serious anticolonial force. After Japanese defeat in 1945, Korea, like Germany, was partitioned between American and Soviet spheres of influence, with US troops entering Seoul in the south and Soviet ones entering Pyongyang in the north. After independence in 1948, a formerly united peninsula remained divided between two nations, each of whom viewed the other as illegitimate.
For the North Koreans, independence led not to democracy but to a change in masters. The Workers’ Party of Korea, a Stalinist movement led by Kim Il Sung, took power. Kim consolidated his rule and his dynasty by means of an extreme personality cult underpinned by fantasies of racial purity; in doing so, he was imitating Japanese colonial tactics of deifying the royal family in order to command the loyalty of the masses.
In June 1950, with the backing of Stalin, he invaded the South, triggering the Korean War. (Pyongyang, in typically totalitarian fashion, later rewrote history to deny its act of aggression.) The war, which became a proxy conflict between the US and China, was a stalemate. It left North Korea with a dependence on the fellow Communist states of the USSR, China, and, later, Cuba, and an “elevated threat perception from the United States, South Korea, and wider international society”. This persecution mania, this victim mentality that the whole world is bent on its destruction, continues to define Pyongyang’s view of the world.
The three tenets of North Korean policy are therefore as follows: anticolonialism inherited from the historical struggle with Japan; ideological expansionism in line with Communist Russia and China; and a “hostile policy” of anti-Americanism as the legacy of the Korean War.
Kim Il Sung’s ultimate goal was always to reunify Korea and to bring the entire peninsula under his own rule. This fantasy, always improbable, took an initial blow when North Korea lost its economic ascendency over the South in the 1960s. A fatal blow followed in the 1980s and 90s, when an economically liberal China and a terminally ill Soviet Union officially recognised South Korea. The result was to reaffirm Pyongyang’s view of the whole world as being in a US-sponsored plot to undermine it.
The first nuclear crisis of the 1990s exemplified what would become North Korea’s signature use of “strategic delinquency”. In 1993 Pyongyang violated all norms by threatening to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, before, in 1994, signing a new agreement to halt its nuclear development in exchange for perceived rewards from the US. The episode showed that bad behaviour paid off, and that “strategic delinquency” was the best way for North Korea to achieve its aims.
Kim Il Sung’s grandson, the incumbent Kim Jong Un, has done more than either of his forefathers to establish a nuclear North Korea. President Trump met Kim in 2018-19 but, despite hoping to frame himself as the American who restrained North Korea, he extracted no real concessions. Kim made vague pledges to adhere to international norms, in return for which he acquired a new diplomatic prestige and hopes of increased American aid. In further meetings, however, like the Hanoi Summit, talks stagnated. Trump failed to satisfy Kim’s demands; he did not withdraw US troops from South Korea; he did not end sanctions on North Korea; and so Rocket Man’s interest in diplomacy fizzled out. In 2020, COVID-19 hit North Korea harder than any sanctions could have done, but still no substantial diplomatic overtures were made. That is how things stand at present.
The book is well-written in academic Oxbridge prose, although it is clear throughout that Dr Howell is very puritanical in his approach to grammar. Evidently he belongs to that sect of grammarians who hold that to deliberately split an infinitive is a contemptible practice. His views are worth quoting: “To the reader, true to my obsession with correct English grammar, this book does not contain a single split infinitive. Caveat lector, any errata therein are my own responsibility.” (I admit that when I first saw this passage, I had to frown and reread it several times in bafflement, before I remembered that “errata” is the Latin for “mistakes”, as opposed to the synonym for “pornography”.)
North Korea and the Global Nuclear Order covers its field in great depth. It may have benefitted from more developed comparisons between North Korea and other countries – for example, by contrasting the nuclear effects of the division of Korea to those of similar partitions in India or Palestine, or by comparing the foreign policy of Pyongyang more explicitly to that of Communist China – but these are minor criticisms. In spite of his copious research and vivid understanding of international relations, Dr Howell concludes that North Korea remains a known unknown. At any rate until the Kim regime collapses, we can only see the tip of the missile silo; there must be a great deal of hidden information of which nobody is aware; and the country is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.
North Korea and the Global Nuclear Order: When Bad Behaviour Pays by Edward Howell is available now from Oxford University Press
