SURVIVING THE UNIPOLAR ERA: North Korea’s 35 Year Standoff with the United States

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On June 29, 1950, the U.S. launched its first ever air strikes on the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, marking the start of what would become the longest conflict in history between two industrial powers. Four decades later, the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of a new phase of the conflict, with a new unipolar world order centered on the power of the U.S. and Western world leaving North Korea in unprecedented isolation. Now unsupported in its fight against a Western superpower intent on its destruction, the small but technologically adept and heavily militarized East Asian state would need to adopt more radical measures to ensure its security. Over the next 35 years, the conflict would transform from a period of North Korean decline in the face of tremendous economic and military pressure, to one of an ascent in its power and decline in the West as international order evolved past the unipolar era

Surviving the Unipolar Era elucidates the conflict’s transformation, beginning with unprecedented U.S.-led efforts to achieve North Korea’s total collapse and elimination through maximum pressure, and ending three decades later with a subsiding of Pyongyang’s international isolation and the modernization of its economy, armed forces and nuclear deterrent. A. B. Abrams highlights how the small state has been able to hold its own in multiple standoffs with the world’s superpower, successfully weather economic sanctions, and prevent penetration of its information space, and the implications that this has had for the country, the region and the wider world. He details the strong consistency in American objectives, and the evolution of consensus across five separate administrations on how these should be pursued as the circumstances of the conflict transformed. In the context of prevailing geopolitical, economic and security trends, Abrams projects the future course of the conflict including aspects such as Western difficulties coming to terms with North Korea’s ascent, U.S. policy priorities going forward, and the growing opportunities that an emerging new global cold war is likely to provide Pyongyang.

“In this timely, much-needed overview and analysis of North Korea in the world from the end of the Cold War to the current era of the Second Cold War, Abrams details how North Korea indeed “survived the unipolar era”, and how the emergence of a new geopolitical environment may be more conducive to it than any time since the late 1950s. This careful and well-researched study is an invaluable corrective to the stereotypical and ahistorical assumptions that underlie most Western views on the subject.” CHARLES K. ARMSTRONG, former Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies, Columbia University, author of numerous books and articles on North Korea.

“A. B. Abrams has produced another exceptionally well researched book with a depth of nuance and understanding of the DPRK (North Korea) few others can provide. The book unravels the tenacity of the North Koreans to survive the continuous onslaught of debilitating Western actions against their country over decades. It blows away the smoke of misleading and derogatory Western propaganda, and labelling, to reveal truths seldom told about their resiliency, in spite of the myriad puerile attempts by Western powers and their media apparatus to castigate and dehumanise them. Abrams’ work provides very timely and much needed realistic context to North Korea’s role on the geopolitical chessboard in the current rapidly devolving geopolitical environment.” PHIL HYNES, former Head of Research & Political Risk at ISS Risk, former British Army counterinsurgency specialist, and longstanding expert on North Korean politics, and longstanding expert on North Korean politics, the ‘Shadow Economy’ and commercial business environment who has spent considerable time in the country over 15 years.  

“A highly effective case study of a world on the more-or-less constant brink of nuclear war. A. B Abrams’ book reads like a thriller but tells you much of what you need to know.” RICHARD C. COOK, retired analyst for the U.S. Treasury Department, NASA and the Jimmy Carter White House, author, Our Country, Then and Now

Surviving the Unipolar Era portrays an epic struggle between North Korea (the DPRK) and the US-led West. A.B. Abrams’ book is engaging and rich in factology.” ARTYOM LUKIN, Professor, Far Eastern Federal University

       

Description

On August 14, 1945, in anticipation of the imminent formal surrender of the Japanese Empire, officials from the Pentagon’s Strategy Policy Committee proposed division of the Korean Peninsula into American and Soviet trusteeships, using the 38th parallel to grant Washington the southern half and Moscow the northern. Korea had been under effective Japanese rule for four decades from 1905, and in the immediate aftermath of Tokyo’s defeat had seen popular people’s committees formed across its territory to establish a People’s Republic of Korea – a short-lived state that would be abolished once Soviet and U.S. forces fully took control. The beginnings of a distinction between the two halves of the Korean Peninsula would emerge with the vastly diverging policies between the Soviets and the Americans, with the former allowing the people’s committees to remain and granting a great deal of autonomy to local nationalist forces which had previously resisted Japanese rule. The latter employed military force extensively to abolish all those associated with the People’s Republic, instead relying on Koreans who had governed under the Japanese, and a number who had resided in the West, to form a new state.

Opposition to the new order in the south resulted in five years of intensive civil war which at the most conservative estimates killed two percent of the population as insurrections broke out across the country. Entire population centers were either massacred or placed in concentration camps, which by 1950 housed up to 1.2 million people or over 5 percent of the population.[i] With the new establishment solidifying its authority, headed by 20-year resident of Washington D.C. Syngman Rhee, who had been hand picked to rule by the U.S. Army, it was able to declare the formation of the Republic of Korea on August 15, 1948, which claimed to be the sole government of the entire Korean nation including all territory north of the 38th parallel. The government in the north, headed by the leaders of the guerilla movement that had for decades fought Japanese rule, subsequently declared the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on September 9. With the division of Korea thereby officialized, two further years of civil war in the south and escalation tensions along the 38th parallel culminated in the outbreak of full scale war between the rival governments on June 25, 1950, for which each side blamed the other.

With South Korean forces effectively disintegrating within 72 hours, the United States would play a central role in fighting North Korea over the next three years, leading a vast coalition of predominantly Western militaries. In September, Washington made the controversial decision to invade the north in an attempt to abolish the state and extend the authority of Sygnman Rhee’s government. The invasion would in hindsight widely be seen as a reckless error – one which forty years later would be a primary factor influencing Washington to refrain from invading Iraq in the aftermath of the Gulf War – particularly after U.S. forces pushed up to the Chinese border and provoked Beijing to intervene on North Korea’s side.[ii] The result after almost three more years of fighting was a stalemate roughly along the 38th parallel and the conclusion of hostilities in an armistice. While Chinese forces completely withdrew from North Korea once reconstruction was complete in 1958, and Beijing would normalize relations with South Korea in 1992, U.S. forces would remain in the south indefinitely with Washington continuing to refuse to form diplomatic ties with North Korea or to recognize its existence. It thereby implicitly continued to endorse the south’s claim of sovereignty over the north.

North Korea and the United States have remained officially at war for over seven decades, representing by far the longest war between any two industrial nations in history. With the U.S. having since 1950 waged well over a dozen other hot wars, from Panama and Grenada to Iraq and Somalia, all of which were resolved in small fractions of the time of the yet unresolved Korean conflict, this aspect alone has made North Korea stand out among America’s adversaries. This book explores the conflict’s evolution in the 35 years following the end of the Cold War in 1989, after it entered an entirely new phase with North Korea’s isolation and the emergence of a unipolar post-Soviet global order, before shifting into a new era as the unipolarity that characterized post-Cold War geopolitics gradually diminished.

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ISBN::

978-1-963892-12-3

EBOOK ISBN:

978-1-963892-13-0

Author

A. B. Abrams

Reviews

1 review for SURVIVING THE UNIPOLAR ERA: North Korea’s 35 Year Standoff with the United States

  1. JEREMY KUAMAROV

    “Abrams’ book ultimately makes clear that David (North Korea) has defeated Goliath (the USA)—after withstanding biblical scale devastation.” JEREMY KUZMAROV, COVERT ACTION Magazine CovertAction Magazine

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