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.
Salter, Christopher L., and Charles F. Gritzner. "Introducing North Korea,." North Korea. 2nd ed. New York: Chelsea House, 2007. . Print.
Yun, Tae-gyu. The Constitution of North Korea: Its Changes and Implications. [New York, N.Y.]: Fordham University School of Law, 2004. Print.
North Korea and South Korea are complete opposites but both need security reforms to make the country better. North Korea is known...
In public, Reagan condemned authoritarian nations such as the Soviet Union, but in 1981, he was negotiating with an authoritarian leader. This is contradictory to what is thought of as Reagan’s strong and unyielding foreign policy against those who go against the American model. In his summit meeting with President Chun Doo Hwan in February 1981, Reagan was essentially establishing a new policy of engagement with South Korea by building a close relationship of cooperation and reliance with President
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.
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. In reality, North Korea to this day does not pose a significant military threat, even with limited nuclear capabilities. A constructivist perspective is more able to explain US policy in this instance because it does not focus on sheer militaristic power. It takes into consideration the state's identities which drives their interests. The identities of the US and North Korea and the interactions between them drove both nations to the point of acquiring and deterring nuclear use.
The theory of Realism provides reasons why North Korea has positioned the nuclear weapon debate at the centre of its policy. One of the fundamental assumptions of Realism is in fact that each state, embedded in an international order characterized by a condition of antagonism, attempt to pursue its national interest. Besides that, the overriding national interest is defined in terms of national security and survival. Moreover, according to the same theory, relations among states are derived primarly by their level of power, which is constituted basically their military and economic capability, and in pursuit of the national security states strive to attain as many resources as possible. The theoretical model explains thus why the nuclear issue has eventually resulted in identifying with a security one, meaning that North Korea main concern is to assure its survivor, its efforts are in the first place finalized at meeting that target and its only means of pursuing it consists of the posing of the nuclear threat. North Korea finds itself to be stuck in an economic and, to some extent, diplomatic isolation; even though the financial sanctions leading to the just mentioned critical conditions have been caused by the government inflexible, aggressive and anti-democratic behavior, the regime has no ot...
.... 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
Communist North Korea continues to be an underdeveloped country while South Korea continues to prosper in all areas such as technology, and agriculture. These two countries have vast differences with their political and government views. North Korea at one point was influenced by the Soviet Union but no longer. However, North Korea continues to be influenced by and receive aid from China. South Korea continues to be influenced by the United States of America. North Korea is governed and controlled by a dictatorship, which has complete control over media and social
Throughout the global media North Korea’s isolation and Harsh rule has become increasingly secretive, although some facts have been detected (“North Korea Profile”, 1). According to data collected from The Guardian, eighty-one out of one-hundred people in South Korea have access to the internet, yet in North Korea around .1 out of one-hundred people have access to the internet . Not only is the greater population of North Korea disconnected from outside sources, yet leaders in North Korea are also isolated from outside sources; putting themselves at a disadvantage. North Korea may launch a war, but they are unaware as to what they are up against because of its secrecy . Around one million are serving in the North Korean Army, but when South Korea’s army; combined with the U.S’s army (their ally), the ratio of the North Korean Army is signi...
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.
South Korea, once a broken country filled with broken families, has transformed itself into a fine example of perseverance in a tough situation. South Korea and its neighbor to the north have developed past where they were before the Korean War, but in different ways. The two countries, while certainly dependent on each other, are vastly different. Their conflicting styles of government and their differing cultures speak for themselves in this case. South Korea has, over the years, changed dramatically from the crippled country of the Korean War into a blossoming beacon of Asian cultural and economic changes. The combination of its recent economic importance, its heavy cultural influence, and its constant danger of participating in a war makes South Korea one of the most influential countries in the world.
This country is of particular interest as it is one of the four Asian Tiger economies, whose rapid industrialisation and growth between the early 1960’s and 1990’s caused it to emerge as one of the most dynamic and fast-changing countries in Asia and the world. Much like Japan, its economic development was marked by heavy investments in foreign technology and imitation through reverse-engineering. By limiting FDI, South Korea maintained control over its industrial base and encouraged investments in R&D.
...h Korea flirts with the free market. (World In Review)." Harvard International Review 25.1 (2003): 36-39. General OneFile. Web. 6 Feb. 2010.
To understand this situation more fully, one must be given some background, starting in the early 1950s. Due to the harsh differences between the peoples of Korea, and especially due to the onset of Communism, the Korean War erupted and the nation split in half, with the Communist-supported Democratic People’s Republic in the north and those who favored democracy in the Korean Republic of the south (Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2000). The two separate countries of North Korea and South Korea went their opposite ways, and each has experienced different fortunes in the past half-century. The South Koreans managed to recover from the turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s to become an economic power and a democracy supporter. On the other hand, North Korea can be viewed as a retro country, based first on a Communist ideology, laid down by leader Kim Il Sung and inherited by his son, the current dictator Kim Jong Il, then evolving into a totalitarian state (Pacific Rim: East Asia at the Dawn of a New Century). Today North Korea holds the distinction of being one of the very few remaining countries to be truly cut off from the rest of the world. Author Helie Lee describes this in her novel In the Absence of Sun: “An eerie fear crawled through my flesh as I stood on the Chinese side of the Yalu River, gazing across the murky water into one of the most closed-off and isolated countries in the world.” (1)