The Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992 by Charles K. Armstrong (review)

Most narratives of wars and interstate rivalry focus on how great powers shape a balance of power and reap benefits from it while small states have to accept what they are handed. The author deviates from this accepted pattern. The book explores the four decades of North Korea’s relations with the world not as a case of a powerless country subserving the freedom of great powers but as one wherein, despite its limited power, the weak partner possesses and exercises an ability to “resist and even manipulate the more powerful” skillfully exploiting “the existence of competition among the great states” (p. 3). In constructing such a narrative, the author takes maximum advantage of evidence recently made available. He draws from Western diplomatic and intelligence sources, testimonies of North Korean refugees and defectors, the archives of the former Soviet Union and North Korea’s allies in Eastern Europe, and memoirs and scholarly studies released by China beginning in the 1980s, hence enabling readers to obtain a rich synthetic picture of North Korea’s postcolonial history.

Those sources reveal the crucial role played by the Soviet Union and other socialist allies in laying the foundation for North Korea’s industrial and agricultural development. They also shed light on one of the most puzzling questions in North Korea’s modern history: how the country came to be where it finds itself now. At the core of this mystery is the Juche idea that, according to the author, has eventually led the country to the status of an economic basket case and an international pariah. Enunciated in December 1955 by Kim Il Sung himself, the autarkic ideology helped North Korea to keep aloof from the impacts of changes in its socialist allies in Eastern Europe and to take a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement. Yet the independence of North Korea did not come without a price. Together with a lopsided emphasis on heavy industry at the expense of the production of consumer goods, the ardent pursuit of autarky was accompanied by a failure to participate in the division of labor that it could have exploited for its own benefit within the international trade system, thus hindering the inflow of technology and capital.

In spite of the perceptive analyses of the problems attendant on pursuing autarky, the author could have provided his readers with a clearer picture about why the regime proved so resilient, if he had paid greater attention to two crucial factors . One is North Korea’s security dilemma vis-à-vis the United States and South Korea, particularly the threat of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons from the United States, which has been a permanent feature of the war plans in the U.S.–South Korea combined alliance system. The other is the fact that the Juche idea was as much a cultural statement of North Korean society as it was Kim’s idiosyncratic political manifesto, an outlook that, facilitated by the seamless transition from the colonial experience to the communist revolution, constantly regressed North Korea’s self-identity back to the precolonial Confucian worldview. North Korea’s isolation was therefore not only a choice of policy by an individual leader or a group of elites but also a choice of a different path to modernity shaped and acquiesced in by the entire body politic.

The relatively weak treatment of these issues by no means reduces the value of this book. Readers will see the strength of the book in the author’s in-depth analysis of the survival tactics implemented against major shifts in interstate relations during the last four decades, which he eloquently shows could not be made intelligible unless the interaction between North Korea and the shifting balance of power in the system of international relations is taken into account as a whole...