Tyranny of the Weak

North Korea and the World, 1950–1992

Charles K. Armstrong

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801468933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

To much of the world, North Korea is an impenetrable mystery, its inner workings unknown and its actions toward the outside unpredictable and frequently provocative. Tyranny of the Weak reveals for the first time the motivations, processes, and effects of North Korea's foreign relations during the Cold War era. Drawing on extensive research in the archives of North Korea's present and former communist allies, including the Soviet Union, China, and East Germany, Charles K. Armstrong tells in vivid detail how North Korea managed its alliances with fellow communist states, maintained a precarious independence in the Sino-Soviet split, attempted to reach out to the capitalist West and present itself as a model for Third World development, and confronted and engaged with its archenemies, the United States and South Korea.

From the invasion that set off the Korean War in June 1950 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tyranny of the Weak shows how—despite its objective weakness—North Korea has managed for much of its history to deal with the outside world to its maximum advantage. Insisting on a path of "self-reliance" since the 1950s, North Korea has continually resisted pressure to change from enemies and allies alike. A worldview formed in the crucible of the Korean War and Cold War still maintains a powerful hold on North Korea in the twenty-first century, and understanding those historical forces is as urgent today as it was sixty years ago.

1

THE UNFINISHED WAR, 1950–53

If a war is inevitable, then let it be waged now, and not in a few years when Japanese militarism will be restored as an ally of the USA and when the USA and Japan will have a ready-made bridgehead on the continent in the form of the entire Korea run by Syngman Rhee.

—Joseph Stalin, October 1950

The War for Liberation

On June 25, 1950, in a predawn drizzle at the beginning of the rainy season, the Korean People’s Army (KPA) of North Korea attacked South Korean positions on the Ongjin Peninsula in the west with an artillery barrage and moved eastward across the Thirty-eighth parallel in a series of artillery and ground attacks.1 By around 5:00 a.m., the KPA had taken the medieval Korean capital of Kaesŏng, just south of the Thirty-eighth parallel; shortly thereafter, a full-scale invasion force moved down the road toward Seoul, while other North Korean detachments invaded across the center of the peninsula and the East Coast. By June 28, just three days after the invasion began, the KPA had taken Seoul from the city’s scattered, outnumbered, and outgunned South Korean defenders.

The invasion of June 25 was far from the first armed clash between North and South Korean military forces. Initiated by both sides, fighting had been fierce along the Thirty-eighth parallel for more than a year, including particularly pitched battles in the area of the Ongjin Peninsula in the summer of 1949.2 But the KPA blitzkrieg was qualitatively different from the uncoordinated skirmishes and guerrilla warfare that had beset Korea since the two regimes were established in 1948. To many in the West, particularly the United States, the North Korean action was a perfidious attack by international communism against the Free World, an attack that could only have been masterminded by Moscow to test Western resolve and expand communist territory in the newly emerging Cold War. The United States and its allies in the United Nations were quick to condemn the invasion, and two days after the North Korean attack, the UN Security Council called on “members of the United Nations to furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area.”3

The communists responded by accusing the Americans and their South Korean clients of starting the war, and condemning US “aggression.”4 The Soviets maintained that the United States had no business intervening in a civil war, and the Chinese leadership, in a kind of mirror-image reversal of the American perspective, saw the American intervention in Korea as part of a general plot to expand the US military presence in mainland Asia, including the areas of greatest strategic concern to China: the Korean Peninsula, Indochina, and especially Taiwan.5 Naturally, the North Koreans were the most vocal critics of the United States and South Korea for “starting” the war, and their official line on June 25 has been exactly the opposite of the American and South Korean view: on that morning, North Korean histories assert, “The South Korean puppet army, under the direct command of the ‘US Military Advisory Group,’ launched an armed invasion all along the Thirty-eighth parallel in a preconceived war plan.”6 The Soviets and Chinese tended to be less explicit about what happened on the morning of June 25, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian documents have shown conclusively that North Korea did indeed launch an all-out attack, with Moscow’s blessing (and weapons)—although these documents do not entirely support the standard, anticommunist Cold War view of the event either, as we shall see. As mentioned in the Introduction, the Chinese government began releasing documents related to the Korean War in the 1980s, and the Chinese Foreign Ministry began opening its archives in 2004, in part as a response to the Russian material.7 Although not as thorough and accessible as the Russian archives, Chinese documents, along with memoirs, official histories, and scholarly books and articles released since the late 1980s, give a much more detailed picture of Soviet-Chinese-North Korean dynamics in the Korean War than was previously available, even if they tend to gloss over the issue of “who started the war.”8

Origins of War

For decades, the origins of the Korean War were as contested and mysterious as any war in the twentieth century. The idea that the North Korean invasion was a carefully preconceived conspiracy among the communist leaders, with Stalin pulling Kim Il Sung’s (as well as Mao Zedong’s) puppet strings, remained the orthodox view held by many Western scholars and the general public throughout the Cold War. Even during the war itself, however, the journalist I. F. Stone publicly questioned this view and suggested a more active American and South Korean role in this “surprise attack.”9 In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars strongly critical of US foreign policy and suspicious of Western orthodoxies about the Korean War, in part following Stone’s lead, reexamined the Korean War as fundamentally a civil war that became internationalized through U.S. intervention—an event in which South Korea and the United States were, if not instigators, not entirely innocent victims either.10 But until the end of the Cold War and the release of previously classified, high-level Soviet materials in the early 1990s, neither the orthodox nor the revisionist schools of thought on the Korean War could rely on a clear picture of actions and strategies on the communist side. The Chinese responded to the release of Soviet documents with more limited, but nonetheless very enlightening, revelations of their own. Even without access to North Korean archives, we now have a much better understanding of the processes leading up to June 25 from the communist perspective than was possible before the 1990s.11

And what we know is that June 25 was a kind of communist conspiracy—but not in the way commonly understood in the 1950s. The North Korean invasion was not initiated by Stalin and carried out by his faithful proxy Kim Il Sung, but rather, Kim Il Sung took the lead in persuading Stalin to support Kim’s venture against the South. The idea that Kim initiated the Korean War is not entirely a post–Cold War revelation—Khrushchev said as much in his memoirs more than forty years ago12—but, strangely enough, the post–Cold War literature on the Korean War tends to reaffirm old orthodoxies and emphasize the role of Stalin (and to a lesser extent Mao) in initiating the conflict, downplaying the North Korea role, even though the evidence these studies present make it quite clear that Kim was more manipulating than manipulated. For example, the first major post–Cold War study of the Korean War, a collaboration among a Russian, an American, and a Chinese scholar and drawing heavily on the Soviet documents, acknowledges that Kim Il Sung “managed to make Moscow see the situation on the peninsula through his own eyes” and successfully lobbied for a year to win Stalin’s support for the invasion.13 Yet the authors present the war almost entirely as a Great Power conflict between the USSR, the United States, and China, and pay little attention to the role of Koreans in initiating and conducting the war. Like the orthodox reading of the Korean War in the 1950s, much of the post–Cold War, postrevisionist literature on the Korean War relegates the Koreans to the margins and treats the event almost entirely as a clash of major countries and personalities.14

The fact that North Korea under Kim Il Sung initiated the war is crucial for our understanding of not only the Korean War itself, but the history of subsequent events on the Korean Peninsula, especially in North Korea. DPRK histories call the war “the Fatherland Liberation War” (Choguk haebang chŏnjaeng), and claim that the war was a heroic defense of Korea against the American imperialists.15 This is how Kim Il Sung and the DPRK leadership presented the war to the Korean people, before and after June 25, and how Kim justified his planned invasion to Stalin: as a war to liberate the people of South Korea from the American occupiers and their Korean collaborators. Although the war ended in stalemate, the North declared victory, claiming to have foiled the American scheme to “re-colonize” the entire peninsula. Yet in practice, North Korea, like South Korea, has always acted on the premise that the war was unfinished, “liberation” incomplete. It is most likely that by the 1990s, unification on North Korean terms was little more than an abstraction to the DPRK leaders, who were preoccupied with the sheer survival of their regime.16 But for decades after the Korean War armistice ended the fighting in July 1953, much of North Korean foreign policy (and domestic policy as well) was driven by the ambition to extend the revolution to the South, to complete the task initiated by the June 25 attack and frustrated by the US intervention. The massive military buildup in the 1960s, and the tragic long-term consequences for the DPRK economy that resulted, was only one expression of this overriding ambition.17

The attack of June 25 was a North Korean invasion, planned in advance with the Soviet Union, and supported by China. This much confirms the “orthodox” understanding of the Korean War. But it is also important not to forget the Korean political context of the war, including the ongoing guerrilla war in South Korea, the perception of the illegitimacy of the Rhee regime by many in the South, and the perception in the North that South Korea would launch an attack against the North if the communists did not strike first. In other words, to North Korea June 25 was, in a sense, a preemptive strike, and not merely a war of aggression. Readers in the early twenty-first century need hardly be reminded that the difference between a war of aggression and a war of preemption may be largely in the eye of the beholder. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily justifying the North Korean action to point out that there was already a de facto war going on between North and South Korea well before June 25, that Kim’s concerns about a South Korean attack were not completely unfounded, and that neither the North nor the South, nor even the United Nations before the war began, considered the Thirty-eighth parallel an international boundary. In that sense the UN defense of South Korea may be less clearly justified than the UN-sanctioned coalition war in 1991 against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which incontrovertibly had violated an accepted international border, that between Iraq and Kuwait. Korea was a civil and an international conflict simultaneously, not just an international war fought by local proxies, and not just a civil war that became internationalized.18 In June 1950, Koreans invaded Korea—or rather, Soviet-sponsored Koreans attacked territory administered by American-sponsored Koreans, and in the process nearly triggered World War III.

Although much has been written during the past few decades about the origins and outbreak of the Korean War, the orthodox and revisionist accounts of the war have tended to speak past each other rather than come together to create a synthetic picture of the war.19 Attempting in part to move toward such a synthesis, it is worth recounting here the events leading up to June 25. Until the end of 1949, Stalin was more concerned about preventing a South Korean attack on the North than supporting a North Korean invasion of the South. Kim had begun lobbying Stalin for support for an invasion as early as March 1949, informing Stalin during a meeting in Moscow that “we believe that the situation makes it necessary and possible to liberate the whole country through military means.”20 Stalin replied that North Korea was too weak for a quick and decisive victory, and that a war would draw in the Americans, who still maintained a large military presence in the South. He sugg...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: North Korea in the International System
• 1. The Unfinished War, 1950–53
• 2. Postwar Reconstruction and a Declaration of Self-Reliance, 1953–55
• 3. A Singular Path: North Korea in the Socialist Community, 1956–63
• 4. The Anti-Imperialist Front, 1963–72
• 5. Breaking Out: Engaging the First and Third Worlds, 1972–79
• 6. A New Generation and a New Cold War, 1980–84
• 7. The Sun Sets in the East, 1985–92
• Epilogue: Tyranny of the Weak, Tyranny of the Strong
• Selected Bibliography
• Index