North Korea is stripping its official propaganda websites of sections on unification, shrinking or culling ministries and agencies responsible for inter-Korean relations, and characterizing South Korea as a hostile neighboring country. These actions point to an inflection point in North Korean international affairs, one facilitated by its confidence in its nuclear deterrent, its reinvigorated relations with Russia, and a shifting global geopolitical balance. While such a change does not reduce the risks of escalation around the Korean Peninsula (and may actually increase them), it could see North Korea focus some of its attention further abroad, positioning itself as an active participant in what leader Kim Jong Un called the international ''anti-imperialist joint action and struggle'' at last month's plenary meeting of the ruling Workers' Party.
A Turn of Phrase
In September 2023, obsessive Korea watchers were taken aback when official North Korean media published remarks by Kim Jong Un where he referred to South Korea by its official name, Daehan Minguk, instead of calling it South Chosun, or a puppet regime (the North calls Korea ''Chosun,'' the South uses the term ''Hanguk,'' and thus casually refers to the North as Bukhan or North Han). The incident raised a flurry of speculation — from a sign of North Korean weakness to merely a sly use of air quotes to sneer at the South.
At the time, in private correspondence, I suggested that ''our assessment leans toward the North moving closer to effectively accepting the idea of two Koreas rather than maintain the fiction of a single Korea. The North uses the phrase Daehan Minguk in quotation marks, a hint at continuing to consider it a delegitimate term, but the repeated use by high-level officials would seem to be a pattern of normalizing the phrase, a fairly significant shift in DPRK terminology and acceptable language.''
Since September, a quick look through North Korea's Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the official Workers Party, sees the phrase Daehan Minguk not only used several times (going back to July) but since early December, no longer written in brackets. The phrase has been normalized, at least in state media. At the same time, North Korean officials still regularly refer to the South Korean government as a puppet regime, or, as Kim Jong Un put it in his late December speech at the ruling Workers' Party plenum meeting, a ''hemiplegic malformation'' and ''colonial subordinate state'' whose ''whole society [is] tainted by Yankee culture.''
Shifting Focus
Kim's address at the annual WPK meeting spent quite a bit of time discussing the failure of North Korea's unification policies, critiquing South Korea and the United States for pursuing unification through the absorption or destruction of North Korea's political system, and not accepting Pyongyang's ideas of one nation with two political systems. He concluded that Pyongyang needed to fundamentally alter its position on unification, but the phrasing suggests not a new push to reunify, but rather an intent to ignore any discussions on unification. North Korea, instead, needed to ''write a diplomatic history of the DPRK which accords with the position of a powerful country on the principle of defending the dignity of the Party, raising the national dignity and protecting the national interests.'' In short, North Korea needs to rethink of itself as a singular entity, not part of a divided Peninsula, at least in the current regional and global context. Related to this, Kim said the nation's international focus should concentrate on developing relations with socialist countries to ''further expand and strengthen the external sphere of the country,'' and with ''anti-imperialist independent countries opposed to the hegemony strategy of the United States and the West.''
While much attention has been paid (at least by Korea watchers) in the past few months to North Korea's closure of several overseas embassies and the recall of diplomatic staff, the directions from Kim suggest this is a refocus rather than a wholesale retreat of the North's diplomatic efforts. North Korea has already strengthened political and military ties with Russia, with Pyongyang now supplying its larger neighbor with weapons — a sign of changing geopolitical dynamics. North Korea has also accelerated economic activity with China after constraints related to the COVID-19 pandemic, international sanctions, and Pyongyang's lingering distrust of Beijing.
In other remarks from the WPK Plenum, Kim was reported to have exhorted officials to ''dynamically wage the anti-imperialist joint action and struggle on an international scale,'' suggesting an ambition for a more internationally engaged North Korea, albeit not with the Western nations. While Pyongyang is unlikely to reach the levels of international engagement seen in the early years of Kim Il Sung's rule, Kim Jong Un's comments seem to hearken back to the days when North Korea supplied weapons, fighters, advisors and even aid to revolutions and emerging nations around the world. Pyongyang may see an opportunity emerging in the shifting global order to more actively engage developing nations, sell arms and goods, and send its laborers abroad in search of remittances, technology, materials and influence.
Pyongyang's shift is likely the result of both the significant shift in South Korean policies toward the North under President Yoon Suk Yeol, and North Korea's changing security situation. On the Korean Peninsula, North Korea has developed both a robust nuclear deterrent and a strong modernized conventional deterrent, giving it more options for scaled escalation, and thus perhaps lowering the bar for escalatory actions and counter-actions. Stronger ties with Russia and China give Pyongyang a sense of security that may further embolden North Korea to both showcase its continued deterrence development (through additional missile and satellite launches and new nuclear tests, as well as expanded conventional weapons drills), as well as act in a limited fashion, both proactively and responsively, along the inter-Korean land, air and sea border. North Korea's expanded conventional capabilities, meanwhile, may reduce the risk of nuclear war by offering more options, while simultaneously increasing the likelihood of more frequent and escalatory clashes.
An Inflection Point
As we noted back in 2022, North Korea's strong focus on advancing its conventional weapons systems alongside its nuclear deterrence gives Pyongyang more options when it comes to managing escalation on the Korean Peninsula. Rather than having few steps between small border skirmishes and the compulsion to shift to nuclear weapons, North Korea now has more options to selectively target South Korean and even U.S. assets on the Korean Peninsula. Pyongyang feels its security is further reinforced by its shifting relations with Russia and even China, potentially giving Pyongyang more confidence in its active efforts to counter what it sees as an expanding threat from South Korea and the United States, as the two allies step up the pace and scope of joint exercises, reinvigorate the concept of extended deterrence, and expand trilateral security coordination with Japan. With the South Korean administration already seeking ways to further isolate and constrain North Korea, and Pyongyang declaring a more activist anti-imperialist policy, the likelihood for more frequent security crises on the Korean Peninsula has increased significantly.
While all of North Korea's traditional constraints remain — including economic and technological challenges, diplomatic isolation and an unenviable geographic position — Kim Jong Un appears to be setting a new direction for his country's regional and international policies, clearly aware of the vast uncertainties facing the international geopolitical situation. It is always difficult to assess North Korean policies and actions from occasional speeches, personnel shuffles, and distant satellite images (something I have likened to reading the tea leaves in a cup of black coffee). However, there are a growing number of signs and signals from Pyongyang that appear to show a shift in priorities, and thus should awaken us to a likely change in behavior, and in the way North Korea may respond to political or military stimuli.
