North Korea appears to be on the brink of starting a war, again. The recent uptick in tensions began in January when Kim Jong-un returned to one of his father’s favorite pastimes: issuing nuclear threats. But what exactly has North Korea been doing lately to alarm us?
Last week the North moved a long range missile to its Eastern coast. Though the missile does not have the range to strike the continental U.S., it could potentially threaten American military bases in the Pacific. Monday, Pyongyang withdrew all North Korean workers from Kaesong, an industrial park it shares with the South and Tuesday it advised foreigners in South Korea to leave the country. Disconcertingly, this posturing has coincided with the February 25th election of new South Korean president Park Geun-hye who has promised retaliation should North Korea attack.
If it seems like threats from North Korea have been going on for a while, it’s because they have. The country’s insular and dictatorial regime began its nuclear program in 2002. Since then, the international community has failed in several attempts at ending the program through diplomatic negotiation and the North has stubbornly stuck to its nuclear ambitions. To fully understand the North’s nuclear threats, we need to look back even further to the beginning of the conflict between North and South Korea in the 1940s.
The split between North and South Korea dates back to the end of World War II. After liberating Korea from Japanese occupation, the allies agreed to pide its territory. The USSR occupied the northern half and the U.S. the southern. Five years later in 1950, the North’s communist leader Kim Il-Sung launched a surprise attack on the South. The conflict escalated into a proxy war between Cold War powers as the U.S. sent troops to defend South Korea while the North Korea received military support from China and economic support from the USSR. After a bloody conflict, in 1953 an armistice was reached that established a demilitarized zone between the two countries.
Following the war the North seemed to have emerged the more powerful of the two nations. North Korea’s economy was flourishing, largely due to support from the Soviet Union. On the other hand, South Korea was initially one of the poorest countries in the world and was ruled by a repressive authoritarian dictatorship. But this post-war order did not last. The North’s economy suffered mightily following the breakup of the USSR in 1991. As a result of the elimination of food aid it depended on, North Korea suffered famines during the 1990s that are estimated to have resulted in a million deaths. The country continues to face food shortages as a result of a troubled economic system that has yielded disastrously low agricultural production. Meanwhile South Korea economy grew rapidly starting in the late 1960s. It is now the fourth largest economy in Asia and is home to companies like Hyundai and Samsung.
There is a connection between North Korea’s nuclear program and the country’s need to alleviate economic and nutritional deficiencies. In 2006, the country ran its first nuclear test under the leadership of Kim Il-sung’s son Kim Jong-il. To ease the resulting international distress, the following year a deal was reached in which North Korea agreed to shut down its main nuclear reactor in return for aid. More recently a similar pattern has been followed by Kim Jong-un. In 2011 he suspended North Korean long-range missile tests also in exchange for food aid from the U.S. Unfortunately, as recent developments have shown, his conciliatory approach has not lasted.
As the North Korean nuclear program becomes increasingly sophisticated, it poses a real danger to South Korea and its allies. Thankfully, thus far the North Korean nuclear program has primarily served as a tool to win economic aid. The government has used aggressive foreign policy as means to avoid enacting difficult but necessary reforms to an economy that cannot feed its citizens. The question for American and South Korea leaders is how this dangerous relationship between nuclear proliferation and economic dependency can be broken without North Korea blowing anyone up.