North Korea's Role and Its Impact on Indo-Pacific Regional Security

Tung-chieh Tsai

《Taiwan Strategists》 7期 (2020/09) Pp. 37-52

摘要

Since the ＂ice breaking journey＂ in early 2018 when the two Koreas participated in the Winter Olympics together and conducted a series of bilateral summits following the games, the nuclear challenge centered on North Korea seemed to be at a new turning point. Nonetheless, after about a year of pushing the ＂smile diplomacy,＂ and as long as Pyongyang has no intention of abandoning or revising its nuclear and missile development programs, any dialogue with North Korea will only be used by that country to buy time to boost its military capability. Furthermore, due to limited progress on denuclearization, the trade war between the US and China, the Covid-19 pandemic, and with North Korea launching missiles again, the situation has become more complicated, and it seems hard to have any positive expectations for the near future. In this paper, I will analyze the role of North Korea in recent developments in regional security and how Pyongyang thinks about its survival strategy according to national and family interests, before discussing the potential future developments on the Korean Peninsula.

關鍵字

North Korea ； Nuclear Policy ； Korean Peninsula ； Indo-Pacific ； Regional Security