The ruling strategy of Kim Jong-Un and North Korea’s last 10 years: The Rational Action-Reaction about The Expected Effect of The Sanctions

초록

The international community has imposed economic sanctions to coerce North Korea to abandon its nuclear program for decades. However, in the end, it completed the development of nuclear warheads, and it even successfully tested the ICBM. Pyongyang's successful nuclear program shows that the sanctions have not been effective. Thus, it would be appropriate to analyze why the sanctions on North Korea have failed to produce the intended outcome. This study explores the reasons for the economic sanction failure from the perspective of the rational actor theory. Presuming the U.S. and DPRK as “reasonable actors” trying to minimize the effectiveness of each other's actions, it will explain not only the regime survival scenario of Kim Jong-Un but also the effectiveness of sanctions on Pyongyang. This approach will contribute to bringing new inspirations to policymakers who want to figure out how and why sanctions on North Korea have remained ineffective. It also can explain how Kim's regime maintains strong ruling power as well as why they adopt all-around hacking, the science-technology policy line, and the strategies to exploit the U.S.-China conflict as its regime survival strategies of “Building a Powerful Socialist Country.”

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