~As a U.S. Army officer I was fortunate enough to have attended the University of Washington as a graduate student to study Korean history with the late Professor James Palais at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. His demanding academic standards were well known to his...

~ABM

~This book explores whether North Korea (officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [DPRK]) has behaved rationally under the Kim family rule....

~The purpose of this chapter is to examine what Kim managed to accomplish by pursuing his strategy of reunification. This is an important question because, no matter how “uncanny” his ability in manipulating the great...

~The purpose of this chapter is to examine what Kim Il-sung managed to accomplish by...

~This chapter examines how the Kims continued to seek opportunities to attack the U.S. after the USS Pueblo incident of 1968 and the EC-121 shoot down in 1969. After the success of the two attacks in the late-1960s, the Kims became more emboldened to use limited force to achieve their...

~This chapter examines how the Kims began to avoid a direct confrontation with the U.S. after the ax murders at Panmunjom in 1976. As they observed another military coup in South Korea led by Lieutenant General Chun Doo-hwan after the death of Park Chung-hee in October 1979, they realized it...

~If Kim Il-sung can be assessed as predominantly rational as he led North Korea to confront South Korea, the U.S., Japan, and others, what can be said of Kim Jong-il, who was generally thought to be a shadow of his father and unlikely to be capable of devising or delivering a longer-term,...

~It should be evident from the previous chapter that Kim Jong-il and his core elites were capable of developing and implementing effective strategy to survive the famine years. Nevertheless, one could argue that Kim was successful because the U.S. and South Korea simply chose not to apply...

~The previous two chapters showed Kim Jong-il and his core elites were more than capable of surviving the famine years during the 1990s and the hardline policy of the Bush years that threatened regime change. Even if one ignores North Korea’s accomplishments during the famine years by...

~The aim of this chapter is to examine the rise of Kim Jong-un as the successor and Supreme Leader, and consider the case of the nuclear missile deployment in...

~A strong case can be made that Kim Jong-un engineered a nuclear crisis in the Spring of 2013 to demonstrate his competence as the new Supreme Leader by confronting the U.S. early in his reign. However, before Kim began to...

~Are the Kims rational? This is important because, if the Kims are assessed as rational and treated accordingly, this would suggest there could be a way to prevent the...

~Abramowitz, Morton I., and James T. Laney, Co-Chairs, and Michael J. Green, Project Director. “U.S. Policy Toward North Korea: Next Steps.” Report of an Independent Task Force Sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, 1999.

David W. Shin, PhD, is associate professor at the National Intelligence University (NIU) in Bethesda, Maryland. From 1986 to 2011, he served in the U.S. Army as a Military Intelligence and Northeast Asia Foreign Area Officer, achieving the rank of Colonel. His experience includes negotiating with the North Korean People’s Army (KPA) at Panmunjom as a United Nations Command Military...