on of the now-divided Korean Peninsula under the unfettered “independent, socialist” rule of the Pyongyang regime–in other words, unconditional annexation of present-day South Korea and liquidation of the government of the Republic of Korea (ROK) so that Kim Jong-il and company might exercise total command over the entire Korean race (minjok in Korean).
If that sounds preposterous and utterly impracticable to us, understand that things look very different from Pyongyang. North Korean statecraft has been predicated on that very vision for over half a century. To this day, the Sunshine Policy and all the rest notwithstanding, Pyongyang grants diplomatic status to only one “government mission” from Seoul: the legation of the so-called National Democratic Front of South Korea (Hanminjon), an invented resistance group supposedly based in the South that regularly uses North Korean airwaves to denounce the Republic of Korea as an illegitimate colonial police state.
The second purpose is to settle a historical grievance, namely the failure of the famous June 1950 surprise attack against South Korea–an assault that might well have unified all of Korea on Pyongyang’s terms but for America’s unexpected military intervention in defense of the ROK. In Pyongyang’s telling, it is only American imperialism that has permitted an otherwise rotten, unstable and irredeemable ROK government to survive since 1950. The total-mobilization war state that Pyongyang has painfully erected over the decades (at the cost of, inter alia, the North Korean famine of the 1990s) is a response to this grievance and an instrument for fulfilling this vision.
The third purpose is to conduct a war, and that war is not some future theoretical contingency. Rather, in the view of North Korean leaders, their country is at war today, here and now. This may help to explain why the DPRK, with its population of more than twenty million, has for years fielded an army of a million-plus soldiers, a military force that currently ranks as the world’s fourth largest–larger even than Russia’s. Although we are sometimes inattentive to it, the historical fact is that the Korean War’s battles were only halted through a cease-fire agreement, the Armistice of 1953. There has never been a peace treaty bringing the hostilities to a formal and conclusive end. The Korean War is, from the DPRK’s standpoint, an ongoing war–and North Korea’s leadership is committed to an eventual, unconditional victory in that war, however long that may take and however much that may cost. […]
There is no indication, incidentally, that North Korean decision-makers view WMD as “special weapons” to be held in reserve. On the contrary, missiles and nuclear devices seem to figure integrally in North Korean official thinking and are already being used on a regular basis in North Korean statecraft, as the government’s ongoing forays in “blackmail diplomacy” attest. Moreover, despite North Korea’s emphasis on race doctrine, there is no indication whatsoever that North Korean leadership would hesitate to use such weapons on minjok in South Korea. Pyongyang did not blink at starving perhaps one million of its own people for reasons of state in the 1990s. It regards the South Korean state as a cancerous monstrosity, and those who support it as corrupt and worthless national traitors.
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