North Korea Demystified By Han S. Park

North Korea is not an anomaly in this sense. In order for the government to achieve the objective of satisfying people’s needs, it establishes its own policy goals for the political system. The systemic policy goals are (1) national security, (2) political integration, (3) resource expansion, and (4) conflict management. The expectation is that these goals will be pursued in this very order of preference, in which national security precedes all other policy goals and is followed by political integration and resource expansion. In the case of North Korea, the regime has constantly felt that its national security is precarious owing to the presence of the United States, which has maintained strategic alliances with South Korea and Japan.

This sense of a security threat can explain Pyongyang’s foreign policy behavior, especially controversies surrounding the nuclear conundrum, placing that behavior in the geopolitical context in which the two Korean regimes have had to compete for political legitimacy vis-à-vis the entire peninsula. Thus, the ideology of juche (“self-reliance”) emerged, initially as an instrument to consolidate the leadership and integrate the regime. But this ideology has also been instrumental in claiming that the state of the DPRK is consistent with nationalism and thus more legitimate than the South’s regime. In this way, the ideology of juche has been employed as a means of attaining national security.

One must realize that the threat to regime security arises not only from external sources but also, and just as important, from domestic sources.¹ Because of the powerful political ideology of juche, the nontraditional sources of national insecurity have been largely negligible, but continuous and sustained shortfalls in meeting people’s basic needs, especially the need for food, could turn out to be a vital source of political and civil unrest even in North Korea. This would be the case especially if the next generation of leadership surrounding Kim Jong Un is unable to alleviate the acute food-shortage problem. When people’s basic needs are consistently denied, no ideology can guarantee regime stability, and the North Korean leadership is keenly aware of this. This means that even for the