The West Couldn’t Break North Korea And Now They’re Afraid

Radhika Desai in discussion with Keith Bennett. Transcription from the Geopolitical Economy Hour podcast hosted by Radhika Desai.

16 June 2026

 

Keith Bennett: The growing coordination between the DPRK, China and Russia is actually a fundamental failure of Western policy. I would argue that, with Brzezinski and Kissinger, from at least the early 1970s, the fundamental Western strategy was to keep these countries as divided as possible and play one against another. And what we see today is not only the highly intelligent leadership of Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in international relations, but also the complete failure of half a century of Western strategy to keep its perceived adversaries divided. And I say “perceived” adversaries, because these countries are all focused on their own development. They all want to provide a better life for their people; they want to engage in modernization. None of them choose the path of confrontation — but if confrontation comes to them, they have to deal with it.

Radhika Desai: Hello and welcome to the 73rd Geopolitical Economy Hour, the conversation that illuminates the fast-changing political economy and geopolitical economy of our times from a socialist and anti-imperialist point of view — the point of view of the world majority. I’m Radhika Desai and you’re watching Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economist. Please like, subscribe, share, and if you can, donate here on YouTube or on my Substack and Patreon — this helps me keep my content free across all platforms.

Now, on to the subject of the day. What can we make of President Xi’s recent trip to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea — or, to be precise, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea? As many of you will know, President Xi has just hosted the leaders of the two most powerful nations on earth other than China — President Putin and President Trump. So why follow this impressive double act with a trip — his first foreign trip this year — to a small country of some 26 or 27 million people, a pariah to the world and among the most sanctioned countries in the world?

Perhaps it’s because the DPRK is not quite the obscure entity some might imagine. It is the product of one of the bloodiest post-war battles against imperialism. The Korean War, which lasted about three years from 1950 to 1953, took nearly five million lives and divided the Korean Peninsula between the capitalist South — the Republic of Korea — and the communist North, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. After suffering saturation and carpet bombing — images of which cannot but recall the cruel and complete destruction of so many parts of Gaza — and notwithstanding a formidable sanctions regime, North Korea, guided by the Juche ideology of Kim Il Sung (Juche translates roughly as self-reliance, or being the master of one’s own destiny), built itself up into a highly educated society with universal health care and a formidable industrial base. More recently it has also developed nuclear weapons and delivery systems that can reach the west coast of the United States.

China played a most critical role in all this — fighting alongside the Koreans against the United States and the capitalist South, and later becoming the country’s most important trading partner. The DPRK is also the only country in the world with which China has a mutual defence pact.

Of course, little of North Korea’s success is accepted in the Western press. Rather, our media brands the country as authoritarian, an economic basket case, a society of famished people controlled by its “regime,” as it is always called. As for President Xi’s visit, the Western press has portrayed it as a tussle between China and North Korea — with China demanding the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the DPRK refusing — and as an effort by North Korea to balance China against Russia, a country to which it has recently become quite close and with which it has also signed a defence pact. So what’s the reality behind all this propaganda? What was actually achieved during President Xi’s historic visit?

I can think of no one better informed about all this — and able to converse in English about it — than Keith Bennett, who joins us today. Welcome, Keith.

Keith Bennett: Thank you very much, Radhika. Having listened to your shows many times, it’s a great pleasure to be on with you.

Radhika Desai: That’s so nice, thank you. Let me introduce you in a little detail, because our audience should know how uniquely qualified you are. Keith first became interested in the DPRK in the 1970s, while still at school — a natural outgrowth of his already established interest in China and the Chinese revolution. He took the view that the most advanced and sustainable socialist experiments were to be found in Asia rather than Europe. He went on to study at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, where he interacted with his teacher Dr Malcolm Caldwell, who shared a similar view and had visited the DPRK — a rare thing in those times.

Establishing contact with the DPRK was not easy in those days, but in 1982 Keith met their nearest representatives at the time in Paris. This led him to establish the Korea Friendship Committee with his friend Hugh Goodacre, which had the support of about half a dozen Labour MPs who had also visited the country. Keith’s first visit came the next year, when, as the editor of a Marxist-Leninist newspaper, he was invited to the World Conference of Journalists Against Imperialism — bringing together people from over a hundred countries, personally welcomed at a banquet given by President Kim Il Sung. This proved the first of between 50 and 60 visits — Keith has lost count — for periods of a couple of days to six weeks, including the 35th National Day in September 1984 and the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party of Korea in October last year. He met President Kim Il Sung on a number of occasions, and was twice awarded the country’s Order of Friendship medal. In 1992 he published a short book, Korea: Pioneer of Communism, marking Kim Il Sung’s 80th birthday. In 1989 he led a hundred-strong delegation of young people from Britain to the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students in Pyongyang. He has written and lectured on the DPRK extensively over four and a half decades, across Western Europe as well as in Russia, Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Venezuela, Algeria, Equatorial Guinea and elsewhere. He is currently deputy chair of the Kim Il Sung–Kim Jong Il Foundation, headquartered in Pyongyang, and deputy director-general of the European Regional Society for the Study of the Juche Idea.

So, Keith — what’s wrong with the Western story about President Xi’s visit, and how do you see its significance?

Keith Bennett: In terms of what’s wrong with the Western media account — and not just the Western media; Al Jazeera’s coverage is little if anything better on this issue — I would say just about everything. It’s difficult to know whether it’s because they simply don’t understand, or whether they misrepresent, or some combination of both. They start from a basic paradigm that is completely negative, and then fit almost everything into it — which means they can’t see the real picture, and they even do themselves a disservice by their inability to see it.

There are one or two heavily qualified breaks. It was quite extraordinary earlier this week to read a substantial article in the Wall Street Journal saying the DPRK was a surprising economic success story. Of course it was caveated with various silly, deprecatory remarks, but the whole thrust was about the very considerable success the DPRK has registered, and is registering, in its economy in the recent and current period. I think they allowed the truth to seep in because they were so surprised by it themselves.

They assume the DPRK is an irrational actor. I would say it’s actually a supremely rational actor — which is a different thing from whether or not people agree with what it does. The government, the system and the country would not have survived from de facto 1945, de jure 1948, after the complete destruction of a war that ended not with a peace agreement but only with an armistice — and would not have survived a longer period of sanctions, imposed by the United States and others, than even Cuba has endured, unless it had an extremely astute and rational leadership.

From the point of view of China, and of its relations with Russia, it’s always filtered through a prism of, at best, realist international relations theory — that these are the machinations of big powers based on narrow state interest. Of course every state pays attention to its national interests. But to see this only cynically obviates the fact that there are very deep historical, and indeed personal, connections between the DPRK and China, and between the DPRK and Russia — originally the Soviet Union, but under President Putin that Soviet ethos has really come back, at least in international relations. And while the national interests of these three countries are not identical, they are fundamentally compatible and complementary, because they all face similar threats and challenges from external powers — principally the United States, but also Japan to some extent, and the countries more or less in the American camp.

So the growing coordination between the DPRK, China and Russia is actually a fundamental failure of Western policy. With Brzezinski and Kissinger, from at least the early 1970s, the fundamental Western strategy was to keep these countries as divided as possible and play one against another. What we see today is not only the highly intelligent leadership of Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, but the complete failure of half a century of Western strategy to keep its perceived adversaries divided. And I say “perceived,” because these countries are all focused on their own development. None of them choose the path of confrontation — but if confrontation comes to them, they have to deal with it.

Radhika Desai: So in that context, what is the significance of President Xi’s visit?

Keith Bennett: The significance manifests itself on a number of levels. The Western media will say there’s been a period of cool relations and differing expectations. That’s true to the extent that we live in a rapidly changing world — “changes unseen in a century,” as Xi Jinping says — and those changes are happening at an accelerating pace, so every country has to take stock and make adjustments. Up until COVID struck at the beginning of 2020, there had been an intensive period of diplomatic exchanges between China and the DPRK: Xi had been to the DPRK; Kim Jong-un had made five or six visits to China — three times within a hundred days on one occasion. Now it’s presented as a rare visit, “not for seven years,” but that’s invariably put without reference to the COVID years, when people weren’t travelling. The DPRK took the public-health situation very seriously, keeping COVID out of the country for a long period — closing down even before China closed Wuhan, and staying closed far longer.

From a slightly different angle, this is the second time in about nine months the two men have met, because Kim Jong-un came to Beijing at the beginning of September last year for the 80th anniversary of the victory in the War to Resist Japanese Aggression and the global anti-fascist war. People read the signals: of the 26 heads of state or government who joined Xi, the two placed on either side of him were Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. Many found that strange — there were bigger, arguably more important countries — so it was surprising that the Chinese singled out Kim Jong-un as one of the two principal guests. Viewed from that angle, President Xi’s visit this week was in many respects the return visit, and indicates that in this post-COVID era the pace of exchanges is picking up.

As for the significance, there are a number of aspects. First, it rests on a long history. The two countries are neighbours, but as Kim Jong-un said in his banquet speech, they are linked not only geographically and topographically but by shared ideology, shared ideals, shared goals. You mentioned Chinese participation in the Korean War, but the founder of the DPRK and Kim Jong-un’s own grandfather, Kim Il Sung, went to China at the age of 13 — to secondary school in Jilin, in the northeast, as many Koreans did, because of the particularly brutal Japanese colonial rule. That’s where he first came into contact with the communist movement; his first comrades were both fellow Korean exiles and Chinese communists. Both sides attach great importance to this long connection, and it was a big part of the framing of the visit — but so was the idea of repurposing it for the next generation and the coming period, when both countries feel they face significant challenges from the United States and Japan, and both want to develop their economies.

From the Chinese point of view, they repeatedly stress now — not only regarding the DPRK but also Cuba, Vietnam and Laos — that they have a particular tie with fellow socialist countries. One small example: when the Chinese announced that Xi would visit, the announcement was made by the International Department of the Party Central Committee, not the foreign ministry. It may seem a small detail, but it shows the fundamental nature of the relationship — the party relationship actually comes above the state representation. From the DPRK side, they describe the relationship with China, to quote their formulation, as one “with socialism at the core.” This is very significant — not in an abstract or rhetorical sense, but as the framework within which everything else is situated, including where there might be disagreements from time to time; the framework in which those are resolved is that shared socialist paradigm.

On the day Xi arrived, he had an article published in the Rodong Sinmun, the main newspaper in the DPRK, in which he said the older generation of leaders of both countries were “as close as can be,” like family — which would apply, among others, to Kim Jong-un’s own father and grandfather, but also to Xi Jinping’s father, who was a great friend of Kim Il Sung.

Radhika Desai: That’s really fascinating — the personal aspects are amazing. The way I look at it, one of the very interesting things more recently, and the larger significance of the trip, is that there’s a more and more explicit recognition by the two states, and in their mutual relations, that the world is fundamentally changing — that the world is in great chaos, but that most of this chaos is coming from Western countries. In this chaos and aggression, countries like China, North Korea, and for that matter Russia, must defend themselves, and in doing so they have to maintain good and stable relations. One aspect of this is that, whereas in the past China at least formally adhered to denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, it now seems that China, as well as Russia, are moving towards a position in which North Korea’s nuclear weapons are sort of not an issue. They’re not necessarily endorsing them, but they’re not an issue. This represents an important shift, and a very meaningful one for the time to come. Don’t you think?

Keith Bennett: I completely agree. And you were very correct to use the phrase “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” because the Western position — the United States, but also Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada — always framed it as the nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons program of the DPRK. China’s position was always for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which is an important difference, because nuclear weapons were introduced into the peninsula by the United States in the 1950s, in direct violation of the armistice agreement they signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953, which committed them not to introduce advanced weapon systems. That was the issue — and denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was the formal position of the DPRK too, even while it was developing its own nuclear weapons.

The DPRK has now put very clearly into its constitution that it is a nuclear-weapons state, and has said denuclearization is simply off the table. I don’t think they’ve actually changed their minds that, ultimately, they’d like to see a world free of nuclear weapons. But if I read correctly the two very important speeches Kim Jong-un made earlier this year — at the 9th Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea and at the subsequent Supreme People’s Assembly — the clear subtext is that global denuclearization is something to be addressed when imperialism no longer exists, because, as he reiterated, the aggressive nature of imperialism cannot change; imperialism that is not aggressive simply doesn’t exist.

In the earlier period of the DPRK’s nuclear development, China was concerned, because China is concerned with stability — not an unreasonable concern, since any country that wishes to develop wants an external environment of stability so it can commit its resources to peaceful construction.

Radhika Desai: And China is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Keith Bennett: Yes. So there was a concern that, with the DPRK developing nuclear weapons, Japan and South Korea could also go nuclear — both are so-called nuclear “turnkey” states — and that would not be favourable to China. China is a signatory to the NPT, which at least means it has to profess to be against proliferation. But the reasons the DPRK developed nuclear weapons are identical to why China developed them in the early 1960s, so from that point of view they ought to understand it. Now there’s a situation where the DPRK is a de facto nuclear-weapons state, whether anyone likes it or not, and it’s developing its deterrent at a very rapid rate, quantitatively and qualitatively — to the extent that even Donald Trump, in his own muddled and confused way, has on several occasions appeared to acknowledge it. So their standpoint is that denuclearization on their part is simply off the agenda — not something for discussion or negotiation — and that includes their stance towards the United States. Kim Jong-un has said that, in his dealings with Trump — make of it what one will — his personal relations with Trump are, in his view, quite good, but that the precondition now, on the DPRK side, for resuming dialogue is that denuclearization be off the table and that the United States recognise the fact that the DPRK is a nuclear power.

From the Russian point of view, Russia has now very formally said this is no longer an issue. The Chinese approach has been slightly different, in that they no longer mention denuclearization at all. It was noticeable a couple of months ago that China published its regular white paper on nuclear policy, which in every previous year had referred to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula — and this year that reference was removed. So the Western media saying Xi would go to Pyongyang and call on Kim to denuclearize was completely wide of the mark. The option China would have is to keep the relationship cool. The fact that it’s not — that it’s actually revving up the heat — shows that, for China too, in practical political terms at least, this is no longer an issue. And not simply because it’s a de facto reality, but because China perfectly well understands, as it should from its own history, why the DPRK has gone down this road. You don’t have to be a genius to see what happens to developing countries deemed unacceptable by Western imperialism who then abandon their nuclear programs, or never go down that road.

The DPRK has no interest in following in the footsteps of Libya, Iraq, Syria, or Venezuela — or even the tragic situation presently confronting the people of Cuba. And it’s not in China’s interests either. China did not sacrifice the lives of several hundred thousand troops in Korea only to have, two decades later, American troops, military bases and missiles sitting on the Yalu River — a very narrow border between China and the DPRK. So, having invested half a century in trying to divide its adversaries, US imperialism seems to have a kind of death wish of driving them together. China and the DPRK face very similar threats and geopolitical challenges, so it’s quite natural that they now understand each other’s positions more clearly.

Radhika Desai: It’s almost not even so much a death wish. When Western capitalism was healthier, countries like Korea, or even China, might have thought there was something to be gained by deeper integration into the Western capitalist system. But today the Western capitalist system has itself become so productively enfeebled — technologically falling backward, so financialized, so predatory — that the greater economic advantage is now for the socialist countries to come together and pool their resources. China is far in advance of any country today in productive terms. Of all the frozen conflicts from the post-war period — Korea, East Germany, and the separation of Taiwan from China — while Germany was settled in favour of the capitalist West, it doesn’t look as if the other two will be. If anything, they’ll be settled in favour of the communist side. And yet, around this time last year, Kim Jong-un explicitly ruled out unification as a goal. How do you see that fitting into the larger scheme?

Keith Bennett: Before unification — one thing he said was very correct: contrary to the idea that the DPRK is extremely belligerent, or wishes to be isolated, it actually spent several decades trying hard to reach some kind of agreement, a modus vivendi, with the United States. Kim Il Sung, shortly before he died, met with Jimmy Carter, who came to Pyongyang. The DPRK entered the Six-Party Talks — with South Korea, Japan, China and the United States — and really wanted to reach a peace treaty with the US, to normalize relations and develop economic ties, not on condition of abandoning their socialist system or their anti-imperialist standpoint. It was an important goal for them.

What’s fundamentally changed is that now it’s Donald Trump who is very keen — sometimes sounds almost desperate — to have some kind of engagement with the DPRK. And it’s the DPRK saying, “We don’t rule it out, but it’s not a priority for us. We’ll talk if you formally respect our status as a nuclear power,” while the United States still wants to discuss them ceasing to be a nuclear power. So at present there’s no dialogue, and the DPRK is in no hurry. Why? Because its economy is now doing better than it has for many years, in a very striking and obvious way — whole new streets and communities being built, private car ownership increasing rapidly, people ordering food delivery and shopping on apps on their smartphones. There’s growing economic strength, growing military strength, and the very close relationship with Russia once again.

The defence treaty you mentioned: at the beginning of the 1960s the DPRK concluded defence pacts with China and with the Soviet Union, to last 50 years. When the 50 years was up with China, they renewed for another 50 — which is why this year is the 65th anniversary. Russia, under Yeltsin, scrapped the treaty when it came up for renewal — Yeltsin wasn’t interested — so the treaty they’ve now concluded with Russia is really a reinstatement of the one they had with the Soviet Union. So they have close relationships with both Russia and China. In terms of raw materials and natural resources from Russia — and the DPRK is itself incredibly mineral-rich, with huge potential, needing the technology to properly exploit it — and with the huge growth of Chinese technology and scientific innovation, if these three countries stand together there’s very little the DPRK actually needs from the West. There’s a year or two’s gap on the most advanced microchips, but in so many fields what you can get from China is better than what you can get from the West — particularly as the West won’t export its best to China anyway, let alone to the DPRK. So the imperative to improve relations with the West has gone. Not that they wish to have bad relations — but now the DPRK can say, “It’s up to you.” The boot is now on the other foot.

That brings me to unification, which is a very sensitive issue, because it was for long the centrepiece of DPRK policy — so this is probably the most radical change the DPRK has ever made. It comes from a realization that all the many negotiations over the years with the South were with a bad-faith actor. Even if some people at different times in the South were to some extent sincere, the very nature of the setup in the Republic of Korea meant the prospects for what the DPRK wanted weren’t there. The DPRK’s position had been very similar to the Chinese concept of “one country, two systems” — Kim Il Sung had talked about one country, two governments, a “democratic confederal republic” — but the South’s position, whether put in hard or soft terms, was about reunification by absorption, basically the East German model, which was not acceptable. They now feel they have no need to indulge that; better to concentrate on their own development, recognize that the division is a fact, and proceed without illusions about getting something from South Korea.

Radhika Desai: Absolutely. Western attempts to make peace with North Korea have had such a bad record — there was an attempt in the 1990s that came a cropper, and it was really after the failure of those attempts that North Korea decided to develop nuclear weapons, explicitly withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. What’s remarkable: people will remember that in Trump’s first term there was all this brouhaha about making peace with North Korea, but there were two reasons behind it. One, North Korea had just demonstrated missile capacities able to reach the west coast of the United States. Two — much more obvious this term, but a factor then too — Trump thought that by making a deal he would get a Nobel Peace Prize. One day he was writing love letters to Kim Jong-un, the next calling him names. The whole thing fell apart because Trump didn’t build on any of the work done by the negotiating team — he simply imagined that meeting Kim Jong-un would solve everything. He calls himself a great dealmaker, but has no understanding of how deals are actually made.

Keith Bennett: There was a meme I saw recently — this is about Xi Jinping rather than Kim Jong-un — where Donald Trump is reading The Art of the Deal, his ghostwritten book, and Xi Jinping is reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. There’s very little dispute as to which is the more intellectually rigorous text.

Radhika Desai: [laughs] Yes.

Keith Bennett: The second summit Trump had with Kim Jong-un, in Hanoi — the mood music at the start seemed positive, but then Trump overplayed his hand. I happen to think he was under the malign influence of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. Trump had some mad idea about a Nobel Peace Prize, and some fantasy about a Trump Tower in Pyongyang. But the people around him were viscerally against any kind of deal. The negotiating position the DPRK brought to the table was: “We’ll make certain moves towards denuclearization — disabling a reactor, say — and then we get a certain degree of sanctions relief or normalization of economic relations.” Something for something, which strikes me as, to say the least, not unreasonable. Trump overplayed his hand and said, in effect: “You completely denuclearize, and then we’ll talk about lifting some sanctions.” That’s the kind of thing you dictate to a defeated enemy.

Radhika Desai: Exactly.

Keith Bennett: But the DPRK is not a defeated country — far from it. That’s where it broke down. And the people in the DPRK are very far from fools. They’re perfectly capable of seeing what happened to Saddam Hussein, what happened to Gaddafi, and now what’s happening to Nicolás Maduro — and, not surprisingly, they don’t see it as a particularly attractive prospect.

Radhika Desai: This is really interesting, and we should probably wind down, because we’ve gone on for a while — and you must come back to discuss other aspects of this fascinating country. But maybe this is a good note. Unlike you, I’ve never been to North Korea, but I’ve taken an interest in the system and in the Juche ideology. Alexander Gerschenkron, the famous theorist of late development, made the point that ideology is always an important element of late development — that is, development in a context where other countries have already developed and are putting pressure on the world market. The Juche ideology is fascinating and revealing to read about. How did it contribute to Korea’s economic development, and what do you think the West gets completely wrong about North Korea’s economic development?

Keith Bennett: Good question. In the post-war period — the armistice was signed in 1953 and the whole peninsula had been devastated, particularly the North. It was quite early in the war when American pilots were reporting back that there was no point going on bombing raids because there was nothing left to bomb. General Curtis LeMay of the US Air Force said, “We burned down every town in North Korea, and every village too.” So it was utter devastation. The 20th century, and now the 21st, are an epoch of unprecedentedly awful conflicts in terms of their impact on civilians. Even some of history’s most bloody battles inflicted terrible suffering but left other things relatively untouched; modern warfare is different. If you look at a picture of Pyongyang in 1953, it suggests two images: Hiroshima in 1945, and Gaza today.

From that starting point, the DPRK industrialized and developed much more rapidly than the South. The eminent economist Joan Robinson went to the DPRK in 1963 or 1964 and wrote an article in Monthly Review about what she saw — and that’s where the phrase “Korean miracle” comes from. Everyone thinks it was coined in the West about the Republic of Korea; the actual origin refers to the DPRK. Up to sometime in the 1970s, the DPRK was developing and modernizing at a greater rate than the ROK. Why there was later a certain change is for another time — but a strong basic economic foundation was laid. And, like all socialist countries, the DPRK put great emphasis on education.

Radhika Desai: Yes.

Keith Bennett: It’s twelve years’ compulsory education now, one of the highest in the world, and at every level, unlike in the West, completely free. This is even emphasized within the basic ideology of the country: the ruling party in the DPRK is probably the only communist party in the world that has adapted the hammer and sickle to add a third element — the writing brush, representing the intellectuals.

Radhika Desai: Interesting.

Keith Bennett: You can say it’s just symbolism, but what countries choose by way of symbolism is also important. So the material and intellectual foundations for development are there — and it’s that intellectual foundation that has enabled them, among other things, to develop their weapons technology and nuclear program, because you don’t achieve something like that in a blockaded, sanctioned country without a considerable cadre of intelligent people: an army of scientists, technicians and engineers. There’s now a very concentrated effort to develop the country. While the nuclear program is increasing — Kim Jong-un has said it should be stepped up — there’s a dialectical process here: part of the reason for the nuclear program was to ensure the defence of the country was secured, thereby freeing resources for economic development. And the ever-increasing closeness with Russia and China is also a positive factor.

I didn’t go to the DPRK for several years — two years for personal family reasons, and then straight into COVID. Having gone very regularly from 1983 to 2017, I had, for the first time, a gap of a few years. When I went back, it was striking and impressive just how much economic development there had been, and on what scale. I always remember what one of my closest friends in the DPRK said to me on my last visit before that gap, talking about their new plans: “The United States can put whatever sanctions they like on us, but they can’t stop us from using our own resources, they can’t stop us from using our own labour, and they can’t stop us from using our own skills.” That was a reaffirmation, and a fresh application, of that basic Juche philosophy. Kim Il Sung’s view of Juche was also shaped by Korea’s geographical position — always surrounded by bigger countries, so the tendency was always to look to them. His view was that we have to rely on ourselves — but it was also about establishing that in the minds of the people, breaking the inherited mentality of feudal superstition and fatalism, and giving people a sense of pride and self-confidence. In his major article placing Juche in a philosophical context, Kim Jong Il said the people of small countries need a sense of national pride more than any others.

The Western misinterpretation is that Juche means the country should be isolated and won’t deal with others. It doesn’t mean that at all — the DPRK has always stood for good relations and interchange with other countries, but on the basis of self-reliance, that they bring something to the table, and on the basis of independence. It’s not about whether to have dealings with other countries, but the basis on which you deal with them. So now, in the relations between the DPRK, Russia and China, each acts on the basis of respect for its own national interests — to use a phrase from the Juche idea, on the basis of their own independent will and demand. The point is that those independent wills and demands are complementary and mutually reinforcing.

Radhika Desai: I absolutely agree. As you were talking, it seems to me the combination of stressing education, industrialization and self-reliance makes countries like North Korea — and China alongside it, and the Soviet Union in its time — much better models of development for third-world countries to look to than any of the Western countries. Keith, we’ve had an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming — and I’m sure you’ll be back; I can already envisage another Geopolitical Economy Hour unpacking all the myths the Western press has created around North Korea. But that’s for another time. Thanks so much. I hope our audience enjoyed this and learned a lot. If you did, please like, share, subscribe and donate as you can. Until next time — thank you very much. Bye-bye.