North Korea

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un assumed his position just over a year ago, following his father's death in late 2011. Under his direction, North Korea has taken some aggressive steps, including launching a rocket despite international condemnation and cracking down even harder on those attempting to flee the country. At the same time, Kim has given a few public indications that the country's "military-first" economy needs to change. And just yesterday, during a New Year's address, he said that "removing confrontation" between North and South Korea was an important step toward reunification. The two nations are still officially at war, having never signed a peace treaty following the end of the Korean War 60 years ago. As South Korea's new president-elect prepares to take office, Kim continues to send mixed messages to the world, declaring 2013 a year of "radical turnabout." The photos of North Korea gathered here were taken recently either by official photographers, or by western photographers under government supervision, their subjects and movement restricted.

The NK response to its dramatic reversal of fortune in the 1990s was accelerate its nuclear program and increasingly turn regime ideology from Marxism to racist nationalism and a theocratic cultism of the Kim family.

Despite the formal DPRK commitment to unification with the South, the regime likely does not want that. NK is the world’s worst human rights abuser. As such it is probable that Korean unification would lead to widespread calls for the prosecution of the Pyongyang elite. That interwoven clique of top KPA brass, high officials in the communist party (the Korean Workers’ Party), and loyalists of the Kim family are all broadly complicit in the network of gulags, torture, and orwellian surveillance and indoctrination for which NK is notorious. Unification scenarios inevitably require the loosening of the NK police state in exchange for Southern assistance. It is simply impossible to imagine SK, an established democracy, becoming more authoritarian to accommodate Pyongyang, for NK needs Southern assistance, not vice versa. As a result any meaningful federation would impact one-party rule in the North, eventually exposing the murderous Pyongyang old boys network to outside scrutiny, in turn heightening pressure for serious political change. Further, SK retains the death-penalty, likely to consider in post-unification trials. In short, the risks to the Kim elite of unity are enormous, including facing the hangman’s noose in united Korea, but they are ideologically trapped into pro-forma support for unity.

NK must therefore continually manufacture crises by which to justify its increasingly inexplicable existence, and it must re-invent itself ideologically now that communism is passé. This is the purpose behind events such as the Cheonansinking or the Yeongpyeong shelling in 2010. This is also the thrust behind the strongly anti-American ideology of the regime. Without tension with its neighbors, NK cannot explain to its own people why they are so much poorer than their Southern cousins. (North Koreans know much more about South Korea than ever before, because North Koreans built substantial informal networks with Chinese during the famine. Those trading networks across the border brought in food during what NK calls the ‘Arduous March,’ and they persisted afterward. Today they bring in DVDs, flashkeys, and cell-phones that have given North Koreans unprecedented access to outside information.)

The evolution of Northern ideology into the semi-deification of the Kim family – the current, third Kim, Jong-Un, is the son of Jong-Il – serves a similar purpose of distinguishing North from South Korea. If the Kim monarchy carries a unique right to rule, cloaked in Korean Chosun myth and legend, then South Korea looks like a shallow, illegitimate American import (the ‘Yankee Colony’) by comparison. And indeed, the first thing foreign visitors must do in Pyongyang when they visit is bow to gigantic statues of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il on Mansudae hill. (I visited NK in 2012, and this submission is required of all visitors without exception.)

Finally, the nuclear program serves to both justify North Korea’s post-communist existence and to deter SK and American intervention. Pyongyang routinely asserts that the United States pursues a ‘hostile policy’ toward it. And indeed the US has wavered for decades on whether to pursue normalization – including recognition of NK and acceptance of its right to exist – or regime change. George W. Bush, most famously, demanded regime change by placing NK on an ‘axis of evil.’ SK too goes back and forth on whether to strike a long-term deal with NK for peaceful coexistence, or to push for the final collapse of NK and ultimate unification. The previous president of SK was a strong hawk, while the current one sends mixed signals of accommodation.

Nuclear weapons are therefore a powerful deterrent. They make the costs of US-SK regime change unbearable. A Northern nuclear strike on the Southern capital, Seoul, would be catastrophic, so Northern security is dramatically enhanced. Nuclear weaopons also enhance the prestige of the state. NK, a small, poor, half-country, nonetheless built these elite weapons which allows the DPRK to stand tall against the South, Americans, Japanese, and Chinese. Hence, Kim Jong-Un called the North’s nuclear program the ‘life of the nation'.