Economic Security and U.S.-China Competition: The View from North Korea

S.-led “unipolar” world was transitioning to a “multipolar world”: The present international situation shows that the contradictions between justice and injustice and between the progressive and the reactionary, especially the power structure surrounding the Korean peninsula, have become obvious and the change from a unipolar world advocated by the US into a multipolar world is being accelerated s. [...] policy, he put the nail in the coffin in his speech to the SPA in September 2023: As long as our Republic exists as a socialist state and as long as the tyrannical nuclear weapons of the imperialists trying to stamp out independence and socialism exist on the earth, we must neither change nor concede the present position of our country as a nuclear weapons state, but, on the contrary, continue to. [...] This connection between foreign and economic policy was evident in North Korea’s efforts to improve diplomatic ties with the United States, South Korea, and Europe in the lead-up to Kim Jong-il’s launch of economic reforms in July 2002, and with China, South Korea, and the United States in early 2018, as it transitioned from byungjin, or a policy of parallel development of the economy and nuclear. [...] The China Opportunity North Korea’s move toward greater centralization of the economy, hinted at during the Party plenary meeting in December 2019 and cemented at the Eighth Party Congress in January 2021, is consistent with the country’s shift to conservative policies across all sectors since the collapse of the Hanoi summit, including in the foreign policy realm. [...] North Korea’s downplaying of economic reform measures since early 2022 further underscored the correlation between North Korea’s foreign and economic policy, and it suggests that North Korea’s weakened will to reform the economy was due at least in part to the space created by its improved relations with China and the rift in U.