The news hit the wire as Kim Jong Il lay dead from a heart attack, unbeknownst to me and the rest of the world. In December 2011, I reported exclusively that North Korea and the United States were negotiating a groundbreaking deal that promised food and aid in exchange for a freeze of Pyongyang's nuclear program. And often, that need to rally the people in order to ensure stability outweighs any advances that North Korea's diplomats have made in repairing relations with the United States.
North Korea systematically uses the fear of an outside threat to spur and inspire national pride and unity. The regime needed something big to reassure the people that the republic was intact, and still feisty, and that Kim was able to defend them against the United States. But at the time, in April 2009, Pyongyang had reason at home for staging such theatrical provocations: then-leader Kim Jong Il had emerged from a coma and had just made his first public appearance after months of speculation about his health and North Korea's stability. Washington tends to look at North Korea's behavior solely from the view of the message Pyongyang is trying to tell America. administration to do anything but lead the chorus of international condemnation of Pyongyang for its defiance of UN Security Council resolutions explicitly barring such activity. But just months into Obama's presidency, North Korea launched a banned long-range rocket and followed that up by testing a nuclear device, making it difficult for the U.S. Knowing that I was a journalist, and no doubt instructed to pump me for information about the president-elect, our North Korean tour guide latched onto me and grilled me: What did Obama think about North Korea? Would he be open to meeting the leader of North Korea?ĭuring his presidential campaign, Obama had suggested he would be open to engaging North Korea if the situation were right, an interpretation that I relayed to the North Korean guide. In November 2008, as the Associated Press news agency's Seoul bureau chief, I made my first trip to North Korea just weeks after Barack Obama won the U.S. But Pyongyang's patience will be limited. The North Koreans have been waiting and watching to see what the Trump administration comes up with. bids to negotiate with North Korea have not stopped Pyongyang from building nuclear weapons. How best to take advantage of that opening, however, is a tricky question when 25 years of U.S. The arrival of a new president, a Republican, in Washington after eight years of a Democrat in the White House means that there is an opening for change.
Understanding how North Korea sees the United States is integral to divining how to change the tenor of the tense U.S.–North Korea relationship, which persistently threatens to erupt again into military conflict. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un reacts with scientists and technicians of the DPRK Academy of Defense Science after the test-launch of the intercontinental ballistic missile Hwasong-14 in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang July, 5, 2017.
But the war is very much alive and present in North Korea, and the standoff with the United States figures prominently in their propaganda, identity, and policy. We in the United States often call the Korean conflict the "Forgotten War." My high school history textbook in Minnesota devoted barely a paragraph to it, and, growing up as the child of Korean immigrants, I knew almost nothing about a war my own parents survived as children. The two sides may have signed a ceasefire in 1953, but the war still looms large in the North Korean psyche.
All spring and summer, North Korean schoolchildren will be making field trips here to cement what is an integral part of their education: hatred of the United States military and a mission to seek revenge.įor North Koreans, the 1950–53 Korean War that pitted the North Koreans and Chinese against U.S.-led United Nations troops - known in Pyongyang as the Fatherland Liberation War - remains in full tilt. This is a museum in a farming town south of Pyongyang that has been rebuilt as a mecca to anti-Americanism. At the ominously named Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities, Americans are a sinister lot: scheming missionaries, marauding soldiers, and masters of torture. But they get an eyeful of them at a massive museum in the town of Sinchon that is devoted to educating them on U.S.-North Korean history. Most North Korean children have never seen an American in person. This article first appeared on the Wilson Center site.