Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. xxv, 275 pp. (Tables, graphs.) US$38.00, paper. ISBN 9781538160305.
Kim Jong-un recently entered his second decade as North Korea’s leader, having come to power in December 2011. Although not nearly as long as his grandfather Kim Il-sung’s close to five decades in power, this length of time is not much shorter than Kim Jong-il’s 17 years at the helm of the North Korean state (14 if you count from 1997 when Kim Jong-il officially ascended to power). It is, in other words, a substantive enough period to examine and form general assessments of North Korean policy under Kim Jong-un.
North Korea’s Foreign Policy makes an excellent, thorough, and deeply needed contribution to that end. The volume gathers some of the foremost scholars in the field to specifically examine North Korean foreign policy under Kim Jong-un’s rule. It thereby joins other books and papers that have come out in the years around his ten-year anniversary in power, such as Strategies of Survival: North Korean foreign policy under Kim Jong-un (eds. Jun Tae Kwon and Weiqi Zhang, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) which takes on a similar mission of summarizing and conceptualizing foreign policy under the still relatively young leader. North Korea’s Foreign Policy offers a more thematic focus rather than a country-by-country analysis of North Korea’s main foreign relations. The volume makes a clearer statement about certain basic features we can now distinguish in Kim Jong-un’s foreign policy under his first decade.
Indeed, the volume centres on the idea that North Korea under Kim Jong-un is markedly different in key aspects from that of his predecessors. Rather than striving merely for survival, North Korea’s Foreign Policy presents a state and a leader with clear visions and ideas for a way forward, albeit not always successful. As the introduction notes, the byungjin policy of parallel development of the economy and nuclear weapons has come to define much of both domestic and foreign policy under Kim, even though these two goals often conflict heavily in practice. The volume very aptly begins its survey of foreign policy with its domestic foundation through a part dedicated to “understanding North Korea’s foreign policy under Kim Jong-un.” In the first chapter, Andrei Lankov surveys the byungjin policy, terming it “reforms without openness” (13) and assessing it as a “modest success” (17). Chapter 2, by Kim Byung-Yeon, looks at economic development strategy under Kim, showing how Kim has consistently sought to incorporate market mechanisms into the economic system still firmly under state control. The third chapter, by Virginie Grzelczyk, looks at North Korea’s nuclear strategy under Kim’s rule, during which four of North Korea’s total six nuclear tests have taken place.
Part 2 looks at summit diplomacy under Kim Jong-un, a natural theme given the exceptional prominence of summits with world leaders among Kim’s foreign policy tools. Chapter 4 by Haksoon Paik surveys inter-Korean relations in the period of intense engagement and summitry in 2018, arguing that Trump’s unwillingness to give in to North Korean demands of sanctions relief in Hanoi ultimately caused a promising episode of inter-Korean warming to end in failure. In chapter 5, Yun Sun looks at China-North Korea relations and summits under Kim in historical perspective, focusing particularly on how Kim benefitted from engagement with the US in 2017–2019 in relations with China as well. In chapter 6, Ramon Pacheco Pardo convincingly argues that one of the foremost legacies of the Trump-Kim summitry is the taboo President Trump broke in meeting with Kim, potentially clearing a road for further summits in the future.
Artyom Lukin’s seventh chapter on Moscow-Pyongyang summitry stands out for its richness in detailing the drivers and dynamics of Russia-North Korea relations. Although written before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the chapter details the mix of ideological, strategic, and economic considerations that have underpinned the much closer engagement between the two countries since the invasion.
Finally, part 3 deals with North Korean diplomacy toward the world. Here, the selection of chapters for such a broad topic could be more clearly laid out by the editors. All chapters are, however, highly worthy of their place in the volume. In chapter 8, Justin V. Hastings surveys how North Korean foreign policy has been shaped by UN sanctions on it, with one of the main results being a “diplomatic profile that … has taken on many of the trappings and methods of private businesses” (167). Chapter 9 by Michael Raska is one of the book’s most informative ones, laying out how cyber operations—an increasingly significant tool for foreign policy and revenue gathering under Kim Jong-un—came to take the central place it currently holds in North Korean attacks on other countries as well as major cyber heists. Sandra Fahy shows in chapter 10 how North Korea has responded through a mix of whataboutism and rejection of the “Western” conception of (individual) human rights to initiatives such as the 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea. In the book’s eleventh and final chapter, Kyung-Ae Park examines the Canada-DPRK Knowledge Partnership Program as a case of track II knowledge diplomacy with North Korea, noting that Pyongyang’s involvement in such activities mainly stems from a desire to acquire new information to serve practical policy goals domestically.
The sometimes-dense chapters may turn away the general interest reader, but all scholars, students, and professionals who deal with North Korea should read this book, and keep it in their bookshelves for its excellent factual content. Undergraduate students (especially non-native English speakers) may find it challenging, but for graduate seminars in topics like Korean studies and foreign relations in Northeast Asia, individual chapters or the entire book would work very well as course reading.
Conceptually, the volume convincingly makes the case that foreign policy under Kim Jong-un is, indeed, distinct in North Korean history, in large part thanks to the byungjin line and its consequences. This case would have been strengthened intellectually by one or two chapters providing a historical framing for the rest of the book, showing what aspects of Kim Jong-un’s foreign policy are truly new, and which ones hark back to North Korean political tradition.
Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein
The Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Stockholm