The United States (US) and the Republic of South Korea (ROK) has had several significant policy agreements and disagreements between each other for several decades after the Korean War. During President George W. Bush’s tenure in office at the White House, a couple key policy agreements between the US and ROK came to light, such as President Kim Dae Jung’s “Sunshine Policy1” officially known as the Policy of Reconciliation and Cooperation toward North Korea. The Sunshine Policy did not fare to well with Bush’s administration and they considered Kim naïve and completely annulled the Policy all together. This was due to the ROK’s passive stance on North Korea’s ongoing nuclear program.
The title of “The Sunshine Policy” originates from a fable told by Aesop called, “The North Wind and the Sun2.” This fable is how the sun and the wind competed with each other to take off a man’s coat. Eventually, the sun won this challenge by just using his sunlight on the man, caused the man to become hot, which resulted in him taking off his coat. On the other hand, the wind used his brute force in an attempt to blow off the man’s coat, which only had him hold on to it tighter. This analogy was to compare the hard and soft approaches of power to counter the North Korean threat to the ROK and the rest of the world. Kim led the way to culminate and drive the ROK towards a bilateral forum between North and South Korea, which eventually held place in Pyongyang in 2000 between the two leaders of the Korean peninsula. The policy bears six characteristics to be used accordingly with North Korea3:
1. “First it is a policy with historical precedence in its favor.” Policies that attempted to utilize a hard approach in seceding authoritarian...
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...a/1999/reunification22.html Assessed May 11, 2012.
Syner, Scott A. “South Korea’s Roh Moo hyun: An Impossible Idealist.” Council of Foreign Relations, May 23, 2009. Web: http://www.cfr.org/south-korea/south-koreas-roh-moo-hyun-impossible-idealist/p19487 Assessed May 6, 2012.
United States Institute of Peace. “Six-Party Talks: Defining a Roadmap for Success.” Web: http://www.usip.org/publications/six-party-talks-defining-realistic-roadmap-success Assessed May 10, 2012.
Wald, Mary. “Kim Dae Jung: A Hero for Peace.” Huff Post World, August 18, 2009. Web: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-wald/kim-dae-jung-a-hero-for-p_b_262296.html Assessed May 10, 2012.
Yang, Sung Chul. “South Korea’s Sunshine Policy.” Asiansociety.org, December 4, 2000. Web: http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan005966.pdf Assessed May 7, 2012.
Blaine Harden, former national correspondent and writer for the New York Times, delivers an agonizing and heartbreaking story of one man’s extremely conflicted life in a labor camp and an endeavor of escaping this place he grew up in. This man’s name is Shin Dong-hyuk. Together, Blaine Harden and Shin Dong-hyuk tell us the story of this man’s imprisonment and escape into South Korea and eventually, the United States, from North Korea. This biography that takes place from 1982-2011, reports to its readers on what is really going on in “one of the world’s darkest nations” (back cover of the book), that is run under a communist state and totalitarian dictatorship that was lead by Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and currently lead by Kim-Jong un. In Escape from Camp 14, Shin shows us the adaptation of his life and how one man can truly evolve from an animal, into a real human being.
and Altemeyer’s approaches to authoritarianism share many similarities, such as the more descriptive approach to their work than explanatory route, where neither clearly identify the source of authoritarianism. (Jones, 2002. Cited in The Open University, 2015, p50)
Pearson, Lester B. "Documents on the Korean Crisis." University of Manitoba. January 24, 1951. http://www.umanitoba.ca/libraries/units/archives/canada_war/tribune/website/clippings/korea/Documents_on_the_Korean_Crisis1.shtml (accessed December 18, 2011).
President Truman strategy was a “negotiated settlement” “This would end the war, unfortunately North Korea would remain independent.” His tactics were diplomatic, whenever there would be a dispute he would talk it out not causing any trouble or alarming other countries there is a collision of interests.
Throughout the early 1950’s the Korean Peninsula was a location with much civil unrest and violence. For this reason, it is a miracle that the Korean Armistice Agreement was actually mutually agreed upon by North and South Korea. Even with the constant complications, and early opposition surrounding the Korean Armistice Agreement, the aid of Dwight D Eisenhower made this unrealistic attempt of peace a reality.
In no field other than politics does the justification for action often come from a noteworthy event and the true cause stays hidden behind the headlines. The United States’ transformation from a new state to a global superpower has been a methodical journey molded by international conditions (the global terrain for statecraft), the role of institutions and their programmed actions, and ultimately, the interests of actors (the protection of participants in making policy’s items and i...
Lee, Killdong. 조선일보, “겨울방학에 읽을만한 청소년 교양도서 – 책을 사랑하는 당신의 선택 북스조선.”. Chosun, 29, Dec. 2000. Web.
Since the end of the Korean War, the United States has enacted policies to isolate and undermine the Kim Dynasty in North Korea. A key development took place in the past several decades where North Korea broke away from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to develop their own nuclear weapons and while lacking launch capabilities, they have been successful in their development. During this process, the United States took active policies to deter the North Koreans in pursuit of their goals. It is easy to assume that the United States took this stance in order to maintain a military edge in the region. But under closer examination, this neo-realist perspective does not explain why the United States pursued this policy.
Soh, C. S. (2001). South Korea. In C. R. Ember & M. Ember (Eds.), Countries and Their Cultures (
Relations between the United States and North Korea have been unstable since the second world war and with each passing decade the relations have become more tense. The U.S has never have formal international relations with North Korea , however the conflict has caused much controversy in U.S foreign policy. North Korea has been the receiver of millions of dollars in U.S aid and the target of many U.S sanctions. This is due to the fact that North Korea is one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet, that uses unjust techniques such as murder, torture, and starvation to get their citizens to be obedient. They restrict contact from their citizens to the outside world, through censorship of technology and rarely allowing visitors to the country. The root of the US-North Korea conflict however ,has been on the basis of nuclear weapons and North Korea threatening to use those weapons against the U.S and neighboring South Korea. The U.S and other nations have been working for the last few decades to stop the regime from purchasing and utilizing destructive nuclear weapons.
The book I chose for this book review assignment is titled Korea Old and New: A History by author Carter J. Eckert along with other contributing authors Ki-baik Lee, Young Ick Lew, Michael Robinson and Edward W. Wagner. The book is published at Korea Institute, Harvard University in 1990. The book consists of 418 pages and it is more of a survey of Korean history and reference type of book, rather than selected readings on modern Korean politics. I chose this book because it is a complete survey of Korean history from the ancient Choson period up to the economic boom of the 1990's, a span of over 2000 years. Each chapter covers a different period, but they all share the same organization of describing the social, cultural, political, philosophical and scholarly aspects of the period in respective subsections. This made it easier to later refer to previous chapters and compare different periods in order to learn the comprehensive history of Korea.
.... The two countries are reconnecting rail lines and sent a combined team to the Olympics. Even the United States is providing $500 million dollars a year in food to the starving North Koreans. The new South Korean President, Roh-Moo-hyun was elected on a peace platform and suggested US troops may be gone within ten years. Works Cited North Korean military and nuclear proliferation threat: evaluation of the U.S.-DPRK agreed framework: joint hearing before the Subcommittee on International Economic Policy and Trade and Asia and the Pacific of the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, first session, February 23, 1995, Publisher: U.S. G.P.O.: For sale by the U.S. G.P.O., Supt. of Docs, Congressional Sales Office; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2340405.stm http://www.iht.com/articles/95391.html
North and South Korea were not very different politically or culturally from one another before mid 1940’s (White, Bradshaw, Dymond, Chacko, Scheidt, 2014, p. 125). However, North Korea started the Korean War when they invaded South Korea in 1950. These two countries, which were once the same, are vastly different in the areas of politics and culture The Koreas’ continue to disagree and not be at peace with each other since the Korean War despite small steps toward progress over the
Steinberg, David I., and Donald N. Clark. "Review of The Kwangju Uprising: Shadows over the Regime in South Korea." The Journal of Asian Studies 47.3 (1988): 662-63. Print.
... In conclusion, Realism is able to explain the outcomes, actual and hypothetical, of NK policies, since its common assumption matches the centrality of the nuclear issue to the agenda of the country. In addition to that, Neoclassical Realism also provides a valuable explanation for some of the nation's more relevant foreign policy patterns of behavior. Works Cited Kim, Yongho and Yi, Yurim “Security Dilemmas and Signaling during the North Korean Nuclear Standoff”, Asian Perspective, Vol. 78, No. 2, pp.