User:Al83tito/NKBrinksmanship

North Korean brinksmanship is the theory advanced by some scholars of how North Korea tactically has repeatedly swung back and forth between an belicose stance to and friendly stance in its foreign relations, as calculated moves to extract economic and diplomatic concessions from the international community each time it makes new friendly overtures.

This strategy is predicated on two key assumptions: that the democracies North Korea threatens are more sensitive to conflict and material and human losses than nk would be in a confrontation

And that Democratic elected leaders are more prone to believing the friendly overtures are real opportunities for lasting rapproachement and peace, normally due to a lack of historical memory and the limited time they will be in office.





Historical and geopolitical background
Korea became divided between North and South at the end of World War II. The South pursued a market economy that eventually led to prosperity, first under military dictatorships, and later as a democracy. The North was established as a communist state by Kim Il Sung. He was succeeded by his son Kim Jong Il in 1994, and his grandson Kim Jong-Un in 2011. All the while the vast majority of North Korean populace lived in extreme repression, poverty, and famine.

With their opposite political and economic regimes, the two Koreas were at odds from the outset, both vying to govern of the entire peninsula. The North attempted to conquer the South in the Korean War, but was thwarted by the intervention of the United States. For decades the North continued to be belligerent and threatening to the South and the international community. North Korea successfully developed nuclear weapons, in pursuit of regime preservation and possibly to cow South Korea into submission in the future.

Historical context
Korea had for centuries been a high-ranking tributary state within the Imperial Chinese tributary system, until in the late 19th century Japan began to assert greater control over the Korean peninsula, culminating in its annexation in 1910. It remained a colony of Japan, until Japan lost World War II in 1945.

At the end of WWII, with Japan stripped of its colonial territories, the Korean peninsula became a United Nations trusteeship, with the northern half administered by the Soviet Union, and the southern half administered by the United States. The ultimate stated plan was to allow Korea as a whole to become again a united and independent country. Disagreements among the parties on how and when to implement the united self-rule led to the two territories establishing their own separate and rival governments. The Korean War (1950-1953) was the last attempt to reunify the peninsula by force, but it ended in stalemate and it entrenched two very different regimes.

Within the Soviet and American spheres respectively, the North became a Stalinist totalitarian regime uninterruptedly led by the Kim family, and the South became a capitalist society that until 1987 included short periods of unstable democracy as well as longer periods of authoritarian rule, including over 25 years of right-wing military rule.

Propped by their allies, North and South experienced rapid economic growth after the Korean War, but in the 1970s the North's growth faltered while the South's accelerated.

While South Korea had a period of military autocracy, mass mobilizations of its citizens forced its end in 1987. This led to the modern South Korea being a young, more stable democracy with a prosperous free market economy. Meanwhile, North Korea's totalitarian regime kept a stronger grip on its society, which was never able to mobilize to demand reforms. Its command economy stagnated in the 1970s, and after the disintegration of the Soviet Union it spiralled into crisis in the 1990s, leading to a massive famine. North Korea remains to this day as one of the most isolated countries in the world, with a struggling economy, within an isolationist, militaristic, and totalitarian regime.