Daniel Skidmore and Dr. Raymond Christiansen, Political Science

Some experts have stated that North Korea is a good example of an illogical regime, which, to a lesser or greater extent, adheres to the madman theory. The madman theory emphasizes that states will sometimes purposefully act in a random or irrational nature of violence in the hope that other nations will be afraid to deal forcefully with them. Knowing whether this commonly held belief is correct or not is an important step to solving the Korea problem.

My hypothesis was that North Korea does not follow a “madman” philosophy, and that when North Korea’s actions were compared with her objectives, the rationality of her foreign policy would be clear. My proposal was to gather a chronology of North Korea’s actions in relation to the US and South Korea and correlate them to North Korea’s primary foreign policy objectives.

Almost immediately I ran into a serious problem with my proposed research design. As I delved further into the literature surrounding North Korea and its foreign policy, increasingly, I was faced with the fact that the real crux of the problem was knowing what North Korea’s policy objectives are. Until one knows what those objectives are for sure, it is useless to correlate them to North Korea’s actions. Such an undertaking would be just as flawed and attacked as were the contentious foreign policy objectives used to correlate the actions.

In discussing how to approach this problem with my mentor, it became clear that there were two possible routes to follow. One, I could adapt the research by examining an unbiased source for a statement on North Korea’s objectives. Two, I could simply evaluate the objectives delineated by a previous author or authors to discover how accurate they were and why.

The first option would not work because no truly unbiased source is available on North Korea’s objectives. Nearly every nation has taken a side on the Korea issue, and statements by North Korean leaders are probably the most biased of any source. North Korean statements on foreign policy are veiled in communist rhetoric and laced with hope to appeal to the masses. Furthermore, I personally believe that one of the biggest objectives of North Korean foreign policy is to maintain the Kim dynasty’s regime in place. If this is true, then North Korean publications, statements and explanations will cater to the masses of North Korea rather than present a real picture of goals and objectives. For these reasons, I modified my research design to evaluate what experts have said of North Korea’s objectives and look at how closely they fit North Korean actions. I created a chronology of all of North Korea’s actions which have been labeled as violent, random or illogical. My list included the many border incursions, infiltrations, bombings, hijackings and assassination attempts undertaken by North Korea since the end of the Korean War. I then researched the myriad of different theories about North Korean foreign policy. I then compared the chronology and the theories. In so doing, I discovered some of the larger flaws in each school of thought.

The rational actor school tends to see any action as logical by justifying it from a Machiavellian standpoint and failing to recognize that the madman theory itself is fairly Machiavellian in its nature. I found the madman school of thought to be even more flawed, however. First, many authors have focused on the results, not the intent of an action. For instance, some have stated that because a certain policy has failed, it was illogical. This reasoning is not logical itself. Just because an action may have a net result that is worse than before does not mean that it was illogical. It is impossible to ascertain the outcome of any policy before it is undertaken.

Second, most authors have failed to recognize the nature of the Kim regime. It operates on entirely different premises than the American system. For instance, to a very repressive communist dictatorship, mass killing such as in the case of the bombing of the KAL airliner in order to frighten people is standard procedure. Is it any wonder that such a tactic would be followed internationally when it is already followed domestically. Furthermore, many experts have not recognized that the North Korean regime views South Korea as a puppet regime of the imperialist power of the United States. When North Korea’s assassination attempts and other violent acts such as the axe slaying at Panmunjom are viewed in this context, these acts are only comparable to CIA-backed assassination attempts undertaken by the US as well as other covert activities. Why is it that we do not view these actions as “illogical”? Thus, most appraisals of the situation have been emotionally distorted and have lacked objectivity.

So, what are North Korea’s foreign policy objectives? The most precise and clear delineation comes from Denny Roy’s article “North Korea and the ‘Madman’ Theory” from which I first got the idea to undertake this research with my original design. In his article he states that the “survival of the regime is something the Kim’s value even more than national prosperity” (Roy 1994, 309). I will go farther than that. I believe that the survival of the regime is the highest objective of North Korean foreign policy.

Second only to that is the reunification of the two Koreas. This, North Korea intends to do by violent overthrow since a peaceful reunification would threaten the regime as happened in the case of Germany. Since this overthrow cannot be done by means of conventional warfare at the time, it is undertaken by means of terrorism, assassinations and attempts to foment revolution.

When North Korea’s actions are viewed from these premises, its foreign policy is anything but random or illogical. In fact 100 percent of the cases I reviewed can be easily understood and explained by these two objectives. For instance, the action which is most turned to by the madman school it the bombing of the KAL airliner before the Olympics in Seoul. This can be easily understood when one recognizes that if the Olympics were widely attended in Seoul, the Kim regime would lose credibility and the North would probably lose ground domestically and internationally, thus threatening the regimes credibility and security by allowing the rest of the world to see that there was another Korea (which appeared to be developing more rapidly than the North). I believe every North Korean action can be explained on the basis of these two goals.

References

• Roy, Denny. 1994. North Korea and the ‘Madman’ Theory. Security Dialogue, 25(3): 307-16.