Contending American Visions of North Korea: The Mission Civilisatrice versus Realpolitik

1202553 MIL0010.1177/03058298231202553Millennium – Journal of International StudiesCha research-article2023 Original Article Contending American Visions of North Korea: The Mission Civilisatrice versus Realpolitik Millennium: Journal of International Studies 1–29 © The Author(s) 2023 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298231202553 DOI: 10.1177/03058298231202553 journals.sagepub.com/home/mil Taesuh Cha Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea Abstract This article aims to situate US–DPRK relations in a broader historical and theoretical context, that is, part of the violent encounters between the West and the ‘Rest’ in modern times, to examine discursive causes of their animosity and devise preliminary solutions to usher in peace and reconciliation in the Korean Peninsula. Drawing on a postcolonial reading of the liberal internationalist project and the global nuclear order, as well as a reflexive realist critique of US foreign policy toward the rogue states, this research explores how two competing geopolitical discourses, the mission civilisatrice and realpolitik, have constructed the epistemological problématique of Washington’s approach to Pyongyang and contributed to internal tensions in it over time. After analyzing the historical trajectory of America’s contrasting understandings of the Korean question, I seek to offer their implications on the dramatic change in the bilateral relations in the Trump era. By interrogating Trump’s realist turn in grand strategy and its unexpected influence on the two Cold War enemies’ mini-détente in 2018–2020, this article asks how a genuine dialogue between the liberal, ‘civilized’ center and the illiberal, ‘barbarian’ periphery can be materialized in an alternative normative setting. In particular, I argue that Trump’s new realist trial posed a critical question on how to depart from old ontological assumptions that frame the dominant liberal internationalist/neoconservative approaches toward a more dialogical and equal negotiation and compromise. A peaceful resolution of the North Korean dilemma is inherently related to a larger reflexivist project that promotes a thorough interrogation of the self-righteous US identity and a great transformation of America’s imperialist monologue toward the Third World in general. Keywords civilizing mission, realism, global nuclear order, rogue state, Donald Trump, postcolonialism, constructivism, English school, discourse analysis Corresponding author: Taesuh Cha, Department of Political Science, Sungkyunkwan University, 25-2 Sungkyunkwan-ro, #50705 Hoam Hall, Seoul 03063, South Korea. Email: taesuhcha@gmail.com 2 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) Introduction This article seeks to situate US–Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (US–DPRK) relations in a broader historical and theoretical context, that is, part of the violent encounters between the West and the ‘Rest’ in modern times, to examine discursive causes of their animosity and devise preliminary solutions to usher in peace and reconciliation in the Korean Peninsula. In a historical dimension, we will interrogate how North Korea has long been constituted as a ‘rogue-terrorist-communist-Stalinisttotalitarian-Oriental nightmare, America’s most loathed and feared “Other”’.1 After the first encounter in the late 19th century, ‘barbarian’ Koreans were placed, in America’s hierarchically constructed security imaginary, beyond the pale of civilization. As an outsider in Eurocentric international society, Korea was designated as the target of the civilizing mission. Over time, the feudal country was first targeted as an object of ‘opening’ through gunship diplomacy. Then, as a racialized, communist Other in the ‘Far East’, massive violence, in the form of aerial strikes and the threat of atomic bombing, was imposed during the Korean War. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, the DPRK was interpellated as a member of ‘rogue states’ or the ‘axis of evil’ in opposition to the US-led liberal world order and its purportedly universal norms, such as nonproliferation and human rights, which requires a diversity of punishments enforced by the international community, including economic sanctions and regime change. Theoretically speaking, the present research contributes to a variety of critical theories in International Relations and an innovative revision of the realist tradition. First, drawing on critical security studies and postcolonial theory, I aim to interpret the US intervention in the Global South as a variant of the mission civilisatrice based on EuroAmerica-centric boundary-making, mobilizing both physical and epistemological violence. In particular, the way in which the US has moralized its non-Western enmities through rhetorical mechanisms of the rogue state doctrine and the Global Nuclear Order (GNO)2 will be discussed. Next, this article seeks to reread the realist tradition as an alternative theory offering a post-liberal worldview and interstate ethics. Against America’s desire to transform the world in its own image in a monologic way, certain traditions in realism can be reconceptualized as a ‘counter-imperial machine’ aligned with decolonial critiques of liberal imperialism.3 Indeed, by providing a revisionist approach to the postcolonial societies that presupposes moral equality in core-periphery relations and recognizes interactive dynamics entailed in security dilemma,4 realpolitik ethos can facilitate measured bargaining and prudent compromise processes between the 1. Bruce Cumings, ‘American Orientalism at War in Korea and the United States: A Hegemony of Racism, Repression, and Amnesia’, in Orientalism and War, eds. Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski (London: Hurst & Company, 2012), viii. 2. Shampa Biswas, Nuclear Desire: Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 3. Kavi J. Abraham, ‘Making Machines: Unlikely Resonances between Realist and Postcolonial Thought’, International Political Sociology 11, no. 3 (2017): 221–38. 4. Roland Bleiker, Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Cha 3 US and illiberal Others, instead of the prevailing mode of punitive, unilateralist gestures by the self-righteous hegemon. The present research does admit that there are many antinomies of the realist school. All realists are not prudential, of course. Especially, the balance of power principle was historically applied only to inter-great power relations. Here, we can rely on some important recent works on the genealogy of modern realism to have a fuller picture of the complex tradition. Matthew Specter shows us that the nascent realpolitik thought from the 1880s to 1890s, that is, age of geopolitics and lebensraum, was invented by Western empires to ideologically justify their global domination.5 That is, the original realist theorization expressed a symptom of the racialized hierarchies of a modern world order. Relatedly, John M. Hobson explicates that even a noninterventionist tendency was born out of a ‘racial apartheid conception of world politics’ in the latter part of the 19th century.6 These ‘cultural realists’ who fiercely criticized contemporary imperialism were not motivated at all by the ethics of prudence or empathy. In fact, they had fundamental fear that colonial expansions would undermine white society by causing interracial breeding and genetic ‘contamination’ among others. Thus, their anti-imperialism originated from segregationist racism that aimed to ‘maximize the distance between the white and nonwhite races so as to maintain white racial vitality and the supremacy of Western civilization’.7 Still, this article seeks to intervene in a growing discussion on ‘another realism’ in the making. This task is far from claiming that there exists the ‘authentic’, ‘real’ realism. Rather, such a theoretical navigation is about how to ‘reinvent’ an alternative realism through unorthodox readings of realist works. As a practical intervention, we also try to confront the prevailing liberal imperialist practices in US foreign policy toward the Third World by unearthing undercurrent traditions in realism, away from brute logics of great power politics under anarchy, toward postcolonial and pacifist critiques of the civilizing mission and ethical ethos of empathy and prudentialism. In this regard, the adventures of the Donald Trump administration pose interesting and somewhat fundamental questions on the US–DPRK relations. The 45th US president consistently boasted that his new policy paradigm transformed North Korea’s militant behaviors and brought peace throughout Northeast Asia. This kind of self-flattery appears to be an expression of his narcissism and a populist rhetoric to distinguish himself from the hawkish establishment. However, it is also true that Trump’s unconventional approach to the Korean nuclear issue contributed to a temporary mini-détente in the region after the hair-triggering risk of military conflicts in late 2017. Such an irony, I think, raises profound research questions on realism and US grand strategy in general. Few would deny that Trump’s political discourses were often offensively and inappropriately exclusivist, deeply embedded in a variety of racialized and gendered dynamics. Even in the foreign policy area, he liberally used white supremacist languages, 5. Matthew Specter, The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2022). 6. John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 84–105. 7. Ibid., 105. 4 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) referring to African countries, Haiti, and El Salvador as ‘shithole’ nations, and persistently calling the coronavirus ‘kung flu’, among many others. In this sense, the Trumpist weltanschauung can be captured as a latest stage of ‘Jacksonianism’, an American ideological tradition of ethnonationalism or right-wing populism, in which the white male working class is discursively constructed as the national identity.8 Nevertheless, it is pointed out that the Jacksonian doctrine at the core resonates well with realism in foreign policy (e.g. its belief in self-help under anarchy, pursuit of the narrowly defined national interest, deep suspicion of international institutions and progress), in stark contrast to the dominant liberal traditions.9 So, even though the 45th administration is not the best laboratory case study example to test the practice of realpolitik in US foreign policy, Trump’s presidency was a rare anomalous moment when a realist approach was seriously adopted to deal with the North Korean nuclear question. Thus, the present article seeks to extract some future implications from this imperfect but still invaluable quasi-experimental case. Against these historical and theoretical backdrops, this research explores how two competing grand strategy discourses, the mission civilisatrice and realpolitik, have constructed the epistemological problématique of Washington’s approach to Pyongyang and contributed to internal tensions in it over time. Specifically, after analyzing the historical trajectory of America’s contrasting understandings of the Korean question, I seek to offer their implications on the dramatic change in US–DPRK relations in the Trump era. By interrogating Trump’s realist turn in grand strategy and its unexpected influence on the two Cold War enemies’ mini-détente in 2018–2020, this article asks how a genuine dialogue between the liberal, ‘civilized’ center and the illiberal, ‘barbarian’ margin can be materialized in an alternative normative setting – beyond the archaic liberal enmity – that would not separate the superior inside from the inferior outside in international society. Two Competing Geopolitical Visions in US History History of America’s Civilizing Mission Through the global expansion of European imperialist enterprise in the past few centuries, the Eurocentric idea of the ‘standard of civilization’ came to play an important role in gatekeeping membership of international society.10 The (classical) standard of civilization was defined by the contemporary forms of European government, political economy, law, and culture.11 The ultimate purpose of the standard was to create an international society of largely uniform states based on Western ideals. The philosophical rationale 8. Jack Holland and Ben Fermor, ‘The Discursive Hegemony of Trump’s Jacksonian Populism: Race, Class, and Gender in Constructions and Contestations of US National Identity, 2016– 2018’, Politics 41, no. 1 (2021): 64–79. 9. Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 244–8. 10. Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 11. Barry Buzan, ‘The “Standard of Civilisation” as an English School Concept’, Millennium 42, no. 3 (2014): 577–81. Cha 5 underpinning such a dream of a cosmopolitan world order rested on modern liberal notions of progress and universal history.12 From this Eurocentric thinking on modern international society, however, a dualistic image of world order emerged. The European interstate order or the sphere of ‘civilization’ was founded upon the principles of sovereignty, equality, and tolerance of differences. In contrast, the extra-European system or the region of the ‘savages’ was designated as the place of backward, barbaric peoples, where European international norms could not be applied. In this vein, commencing in the 19th century, international legal society came to have two distinct categories: great powers and outlaw states. The former’s prerogative is a right to intervene in the affairs of other polities to promote liberal or civilizing goals in the name of international society, while those labelled as outlaws because of their inferior, illiberal qualities are subject to interference. Thus, the Westphalian order’s legal pluralism of equal sovereign states under anarchy always existed in parallel with exclusivist anti-pluralism of interstate hierarchy in a wider modern planet.13 In other words, the concept of the lawful enemy, the principle of Justus Hostis in the public law of the European legal area was not applied to unlawful enemies, that is, usually non-European, colored, uncivilized polities beyond the pale of European international society.14 In this context, it was assumed that natives in the ‘Rest’ should be enlightened by European civilizing forces through colonization and intervention, under the banner of the ‘civilizing mission’. Originating in 19th-century France, the concept of ‘la mission civilisatrice’ became the most powerful legitimizing ideology of European imperialist projects. Drawing from Enlightenment ideas of ‘improvement’ and a hierarchical and progressivist understanding of societies worldwide, the notion of the civilizing mission was adopted by the colonial powers to justify their own colonization enterprises as a pedagogical contribution to the progress of the whole of mankind.15 An important theoretical assumption in the civilizing mission was related to ‘the emergence of the concept of despotism’. From the outset, the topic of liberating poor and oppressed peoples from native non-liberal polities in the non-West or the strategy of ‘regime change’ constituted the core of the mission.16 As an aspiring member of Western powers and a liberal, Christian, and racist state par excellence, the US also possessed an imperial identity and had hierarchically classified different foreign peoples on the basis of the standard of civilization from the very 12. Brett Bowden, ‘To Rethink Standards of Civilisation, Start with the End’, Millennium 42, no. 3 (2014): 619–26. 13. Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3–22. 14. Wouter G. Werner, ‘From Justus Hostis to Rogue State: The Concept of the Enemy in International Legal Thinking’, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 17, no. 2 (2004): 155–68. 15. Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Epilogue: From Civilizing Missions to the Defence of Civility’, in Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century, eds. Boris Barth and Rolf Hobson (Boston: Brill, 2020), 209–13. 16. Boris Barth and Rolf Hobson, ‘Civilizing Missions from the 19th to the 21st Centuries, or from Uplifting to Democratization’, in Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century, eds. Boris Barth and Rolf Hobson (Boston: Brill, 2020), 1. 6 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) beginning. Indeed, there is an imperialist binary between barbarianism and civilization regarding non-white peoples, such as Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Muslims, in the US strategic narrative.17 Repetitive overseas interventions have been rationalized by the same rhetoric of mission civilisatrice (in the US’s own term, ‘Manifest Destiny’). The influence of the civilizing mission has been decisive when it comes to US relationships with the periphery, even after it became a world hegemon claiming to lead a ‘free’ world. During the Cold War times, for instance, ‘modernization theory’ as the ideational underpinning of US foreign economic policy toward the Third World echoed the imperialist tradition of ‘civilizing’ force that shaped earlier American interactions with peoples of color.18 La Mission Civilisatrice Aujourd’hui: The Rogue State Doctrine and Nuclear Orientalism In the aftermath of the Second World War and the establishment of the UN system, a pluralistic view of the international system or the principle of sovereign equality prevailed over the past anti-pluralistic, hierarchical rules. However, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we witnessed a reintroduction of the dualistic structure of international society, that is, the demarcation between a superior, good inside versus an inferior, evil outside.19 As a result, in a new era of liberal ascendency and unipolarity, we came to watch a renewed interest in the notion of the ‘civilizing mission’.20 In particular, security discourses around rogue states have revived the past dichotomy between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbarian’, which underpinned the normative foundation of the mission civilisatrice in the 19th century. The essence of the name ‘rogue state’ is that certain states are placed on the outer fringes of international society, that is, beyond the liberal zone of dialogue and negotiation in the post-Cold War times. The criteria for inclusion and exclusion are socially constructed by the US foreign policy elites who were in search of new enemies filling a ‘threat blank’ after the fall of the ‘evil empire’.21 Rogues are, by definition, the object of law enforcement by the US as the world policeman. As these newly designated Others are ‘securitized’ in line with the discursive tradition of American exceptionalism characterized by Manichean schema demonizing enemies of the US,22 it is naturally assumed that rational communication with them or 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. Taesuh Cha, ‘The Formation of American Exceptional Identities: A Three-Tier Model of the “Standard of Civilization” in US Foreign Policy’, European Journal of International Relations 21, no. 4 (2015): 758. Beate Jahn, ‘The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy: Democratization, Intervention, Statebuilding (Part I)’, Journal of Intervention & Statebuilding 1, no. 1 (2007): 94–102. Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States, 21. Antony Anghie, ‘The Evolution of International Law: Colonial and Postcolonial Realities’, Third World Quarterly 27, no. 5 (2006): 750. Elizabeth N. Saunders, ‘Setting Boundaries: Can International Society Exclude “Rogue States”?’, International Studies Review 8, no. 1 (2006): 23–53. Holger Stritzel, Security in Translation: Securitization Theory and the Localization of Threat (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 141–2. 7 Cha deterring them is not a practical possibility. Only a removal or regime change can serve as an ultimate solution to these new enemies. In the same vein, the rogue state doctrine is well interspersed with the discourse on ‘nuclear orientalism’,23 which also rests on the colonial ‘structures of meaning within which Western diplomats and policy makers operate’.24 The Eurocentric discourse presupposes that the West, as ‘more “responsible”, “mature”, “developed”, “pacific”, and “democratic”’, can be ‘trusted with nuclear weapons’, whereas rogue states, ‘the antithesis of the West’, should not be allowed to possess atomic bombs.25 While America’s massive nuclear stockpiles are represented as the ‘legitimate’ weapons carried by the world police officer to keep order and peace, Third World states are depicted to have ‘irrational’ passions or yearnings for nukes that should be curbed by the ‘international community’.26 Premised on this binary grand narrative, the apparatus of the GNO embodied in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) emerged and policed the boundary between Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) and Non-Nuclear Weapon States (NNWS). In this recycled civilizational discourse in arms control and disarmament that reifies the demarcation line between the enlightened West and the irredeemable ‘Rest’,27 the GNO grants a ‘theodicy of privilege’ to the Western nuclear powers and justifies their battle against racialized ‘nuclear demons’.28 The Tragedy of US Diplomacy: How Liberal Enmity Problematizes the US’s Relations With the Non-West Some critics have focused on the ideational genealogy of ‘the tragedy of liberal diplomacy’ that has been repeated time and again in the interventionist paradigm in US foreign policy.29 In particular, the securitized discourse on the rogue states was dramatically radicalized during the post-9/11 Bush administration by the declaration of the preemptive doctrine and the designation of the axis of evil.30 In fact, the neoconservative moment, based on a teleological interpretation of history and America’s messianic 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. Hugh Gusterson, ‘Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination’, Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 1 (1999): 111–43. Keith Krause and Andrew Latham, ‘Constructing Non-Proliferation and Arms Control: The Norms of Western Practice’, Contemporary Security Policy 19, no. 1 (1998): 24. Ibid., 41. Gusterson, ‘Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination’, 129–30. Ritu Mathur, ‘“The West and the Rest”: A Civilizational Mantra in Arms Control and Disarmament?’, Contemporary Security Policy 35, no. 3 (2014): 332–55. Ursula Jasper, ‘Dysfunctional, but Stable – A Bourdieuian Reading of the Global Nuclear Order’, Critical Studies on Security 4, no. 1 (2016): 52. Jahn, ‘The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy’; Beate Jahn, ‘The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy: Democratization, Intervention, Statebuilding (Part II)’, Journal of Intervention & Statebuilding 1, no. 2 (2007): 211–29. George W. Bush, ‘National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, 17 September 2002. Available at: https://nssarchive.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/2002.pdf. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 8 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) nationalism, marked a regression to the modus operandi of an armed civilizing mission to overthrow the savage regimes and emancipate the downtrodden peoples in the Global South by imposing Western modes of government and political economy.31 This rhetorical escalation led to an extreme form of ‘ultra-politics of foe’ founded upon discursive mechanisms of ‘liberal enmity’. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s critique of the political ontology of liberalism and his conceptual distinction between ‘just enemy’ (existentially equal to the Self) found in the Jus Publicum Europaeum in the Westphalian system and ‘unjust foe’ (stigmatized, demonized, or criminalized opponent deprived of equal status) discovered in the theological just war discourse, Sergei Prozorov diagnosed that US neoconservatives, following the standard script of liberal just war theory, showed ‘an absolute existential negation of the Other’, which enhanced the most extreme possibility of perpetuated and unlimited wars, as witnessed in the case of the Global War on Terror.32 As militant liberals tend to pursue assertive universalism or ‘the monistic disavowal of alterity’, illiberal Others are no longer deserved as Justus Hostis but designated to be foes against all humanity (‘hostis humanis’) that should be morally despised and eradicated in the name of ‘virtuous wars’ conducted by the international community, that is, the US and its allies.33 However, the resultant dynamic tends to produce ‘the most basic contradiction of liberal international theory’, that is, the tension between the nationalist principle of selfdetermination and the imperialist assumption that only those who endorse the US model show mature reason to claim the right to sovereignty.34 After all, this impulse of liberal social engineering on a global scale has not only made diplomacy with illiberal foes much harder, with little middle ground for compromise between the two parts, but also brought the US to quagmires in the postcolonial areas after several invasions based on a ‘great delusion’35 were backfired by nationalist revolts out there. To be sure, the two-decadelong great experiment of regime change and nation building in the post-9/11 era disastrously ended with America’s hasty and humiliating retreat from Afghanistan in 2021. Realist Challenges: American Mavericks Outside the Foreign Policy Establishment Here, we can consult an unexpected alternative theorization to move beyond ‘the tragedy of liberal diplomacy’, that is, a tradition of realist thought. Conventional wisdom usually associates realism with conflict and war, which is why realists have been so unpopular in liberal societies, as Robert Gilpin once lamented (‘No one loves a political realist!’).36 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. Rolf Hobson, ‘American Nationalism and Regime Change: How the Neocons Tried to Speed Up the Inevitable’, in Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century, eds. Boris Barth and Rolf Hobson (Boston: Brill, 2020), 177–208. Sergei Prozorov, ‘Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism’, Millennium 35, no. 1 (2006): 89–90. Werner, ‘From Justus Hostis to Rogue State’. Jahn, ‘The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy’, 102. John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). Robert G. Gilpin, ‘No One Loves a Political Realist’, Security Studies 5, no. 3 (1996): 3–26. Cha 9 However, insights from a group of reflexive realists demonstrate that realism as a statecraft can play a stabilizing role in its practice, in contrast to the disturbing history of liberal foreign policy and its trap of imperial overstretch. Of course, from a realpolitik perspective, international politics is always a nasty and brutish business. Countries under anarchy often incite war for realist reasons. Still, advocates of realism persuasively argue that following the tenets of power politics can lead to a relatively stable world, while acting according to liberal activist impulses results in perpetual wars with illiberal Others. For example, after examining the modern interstate history over the last two centuries, Marc Trachtenberg concludes that realism is ‘at its heart a theory of peace’. As power political thinking promotes crucial virtues, including self-restraint, prudence, and respect for other countries’ national interest, it facilitates a series of dialogues, negotiation, bargaining, adjustment, and finally compromise among states based on the balance of power principle. As in the case of the Concert of Europe, when statesmen pursue policies that are rational in realist terms, a more peaceful world resting on the principle of equilibrium or checks and balances can be created. In contrast, real geopolitical instability arises when expansionist impulses formed by non-realpolitik thinking, involving a liberal civilizing mission or a religious crusading spirit, come to govern the behavior of great powers.37 Certainly, history proves that realists are, in general, ‘less’ warlike than liberal just war theorists, since the former place strict limits on where to use military force, in line with the narrowly defined national interest.38 In this light, reflexive realists today insist that a rereading of the realist tradition can offer an alternative ‘pacifist’ framework on international politics by criticizing the moralization of war prevalent in liberal interventionist thinking, as well as by bravely embracing a frustrating fact that political life is always riddled with ‘tragedy, imperfection, and hypocrisy’.39 Initially, it is important to accept a hard reality that the world is ‘imperfect’ and ‘tragic’.40 Thus, we need to cultivate moral courage to choose modus vivendi or the ‘lesser evil’ in this uneasy, precarious, and gray universe.41 As a result, realists are cautious against imprudent vehemence of the liberal just war tradition and reject translating a political struggle into a moral Armageddon war between good and evil, because they know that an indiscreet pursuit of the perfect world will result in total catastrophe.42 Interestingly, in this realist critique of liberal imperialism, we can find profound ‘resonances’ between revisionist readings of realists and postcolonial thought. As 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. Marc Trachtenberg, ‘The Question of Realism: A Historian’s View’, Security Studies 13, no. 1 (2003): 194. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion, 220–4. Jeremy Moses, ‘Peace Without Perfection: The Intersections of Realist and Pacifist Thought’, Cooperation and Conflict 53, no. 1 (2018): 42–60. Jeremy Moses, ‘A Niebuhrian Pacifism for an Imperfect World’, Journal of International Political Theory 17, no. 2 (2021): 169–84. Seán Molloy, ‘Morgenthau and the Ethics of Realism’, in Routledge Handbook of Ethics and International Relations, eds. Brent J. Steele and Eric Heinze (New York: Routledge, 2018), 182–95. Michael C. Desch, ‘America’s Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy’, International Security 32, no. 3 (2007): 41–2. 10 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) both theorizations share a ‘sensibility to the preservation of difference, of communities defining themselves in their own way’, the revolutionary desire to transform the world in a particular image (‘perpetual war for perpetual peace’) is, in principle, rejected.43 In more philosophical terms, a realist weltanschauung has its own distinctive ontology and ethics of international relations, which are pitted against a hierarchal and binary ontology and a universalist and monologic ethics embedded in the liberal enmity. First, from a realist perspective, the international system is presupposed to be populated by moral equals. Realists affirm differences and recognize the plurality of political life in the interstate sphere. As Niebuhr said, ‘political controversies are always conflicts between sinners and not between righteous men and sinners’.44 All states are merely the same ethical egoists pursuing their own national interests in a rationalist manner: There are neither ‘good’ nor ‘evil’ actors in this (a)moral universe. Second, realist ethics can be called ‘geopolitics of empathy’45 in the sense that realism helps us avoid the so-called ‘fundamental attribution errors’, a general tendency to ‘see the behavior of others as reflections of’ their basic dispositions ‘rather than as response to the situations others are in’. While liberal crusaders tend to depend on ‘dispositional’ explanations that essentialize and demonize enemies and ignore their legitimate security concerns, realist theorists readily admit that every state, irrespective of its ‘nature’, has no choice but to pursue selfish interests or survival under anarchical imperatives. Put differently, in contrast to the problématique of liberal enmity and, relatedly, the rogue state narrative, ‘prudential realism’ wholeheartedly acknowledges the mutual elements of security and seeks to avoid triggering intense security dilemma through benign and cautious grand strategies based on ‘enlightened self-interest’.46 As some critical theorists on the performative role of emotion stress, empathetic identification can ‘help to break down the antagonisms that caused the initial conflict’.47 Against all these theoretical backdrops, realist thought has existed as an ideological opponent against the prevailing exceptionalist mode of US identity and its strategic manifestations, thereby constructing ‘critical mechanisms for national self-reflection and self-restraint’.48 To begin with, US realists have been iconoclasts of the self-righteous 43. Abraham, ‘Making Machines’, 227. Although Abraham exclusively focuses on classical realist thought to develop a ‘pacifist ethos’ or ‘counter-imperial machine’ against the liberal civilizing mission, some crucial sources of ‘undercurrent’ realist worldview or ‘reflexive’ realist ethics can also be unearthed from contemporary neorealists. As we will see, much of the ‘empathetic’ and ‘prudential’ nature of realist worldview pervades across the old/new divide in the tradition, which can be utilized to reinvent an alternative realism. 44. Quoted in Desch ‘America’s Liberal Illiberalism’, 42. 45. Stephen Walt, ‘The Geopolitics of Empathy’, Foreign Policy, 27 June 2021. Available at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/27/the-geopolitics-of-empathy/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 46. T.V. Paul, Power Versus Prudence: Why Nations Forgo Nuclear Weapons (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 148–9. 47. Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison, ‘Performing Political Empathy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance, eds. Shirin M. Rai, Milija Gluhovic, Silvija Jestrovic and Michael Saward (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 602. 48. Vibeke Schou Tjalve and Michael C. Williams, ‘Rethinking the Logic of Security: Liberal Realism and the Recovery of American Political Thought’, Telos no. 170 (2015): 51. Cha 11 national image. In realist theorization, America is fundamentally undifferentiated from other countries in world politics, except for its enormous power and favorable geographical location surrounded by two oceans. In this context, realist thinkers presuppose an ethical equality among nations and challenge an exceptionalist tendency in US grand strategy that often moralizes wars or promotes missionary adventures abroad to hunt down evil barbarians: ‘Realists are less likely than Liberals to place their enemies beyond the pale of civilization’.49 In other words, realists basically reject the notion of the manifest destiny, for the US is merely one of the many actors playing the same interstate game of survival under anarchy. In this vein, realists have maintained the position of ‘political dissent’50 against the reigning postwar US grand strategy recklessly pursuing ‘civilizational security’51 in the periphery. During the Cold War era, Hans Morgenthau and other classical realists were at great pains to restrain America’s anti-communist ideology-driven interventions in the developing world of little strategic significance. Their united front against the Vietnam War was a case in point.52 In the unipolar moment following the Soviet collapse, US realists have also opposed ‘crazy wars’ in the Global South ‘promoted by liberal institutionalists, liberal interventionists, liberal hegemonists, or neoconservatives’.53 Again, their fierce critique of the ‘unnecessary war’54 in Iraq was a paragon in this regard. Relatedly, in the case of a nonproliferation policy toward the Third World, the nuclear orientalist dichotomization of good NWS versus evil NNWS cannot be maintained in the power politics worldview. Realists plainly recognize that the GNO is a hegemonic instrument to support the existing nuclear oligarchy, far distant from a professed ideal of nuclear abolition. The US has created and guarded the NPT regime to simply prevent ‘countries around the world from acquiring nuclear weapons’.55 In other words, realist scholars point out the ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘double standard’ of US policy regarding the notion of nuclear deterrence: ‘We like to deter other countries but we don’t want other countries to deter us’.56 A realpolitik prescription for proliferation is also based on a non-liberal, nonhierarchical ontology, so that moral equality among nations is assumed. As all states are more or less rational, they, irrespective of regime character, can be stably deterred with the balance of terror warranted. Such logic 49. Desch, ‘America’s Liberal Illiberalism’, 41. 50. Seán Molloy, ‘Realism and Reflexivity: Morgenthau, Academic Freedom and Dissent’, European Journal of International Relations 26, no. 2 (2020): 321–43. 51. Randolph B. Persaud, ‘Killing the Third World: Civilisational Security as US Grand Strategy’, Third World Quarterly 40, no. 2 (2019): 266–83. 52. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion, 222. 53. John J. Mearsheimer and Mary Ellen O’Connell, ‘The Promise of International Law: Realism Versus Legalism’, Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law 11, no. 1 (2021): 96. 54. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, ‘An Unnecessary War’, Foreign Policy no. 134 (2003): 51–59. 55. Mearsheimer and O’Connell, ‘The Promise of International Law’, 96. 56. Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘Interview with Ken Waltz’, Review of International Studies 24, no. 3 (1998): 374–5. 12 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) explains why Waltz said, ‘Iran should get the bomb’,57 or Posen argued, ‘We can live with a nuclear Iran’58 in a provocative way. Realists hardly share a fear of ‘unenlightened others’ enshrined in the NPT regime.59 Contrasting Approaches to the Korean Question The Genealogy of a Civilizing Vision In the trajectory of American strategy toward the Korean Peninsula, there has been a historical tension between the discourses of the civilizing mission and realism as well. Again, the impulse of the mission civilisatrice has been a hegemonic paradigm. Namely, the image of Korea was ideologically constructed in line with American orientalism from the first encounter.60 When a brief skirmish with Korea broke out in 1871,61 the New York Herald named it ‘The Little War with the Heathens’.62 The Americans were convinced that they were trying to lead this isolated, ‘semi-barbarous and hostile race’ to the light of civilization by ‘opening’ the hermit kingdom to international free trade.63 America’s first encounter with North Korea followed a similar logic. The US perceived the Korean War as a historical extension of the ‘Indian’ War, thereby imagining the nascent DPRK in racialized, civilized terms again. Virulent anti-communism in the early Cold War period merely reenergized the intensity of ‘military orientalism’.64 North Koreans were called ‘an army of barbarians’, or ‘simple, primitive, and barbaric peoples’.65 These overt racist and colonialist ideas had definite impact on how military violence was exercised in the Korean War. For instance, indiscriminate carpet bombing and liberal use of napalm obliterated a distinction between combatants and civilians, which was reminiscent of colonial wars.66 Several civilian massacres, including the notorious case of Nogeun-ri, were also related to the legacy of counterinsurgency operations in 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘Why Iran Should Get the Bomb: Nuclear Balancing Would Mean Stability’, Foreign Affairs 91, no. 4 (2012): 2–5. Barry R. Posen, ‘We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran’, The New York Times, 27 February 2006. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/opinion/we-can-live-with-a-nucleariran.html. Last accessed August 26, 2023. Biswas, Nuclear Desire, 107. Brandon K. Gauthier, ‘The Other Korea: Ideological Constructions of North Korea in the American Imagination, 1948–2000’ (PhD Diss., Fordham University, 2016), 17–37. Gordon H. Chang, ‘Whose “Barbarism”? Whose “Treachery”? Race and Civilization in the Unknown United States–Korea War of 1871’, The Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (2003): 1331–65. Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 203. Ibid., 206. Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski, eds., Orientalism and War (London: Hurst, 2012), 1–6. Cumings, ‘American Orientalism’, 46–7. Inderjeet Parmar, ‘Racial and Imperial Thinking in International Theory and Politics: Truman, Attlee and the Korean War’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 18, no. 2 (2016): 362. Cha 13 colonies: As ‘Orientals’ do not follow the rules of civilized warfare, ‘we’ are at liberty not to observe them either.67 The Mission Civilisatrice Over the Rogue’s Nuclear Transgression in the Unipolar Moment After the conclusion of the Cold War, the DPRK became ‘the posterchild for rogue states’68 in the US global security imagination. Replacing the collapsed evil empire, a new dangerous Other had to be found (or reconstructed) to provide a new clear map of national security. Therefore, the US mainstream view on North Korea in the unipolar moment came to be based on a ‘securitization paradigm’ that regarded the communist country as ‘bad’ (the North is a sinister and oppressive country outside the borderline of the international community) and ‘mad’ (the DPRK is irrational, unknowable, unpredictable, and dangerous).69 Almost from the beginning, there existed a ‘bipartisan threat consensus’ regarding the North Korean nuclear question, so much so that even the Clinton administration, which attempted to solve the nascent crisis in a ‘give-and-take’ manner through the Perry Process and the Agreed Framework, was not able to make sufficiently grand accommodative gestures. Because the exaggerated threat consensus based on the dominant securitization paradigm tended to interpret Pyongyang’s intention and behavior very skeptically and drew hostile conclusions, leading to limited hawkish policy preferences.70 Under the influence of the September 11 attacks and the Global War on Terror, the Bush presidency represented a culmination of the liberal enmity paradigm regarding the North Korean question. Driven by neoconservatives who had an essentialist view of the North, the Bush administration focused on the ‘nature’ of the North Korean regime by raising a variety of nonnuclear-related issues, including conventional military posture, human rights, and economic reforms. President Bush labelled Pyongyang as part of an ‘axis of evil’ in his 2002 State of the Union address, and the Nuclear Posture Review named the DPRK as a possible target of a ‘preemptive attack’ with ‘usable’ small atomic bombs. Even during the six-party talks, the administration maintained a punitive stance by insisting on upfront North Korean ‘complete verifiable irreversible dismantling (CVID)’ as a precondition.71 Even though Barack Obama, who was elected after the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, sought to renounce the overtly imperialist paradigm of neoconservatism, a liberal interventionist goal of enlarging the American ego per se was rarely questioned 67. Cumings, ‘American Orientalism’, 47–9. 68. Joel S. Wit, ‘North Korea: The Leader of the Pack’, The Washington Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2001): 77. 69. Hazel Smith, ‘Bad, Mad, Sad or Rational Actor? Why the “Securitization” Paradigm Makes for Poor Policy Analysis of North Korea’, International Affairs 76, no. 1 (2000): 111–32. 70. Van Jackson, ‘Threat Consensus and Rapprochement Failure: Revisiting the Collapse of US–North Korea Relations, 1994–2002’, Foreign Policy Analysis 14, no. 2 (2018): 235–53. 71. Niv Farago, ‘Washington’s Failure to Resolve the North Korean Nuclear Conundrum: Examining Two Decades of US Policy’, International Affairs 92, no. 5 (2016): 1134–7. 14 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) by his administration.72 Indeed, the Obama administration could not move beyond the rogue state analytical framework. President Obama shared the same discourse of strategic Orientalism in his characterization of the North Korean question. He once said, ‘They [the North Koreans] are erratic enough, their leader is personally irresponsible enough that we don’t want them getting close [to perfecting a missile delivery system]’.73 Moreover, the so-called ‘strategic patience’ doctrine was implicitly based on ‘collapsism’. Obama frankly commented that North Korea’s future would be ‘accelerated’ by the US scheme: ‘It’s very hard to sustain that kind of brutal authoritarian regime in this modern world. Information ends up seeping in over time and bringing about change. That’s something that we are constantly looking for ways to accelerate’.74 In practice, he consistently framed North Korea as a transgressor of the NPT regime and expected the rogue state to ‘submit to the hierarchy of international society’.75 As Pyongyang chose not to respect international norms, the US-led ‘international community’ punished it by imposing harsh sanctions stipulated in a series of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions. A Realist Alternative: ‘We Can Live With a Nuclear North Korea’ Pointing out the US foreign policy establishment’s inability to feel ‘empathy’ for the North Korean elites’ long perceived fear, Roland Bleiker argues that a first step in cultivating ‘a culture of reconciliation’ in the Peninsula is to recognize ‘an interactive security dilemma in which the West is implicated as much as is the vilified regime in Pyongyang’.76 As a matter of fact, before hurriedly turning ‘a complex story of all its ambiguity’ into ‘a simple morality tale of blameless Americans and bad North Koreans’,77 we first need to accept that, as a small communist outpost, North Korea was heavily bombarded by the US Air Force until there were no meaningful targets left during the Korean War.78 It has also been exposed to more than ‘half a century of American nuclear threats’ thereafter.79 Moreover, after the disintegration of the USSR, North Korea’s security concerns have grown exponentially over time. Without a ‘big brother’ to provide a nuclear umbrella over it, the North now confronts a much richer and stronger southern sibling in alliance with a world unipolar power. In addition, considering what happened to Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and more recently, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the appeal of ‘absolute’ deterrence is dramatically heightened. From 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. Chengxin Pan and Oliver Turner, ‘Neoconservatism as Discourse: Virtue, Power and US Foreign Policy’, European Journal of International Relations 23, no. 1 (2017): 89. Quoted in Danielle Chubb, ‘A Nuclear North Korea and the Limitations of US Security Perspectives’, Critical Studies on Security 5, no. 3 (2017): 325, emphasis mine. Quoted in Van Jackson, ‘The Rebalance, Entrapment Fear, and Collapsism: The Origins of Obama’s North Korea Policy’, Asian Perspective 43, no. 4 (2019): 611. Chubb, ‘A Nuclear North Korea’, 325. Bleiker, Divided Korea, x. Hugh Gusterson, ‘Paranoid, Potbellied Stalinist Gets Nuclear Weapons’, The Nonproliferation Review 15, no. 1 (2008): 26. Tarak Barkawi, ‘Nuclear Orientalism’, Al Jazeera, 17 April 2013. Available at: https://www. aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/4/17/nuclear-orientalism. Last accessed August 26, 2023. Bleiker, Divided Korea, x. Cha 15 the DPRK leadership’s perspective, it is the US that is the ‘revisionist power’.80 Using Alexander Wendt’s tripartite categorization of anarchical culture, Pyongyang is still living in a Hobbesian anarchy – it can be forced to be reunited by Seoul or decapitated by US surgical strikes at any time – while Western European countries in the post-Cold War times have moved into a Lockean or even further into a Kantian world.81 Certainly, few observers would deny that North Korea also bears some share for much of the culture of insecurity in the Peninsula. The North’s extreme ‘siege mentality’82 has contributed to its decades-long pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In addition, ‘the production of crises’ has been utilized by the regime to consolidate its own authoritarian rule.83 However, when Pyongyang’s violation of liberal norms is scathingly denounced by the ‘international community’, the conflict between a global hegemon and a peripheral state is rarely historicized and contextualized in the dominant security narrative. In particular, we should note several important cases of past ‘American failure to implement commitments in a timely manner’ in the processes of nuclear negotiations, due to its domestic interparty divisions, bureaucratic red tape, or disputes among allies. The delay of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization project promised by the Agreed Framework in the 1990s and the US Treasury Department’s sudden decision to freeze the DPRK’s overseas financial assets right after the September 2005 joint statement are the cases in point. In short, Washington should ‘share culpability for the breakdown of successive denuclearization agreements with North Korea’ to some extent.84 More crucially, we also need to note that the very continued existence of America’s nuclear threats against the DPRK is ‘a direct violation of the international non-proliferation regime’.85 In this context, realists have offered an alternative discourse vis-à-vis the dominant rogue state framework based on the ontology of liberal enmity. First of all, realists usually assume that the DPRK is also a ‘normal’ state adopting ‘rational’ foreign policy. Given the fact that the poverty-stricken DPRK cannot afford to continue symmetrical, conventional arms race with the Republic of Korea (let alone the US), Pyongyang’s pursuit of asymmetrical WMD as tools for survival seems to be based on a realist/rationalist calculation.86 A second-image explanation that infers the North’s behavior from its regime character (a rogue state, an axis of evil, etc.) is plainly irrelevant or redundant. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. James D. Fearon, ‘The Big Problem with the North Koreans Isn’t that We Can’t Trust Them. It’s that They Can’t Trust Us’, The Washington Post, 16 August 2017. Available at: https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/16/the-big-problem-withnorth-korea-isnt-that-we-cant-trust-them-its-that-they-cant-trust-us/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 246–312. Bomi Kim, ‘North Korea’s Siege Mentality: A Sociopolitical Analysis of the Kim Jong-un Regime’s Foreign Policies’, Asian Perspective 40, no. 2 (2016): 223–43. Bleiker, Divided Korea, 37–8. Martin A. Smith, ‘Denuclearising North Korea: Evaluating the United States’ Culpability for Failed Agreements, 1993–2008’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 30, no. 3 (2019): 556–71. Bleiker, Divided Korea, 49. Linus Hagström and Magnus Lundström, ‘Overcoming US–North Korean Enmity: Lessons from an Eclectic IR Approach’, International Spectator 54, no. 4 (2019): 96. 16 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) As stated above, in a realpolitik universe, an ethical or normative stratification of state actors in the liberal security imaginary is denied. Realists hardly seek to police the boundary of international society between the West and the ‘Rest’. All sovereign countries are assumed to play a survival game in the international system, against the liberal politics of exclusion. Hence, realist thinkers simply regard both the US and the DPRK as the same rational security maximizers, so that their antagonistic relations are depicted as an amoral security game between the two egoistic actors. A ‘classic problem of anarchy’ plainly explains why the two enemies cannot trust each other and repeatedly break their commitments without resorting to the dichotomized worldview of liberalism.87 In this regard, Kenneth Waltz analyzed a North Korean leader’s rationale behind the nuclear armament in rationalist terms. Interestingly, he explicitly shows here how realists can engage in a geopolitics of ‘empathy’ that sincerely tries to understand the Other’s security universe, in contrast to liberal imperialist monologues. If we declare a country to be a part of an ‘axis of evil,’ and if that country is anyway in a perilously weak position, as obviously North Korea is, then we’d have to ask ourselves, if we were the ruler – no matter how nasty that ruler is – if we were Kim Jong II, wouldn’t we conclude that, ‘My God, we’re likely to be attacked, and since we are weak, we’ll lose unless we have nuclear weapons, which have proved to be the greatest and, indeed, the only reliable deterrent the world has ever known?88 Also, John Mearsheimer, after demonstrating the same technics of empathy in his analysis of the North’s motives based on the nuclear deterrence theory, insists that the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is almost impossible because the ‘North Koreans are not fools’.89 However, such a skeptical prediction hardly means realist theorists depict a catastrophic future in Northeast Asia, since ‘we can live with a nuclear North Korea, and, in fact, that we might prefer this DPRK to the more bellicose one of the past’.90 Indeed, a peaceful solution to the North Korean nuclear problem can be proposed in line with realist logic. There has been a partial paradigm shift in expert discourse on the North Korean problem from ‘the traditional focus on non-proliferation and de-nuclearization’ to ‘evolving nuclear deterrence strategies’.91 Recognizing the harsh truth that the North is already a de facto nuclear state and that its nuclear arsenal is a deterrent to prevent an American 87. Fearon, ‘The Big Problem’. 88. Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘Theory and International Politics: Conversation with Kenneth Waltz’, Conversations with History, 10 February 2003. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F9eV5gPlPZg. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 89. John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Seoul Has to Adjust to a North with Nuclear Arms’, Korea JoongAng Daily, 22 February 2013. Available at: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2013/02/22/ politics/Seoul-has-to-adjust-to-a-North-with-nuclear-arms/2967578.html. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 90. Kenneth N. Waltz and Mira Rapp-Hooper, ‘The Reasons Not To Worry’, in The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate, eds. Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 191. 91. Nicola Leveringhaus, ‘Beyond De-nuclearization: Debating Deterrence and North Korea in Asia’s New Nuclear Age’, Asian Security 15, no. 3 (2019): 365. Cha 17 invasion, a settlement between the US and the DPRK based on a theory of rational deterrence can be proposed. In addition, by accepting the socialist state as a ‘respected counterpart’ or a ‘legitimate actor’ in international society and guaranteeing its regime safety, the DPRK’s ontological insecurity can be addressed, thereby allaying its aggressive posture toward neighboring states.92 Basically, a stable balance of terror or a Cold War-style coexistence in the Peninsula can be a decent modus vivendi for a foreseeable future. The Trump Twist: A Rare Realist Gambit Toward North Korea The Trump Doctrine: The Advent of an Anti-Liberal Moment in US Foreign Policy When a Fox News interviewer hinted at Vladimir Putin’s reputation as a ‘killer’, Trump bluntly responded, ‘There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?’ This kind of rebellious challenge to the traditional American creed by the president himself was a great horror to the liberal establishment.93 However, Trump’s cross-question to the interviewer has much deeper implications for US foreign policy, which is, in a sense, a good starting point to critically reflect on America’s mythical identity that has driven its relentless civilizing mission over external Others in history. Although a dominant view in academia scorned the record of his foreign policy as a series of unprincipled improvisations, Trump actually professed a quite coherent tenet on international relations and US grand strategy since the presidential campaign. The heterodoxy of the Trump doctrine lies in the fact that the postwar consensus on liberal internationalism was fundamentally questioned. As a Jacksonian populist, the 45th US president consistently denounced ‘globalism’ as a sham propagated by the elite insiders for their own sake as opposed to the interests of the white working class.94 Instead of playing a costly role of a world policeman and a guardian of global capitalism, he wanted to promote a nationalist cause, pursuing the narrowly defined national interest under the banner of ‘America First’. Of course, he was far from a sophisticated, well-trained realist in power, like Henry Kissinger. Still, his business instinct or zero-sum worldview was fundamentally ‘Hobbesian’,95 thereby enabling him to recognize the crucial fact that the favorable unipolar moment was over, and that the US should prepare for an emerging multipolar system.96 92. 93. Hagström and Lundström, ‘Overcoming US–North Korean Enmity’, 97–9. Ruth Deyermond, ‘“You Think Our Country’s So Innocent?” The Trump Administration’s Policy on Democratic Practices in Russia and the Challenge to US Identity’, Global Affairs 6, no. 1 (2020): 105–20. 94. Taesuh Cha, ‘The Return of Jacksonianism: The International Implications of the Trump Phenomenon’, The Washington Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2016): 83–97. 95. Nicholas Kitchen, ‘Why American Grand Strategy Has Changed: International Constraint, Generational Shift, and the Return of Realism’, Global Affairs 6, no. 1 (2020): 96–9. 96. Randall L. Schweller, ‘Three Cheers for Trump’s Foreign Policy: What the Establishment Misses’, Foreign Affairs 97, no. 5 (2018): 134–5. 18 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) The Trump phenomenon was not a fluke in this regard. It simply reflected larger international structural forces or the relative decline of the US, while the establishment has long avoided facing this hard reality.97 Hence, Trump aimed to replace the extravagant ‘paradigm of unipolarity’, which pursued an impossible liberal dream of transforming the world in America’s own image, with a new focus on the old traditional paradigm of ‘greatpower competition’.98 A range of unorthodox policies, involving protectionism in trade, a tariffs war with China, withdrawal from multilateral organizations/global governance, and coercive alliance burden sharing, retrenchment from the Middle East, and the like, were well aligned with his power politics vision. In this vein, the 2017 National Security Strategy explicitly defined the strategy of the Trump administration as ‘principled realism’ and explained as follows: ‘It is realist because it acknowledges the central role of power in international politics, affirms that sovereign states are the best hope for a peaceful world, and clearly defines our national interests’.99 To realist eyes, Trump raised correct, long-overdue questions on the sustainability of the liberal primacy project, although his continuous mishandling of foreign policy practices was another mess.100 Related to the main topic of the present research, it is important to stress that the Trump doctrine also represented the American people’s collective reflections on its troubled relations with the Third World. Trump promised to finish ‘the nation-building business and instead focus on creating stability in the world’. Moreover, paraphrasing John Quincy Adams’ famous maxim, he declared, ‘The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies’.101 To be sure, his anti-interventionist messages resonated well with the growing discontent with the reigning liberal imperialist project among the American voters, thereby electing an anti-civilizing mission outsider as US president in 2016.102 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. Ibid., 142–3. Elbridge A. Colby and A. Wess Mitchell, ‘The Age of Great-Power Competition: How the Trump Administration Refashioned American Strategy’, Foreign Affairs 99, no. 1 (2020): 118–30. Donald Trump, ‘National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, The White House, 18 December 2017. Available at: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/ uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf, 55. Last accessed August 26, 2023. Emphasis mine. In his address to the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly, Trump also explained, ‘America’s policy of principled realism means we will not be held hostage to old dogmas, discredited ideologies’, a.k.a., liberal internationalism. Donald Trump, ‘Remarks by President Trump to the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly’, The White House, 25 September 2018. Available at: https://trumpwhitehouse. archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-73rd-session-united-nationsgeneral-assembly-new-york-ny/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. Stephen M. Walt, ‘The Tragedy of Trump’s Foreign Policy’, Foreign Policy, 5 March 2019. Available at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/05/the-tragedy-of-trumps-foreign-policy/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. Donald Trump, ‘Transcript: Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Speech’, The New York Times, 27 April 2016. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/us/politics/transcripttrump-foreign-policy.html. Last accessed August 26, 2023. These points can explain why the US might give up being imperial in the years to come. That is, a growing trend toward a less interventionist grand strategy is more structural in nature, reflecting international constraints and generational change in US society. Given that the unipolar moment has come to an end, an international system is increasingly less 19 Cha In his presidency, Trump hardly moralized conflicts between the US and authoritarian Others, thereby moving beyond the prevailing binary ontology of good and evil. Interestingly, he repeated an analogy of a poker game to define the nature of international politics.103 Indeed, this game metaphor showed how Trump understood international politics as a power play among sovereign nations, in line with a Brzezinski-style realpolitik weltanschauung.104 There is no boundary between superior civilization and inferior barbarian in his nonhierarchical illustration of international relations. Hence, Trump approached Third World security issues based on the balance of power thinking only, rejecting a universalist paradigm of democracy promotion or nation building. As he had no ethical problem in dealing with ‘rogues’ to stabilize the international situation, Trump could say with no qualm that the world would be a better place if Hussein and Gaddafi were still alive.105 ‘This Is All about Leader versus Leader. Man versus Man. Me versus Kim’: The Trump–Kim Bromance in 2018–2020 In the same vein, the Trump administration sought to pursue an alternative realist policy toward North Korea, profoundly distinguished from the mindset of the rogue state doctrine. Its diplomacy with the DPRK was unique in terms of (1) its pluralist definition of the Other, (2) its non-liberal agenda, and (3) its recognition of the enemy’s security concern. First, in terms of a politics of identity\difference,106 Trump hardly mobilized familiar discursive mechanisms of Otherization, securitization, stigmatization, and the like, according to the regime character criteria. Against the anti-pluralism of the rogue state discourse, Trump’s realist instinct embraced the pluralism of the Westphalian system. In this light, he stressed that the profound difference of political systems could not hinder his friendship with Chairman Kim: ‘We just like each other. I mean, we have a good relationship. Yeah. It’s a totally different system, to put it mildly. But we like each other. 103. 104. 105. 106. permissive of the projection of American power. In addition, the triumphalist generation of the establishment that experienced the Cold War victory is fading away and is replaced by younger millennials wounded by the damage of US imperialism in the post-Cold War times, which would change the cognitive milieu of US foreign policy over time. Kitchen, ‘Why American Grand Strategy Has Changed’, 87–104. All in all, whether ‘the Empire gives up being imperial’ is contingent upon an ongoing discursive contestation over America’s selfrole conception among different social forces/generations, as well as the relative decline of American power vis-à-vis China. Cristina Maza, ‘Donald Trump Calls Xi a “World Class Poker Player,” Suggesting He Changed North Korea’s Mind about Meeting’, Newsweek, 22 May 2018. Available at: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-calls-xi-world-class-poker-player-suggesting-hechanged-north-koreas-939509. Last accessed August 26, 2023. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Milla E. Vaha, ‘“We Kant Have Bad States”: On Evilization in Liberal World Politics’, International Politics 55, no. 2 (2018): 297. William E. Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 20 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) A good relationship’.107 In an unexpected way, the US, led by an unconventional president, could temporarily find a way to transcend the entrenched boundary between democracy versus despotism or civilization versus barbarianism, thereby realizing a ‘more respectful relationship between identity and difference’, in line with critical theorist approaches to reconciliation based on a performative politics of empathy.108 In this unique ontological schema, the status of the DPRK was transformed from an existential foe against humanity to Justus Hostis inside international society. When an interviewer reminded him that President George W. Bush once said ‘I loathe Kim JongII’, Trump simply responded, ‘That attitude got him nothing’.109 Such a Schmittian realist approach that ‘affirms the ineradicability of difference’ and ‘pluriversal structure of international relations’110 led to the historic summit in Singapore, which upgraded the status of the hermit kingdom from a pariah to a legitimized counterpart to the US in negotiations.111 As for Chairman Kim, Trump also had no problem respecting him as a lawful diplomacy partner. On the campaign trail, Trump showed his wish for a ‘hamburger meeting’ with Kim and later commented that ‘I’d be honored to meet Kim Jong-Un’.112 Furthermore, Trump not only recognized Kim’s rationality but also complimented Kim on his Machiavellian virtù as a state leader. For instance, Trump said of Kim at a post-summit news conference at Sentosa Island, ‘Well, he is very talented. Anybody that takes over a situation like he did, at 26 years of age, and is able to run it and run it tough – I don’t say he was nice or I don’t say anything about it – he ran it. Very few people, at that age – you can take 1 out of 10,000, probably, couldn’t do it’.113 Second, under Trump’s presidency, the character of the bilateral diplomacy was totally redefined. It was reformulated as a ‘deal-making’ or ‘bargaining’ between the two equal sovereigns who had the same concerns in security and economy. Even when there was a dangerous confrontation in late 2017, Trump hardly defined it as a liberal enmity, such as the battle between good and evil or democracy and authoritarianism. Although his choice of words sounded undiplomatic, the scary ‘my-nuclear-button-is-bigger-thanyours’ tweet or other phrases like ‘fire and fury’ and ‘bloody nose’ were plainly constituted by a rhetoric of Machtpolitik.114 Indeed, his understanding of diplomacy with Kim 107. Donald Trump, ‘Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference’, The White House, 28 February 2019. Available at: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/ remarks-president-trump-press-conference-hanoi-vietnam/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 108. Bleiker and Hutchison, ‘Performing Political Empathy’, 604–5. 109. Bob Woodward, Rage (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 92. 110. Prozorov, ‘Liberal Enmity’, 88. 111. Hagström and Lundström, ‘Overcoming US–North Korean Enmity’, 97. 112. Julian Borger, ‘Donald Trump: I’d be Honored to Meet Kim Jong-Un Under “Right Circumstances”’, The Guardian, 1 May 2017. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2017/may/01/donald-trump-kim-jong-un-meeting-north-korea. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 113. Donald Trump, ‘The President’s News Conference on Sentosa Island, Singapore’, The American Presidency Project, 12 June 2018. Available at: https://www.presidency.ucsb. edu/documents/the-presidents-news-conference-sentosa-island-singapore. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 114. Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 300. Cha 21 was based on a power politics (and machoistic) worldview, far distant from a liberal normative thinking of hierarchy: ‘This is all about leader versus leader. Man versus man. Me versus Kim’. As it was ultimately ‘a contest of wills’, Trump argues, ‘you’ve got to show strength’.115 Even after the ‘no deal’ in Hanoi, Trump defined the on-again, off-again nuclear talks as ‘a very, very beautiful game of chess, or game of poker’116 and called Kim one of the ‘world-class chess players’.117 In the same context, Trump, as a former businessman, also used a metaphor of real-estate bargaining to describe Pyongyang’s hesitation to abandon nuclear warheads: ‘It’s really like, you know, somebody that’s in love with a house and they just can’t sell it’.118 Accordingly, Trump’s goal was to ‘make a deal’ that could give tremendous wealth to North Korea (and perhaps himself) by exchanging the termination of Pyongyang’s nuclear program with the inflow of international capital. In this realpolitik discursive formation, there was little room for the NPT or human rights in Trump’s ‘give-and-take’ with Kim. Agenda related to liberal international norms was not in focus in either Singapore or Hanoi. On the one hand, Trump rarely approached the North Korean nuclear issue from the angle of nonproliferation regime. He simply wished to address the conundrum because American national defense was at stake after the North succeeded in developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) that could reach the US mainland. On the other hand, Trump also tried not to politicize human rights issues in his negotiation with Kim. Trump once even defended the young autocrat over the Otto Warmbier case in his Hanoi press conference. Responding to a reporter’s implicitly reproaching question on the tragic death of a young American citizen who was confined by the North Korean authorities, the president indifferently answered, ‘He [Kim] tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word’.119 Last but not least, Trump did admit the interactive dynamic of security relations between the two archaic enemies, which was a truly rare gesture in the trajectory of the US–DPRK dialogues. Usually, the North had been regarded as the source of international instability by developing the WMD and ICBM programs. The long history of the 115. Ibid., 281. In this regard, Trump explains why he first approached North Korea in hostile manner in 2017 and later dramatically shifted in realist tactical terms. Namely, he attempted to coerce Pyongyang to come to the negotiating table by wielding a big stick. One nuclear expert expressed his appreciation for Trump on this point: ‘While Trump’s approach in his first term was certainly unorthodox, he demonstrated the effectiveness of what deterrence theorists call the “madman” theory’. Graham Allison, ‘Predicting Donald Trump’s Strategy Towards North Korea in a Second Term’, The National Interest, 26 September 2020. Available at: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/predicting-donald-trump’s-strategy-towards-north-korea-second-term-169699. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 116. Haye-ah Lee, ‘Trump Likens N. Korea Talks to “Beautiful Game of Chess”’, Yonhap News, 16 January 2020. Available at: https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20200116000300325. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 117. Duk-kun Byun, ‘Trump Says N. Korean Leader one of “World-class Chess Players”’, Yonhap News, 18 August 2020. Available at: https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20200818002000325. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 118. Woodward, Rage, 192–3. 119. Trump, ‘Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference’. 22 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) enormous US threat to the tiny communist country was simply cancelled out in the dominant security narrative. During the Singapore meeting, however, the US president agreed with Kim’s criticism of ‘the hostile policies of past US Administrations’ and noted that ‘there were some very militant people on the US side’.120 Trump also officially admitted that the regular ‘war games’ by the KORUS alliance were ‘provocative’ and declared to stop them as long as bilateral denuclearization talks kept going.121 After a series of summits with little substantial progress, he still refrained from punishing Pyongyang for its testing of short-range missiles in violation of the past UNSC resolutions. As a gesture to recognize all sovereign state’s right to self-defense, Trump simply said, ‘He’s tested short-range missiles. Which, by the way, every country has short-range missiles. There’s no country that doesn’t have them. Okay? It’s not a big deal’.122 All in all, Trump’s separation from the foreign policy establishment actually secured sufficient ideational space to pursue a ‘grand bargain’ with the totalitarian regime, which was unthinkable in the traditional exceptionalist consensus that assumes an ontological hierarchy between the liberal West and the illiberal Rest.123 To be sure, the second summit in 2019 abruptly collapsed. Thereafter, exchanging ‘beautiful’ ‘love’ letters with each other notwithstanding, the two countries failed to make a breakthrough until the end of the Trump administration. Nevertheless, it is a valuable fact that the two Cold War opponents started to have highest-level dialogues, thereby producing a mini-détente in the Peninsula. For more than 4 years, Pyongyang maintained its unilateral moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests. Trump’s repeated bragging that the two countries would have been at war with each other if he was not elected in 2016 sounds like an exaggeration, but still has some truth to it.124 The Palace War: Neoconservative Resistance in the White House As expected, Trump’s paradigm shift in North Korea policy was strongly challenged by the establishment.125 The conflict was premised on a profound difference in philosophy, 120. John Bolton, The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 109. 121. Trump, ‘The President’s News Conference’. 122. Woodward, Rage, 185. 123. One caveat: the meaning of the ‘Trump twist’ is relatively limited in the sense that neither the institutionalization of agonistic respect nor a push of the circumscribed ethical commitments of realists toward affirmative pluralization was fully materialized in his time. Even in the case of the US–DPRK negotiation, it is noteworthy that Trump occasionally ‘infantilized’ Kim in condescending tones by calling him ‘little rocket man’ or ‘smart cookie’, although his overall approach to the communist regime was based on realist logics against the mission civilisatrice worldview. Meghan Keneally, ‘From “Fire and Fury” to “Rocket Man,” the Various Barbs Traded Between Trump and Kim Jong Un’, The Washington Post, 12 June 2018. Available at: https://abcnews.go.com/International/fire-fury-rocket-manbarbs-traded-trump-kim/story?id=53634996. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 124. Woodward, Rage, 322. 125. In practice, Trump’s realist goals were significantly constrained by imperial ‘habits’ of his own senior staff members. Patrick Porter, ‘Why America’s Grand Strategy Has Not Cha 23 especially their differing views on America’s civilizing identity and its mission in the world. While a fundamental progress in US–DPRK relations is dependent on American decision-makers ceasing to securitize the North as mad and irrational, the foreign policy establishment thinks that such a narrative alteration will enact an ontological threat to the exceptional US self.126 Even inside Trump’s White House, there was a group of hawks armed with a traditional missionary zeal. In particular, then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, the embodiment of a neoconservative movement, spearheaded a ‘palace war’127 to block Trump’s potential breakthrough with Chairman Kim and, indeed, succeeded in derailing the Hanoi summit. By examining why Bolton suddenly resigned later, we can find that the internal conflict was mainly over the discursive contestation between the mission civilisatrice faction and realpolitik one. In other words, the main fault line between the President and his advisor was allegedly about the Third World security problems: while Trump wanted to strike a peace bargain with the Taliban, to make a nuclear agreement with North Korea, and to meet with Iranian President during the UN general assembly meeting, Bolton and his National Security Council entourage strived to resist all those accommodative moves.128 Being loyal to the legacy of an ‘axis of evil’ discourse, Bolton sought to connect the dots between recalcitrant authoritarian regimes across the world, thereby policing the civilizational boundary between the US-led free world and the world of despotism. For instance, he labelled Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua as the ‘troika of tyranny’129 and aimed to raise the connection between Pyongyang and Teheran, pointing out their purportedly common goal of developing ballistic missiles for nuclear warheads.130 When he 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. Changed: Power, Habit, and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment’, International Security 42, no. 4 (2018): 9–46. Therefore, the entire discursive structure of the Trump administration’s foreign policy was never monolithic but characterized by fierce competitions (or even chaos) among different segments of the Republican Party. For example, we can find some ideological moves of Otherization, securitization, and Orientalization in the Trump administration’s policy toward China. Instead of realpolitik languages, the administration’s China bashing was mainly shaped by civilizing mission rhetoric. Especially, mainstream figures, including Secretary of State Pompeo and Vice President Pence, sought to define Sino-US relations not as a realist power struggle but as an ideological Armageddon war between democracy and totalitarianism. Michael R. Pompeo, ‘Communist China and the Free World’s Future’, Department of State, 23 July 2020. Available at: https://2017-2021. state.gov/communist-china-and-the-free-worlds-future-2/index.html. Last accessed August 26, 2023; Mike Pence, ‘Remarks by Vice President Pence on the Administration’s Policy Toward China’, The White House, 4 October 2018. Available at: https://trumpwhitehouse. archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-vice-president-pence-administrations-policytoward-china/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. Hagström and Lundström, ‘Overcoming US–North Korean Enmity’, 103. Yves Dezalay, The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Nahal Toosi and Quint Forgey, ‘Trump Ousts Bolton after Anger over Afghan News Coverage’, Politico, 10 September 2019. Available at: https://www.politico.com/ story/2019/09/10/trump-ousts-john-bolton-as-national-security-adviser-1488093. Last accessed August 26, 2023. Bolton, The Room Where it Happened, 249. Ibid., 218. 24 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) analyzed their collective threats and supported for a regime change solution, America’s own historical involvement in the interactive dimension of security dynamics was, to be sure, silenced. In this vein, Trump complained several times that the Bolton group were too aggressive: ‘These people want to push us into a war, and it’s so disgusting. . . We don’t need any more wars’.131 Trump once sarcastically joked, ‘If it was up to John, we’d be in four wars now’, implying that he was the one who restrained Bolton so far.132 On the question of North Korea in particular, Bolton tried to input his skeptical view on the North to Trump, thereby sabotaging the rapprochement between the two archenemies. He openly championed for a preemptive strike against the DPRK133 and believed that the very idea of the summit between Trump and Kim was a ‘mistake’. Calling Chairman Kim ‘the dictator of a rat-shit little country’, Bolton argued that he did not deserve meeting with US president.134 In his mind, the only solution to make Northeast Asia safe was to reunite the Korean Peninsula ‘under a government like the one in South Korea now’.135 Moreover, during the Hanoi summit, Bolton steadfastly opposed a phased, step-by-step, gradual approach to denuclearization proposed by the State Department136 and, instead, supported for a ‘big deal’ or a hawkish, unilateralist position of denuclearization first and compensation later. Especially, Bolton raised the notorious ‘Libyan model’, thereby enraging not only Kim but also Trump. Interestingly, Trump again showed his empathy to North Korea’s security concern in regards to this thorny issue when he explained why Bolton was fired. We were set back very badly when John Bolton talked about the Libyan model. And he made a mistake. And as soon as he mentioned that, the ‘Libyan model,’ what a disaster. Take a look at what happened to Qaddafi, with the Libyan model. And he’s using that to make a deal with North Korea? And I don’t blame Kim Jong Un for what he said after that. And he wanted nothing to do with John Bolton.137 131. Michael C. Bender and Gordon Lubold, ‘Trump Bucked National-Security Aides on Proposed Iran Attack’, The Wall Street Journal, 23 June 2019. Available at: https://www.wsj. com/articles/trump-bucked-national-security-aides-on-proposed-iran-attack-11561248602. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 132. Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, ‘Trump Undercuts Bolton on North Korea and Iran’, The New York Times, 28 May 2019. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/us/ politics/trump-john-bolton-north-korea-iran.html. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 133. Bolton, The Room Where it Happened, 29. 134. Bolton, The Room Where it Happened, 125. 135. John Bolton, ‘Bolton Claims “No Trump-Kim Hotline”’, The Dong-A Ilbo, 20 July 2020. Available at: https://www.donga.com/en/article/all/20200713/2118637/1. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 136. Bolton, The Room Where it Happened, 353–4; Leon V. Sigal, ‘Paved with Good Intentions: Trump’s Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea’, Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament 3, no. 1 (2020): 166. 137. Quoted in ibid., 175. Emphasis mine. Cha 25 A Return to Normalcy? US–DPRK Relations at an ‘Inflection Point in History’ A ‘Thug’ Doctrine: The Reemergence of a Liberal Enmity Since the presidential campaign in 2020, Joe Biden has repeatedly declared ‘America is back’, and with that is also America’s civilizational politics of identity/difference and the orthodox doctrine of liberal hegemony. While proclaiming that ‘America must lead again’ and ‘rally the free world today’,138 the 46th US president has vigorously revitalized a familiar metaphor of an ‘millennial battle’ reminiscent of the past Cold War times. Envisaging a 21st-century clash between democracies and autocracies, Biden defines that ‘the world is now at an inflection point’.139 Drawing on a restored grand narrative in line with a moralized us-versus-them vision, the Biden administration risks returning to the same ‘tragedy of liberal diplomacy’140 that persistently blocks genuine dialogues between the US and external Others, thereby making it hard to forge a compromise between political opponents.141 Once you return to the anti-pluralistic good-and-evil binary against the realist schema of pluralism, the politics among Justus Hostis will be rapidly sidelined and you will search for more and more ‘monsters to destroy’, consolidating the boundary of international society. Indeed, one notable point in Biden’s critique of the Trump doctrine toward the periphery is that the former president gave ‘license to kleptocrats everywhere’.142 Therefore, the Biden administration seems to go back to a repertoire of the traditional rogue state narrative and to the goal of the civilizing mission concerning the North Korean dilemma. Calling Chairman Kim, a ‘thug’, ‘murderous dictator’, ‘tyrant’, ‘Hitler’, and the like, Biden harshly criticizes that Trump ‘legitimized’ North Korea and granted ‘co-equal status’ by giving away two summits to Kim. In his thought, Kim Jong Un does not ‘deserve’ to meet the president of the US.143 Biden once went far as to say, 138. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., ‘Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing US Foreign Policy After Trump’, Foreign Affairs 99, no. 2 (2020): 76. 139. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., ‘National Security Strategy’, The White House, 12 October 2022. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-HarrisAdministrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf, 12. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 140. Jahn, ‘The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy’. 141. Patrick Porter and Sumantra Maitra, ‘America Should Reject Fighting Global Authoritarianism’, The National Interest, 7 March 2021. Available at: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-should-reject-fighting-global-authoritarianism-179278. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 142. Biden, Jr., ‘Why America Must Lead Again’, 67. 143. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., ‘Statement by Vice President Joe Biden on Donald Trump’s Repeated Diplomatic Failures’, Medium, 1 November 2019. Available at: https://medium.com/@ JoeBiden/statement-by-vice-president-joe-biden-on-donald-trumps-repeated-diplomaticfailures-2e8bc4a84e84. Last accessed August 26, 2023; Duk-kun Byun, ‘Biden Says Will Meet N.K. Leader If He Agrees to Draw Down Nuclear Capacity’, Yonhap News, 23 October 2020. Available at: https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20201023003200325. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 26 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) ‘I would not give him all he’s looking for – international recognition as legitimate’.144 According to this hierarchical and exclusionary boundary-making practices in the Biden’s geopolitical imaginary, a historical fact that the DPRK was already recognized as a lawful sovereign state by joining the UN in 1991 hardly matters. Furthermore, in its characterization of the North Korean enigma, the Biden administration also turns back to the dominant storytelling of liberal international society-versusoutlaws. On the one hand, the former Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated that Pyongyang’s WMD programs ‘constitute a serious threat to the international peace and security of the world’, undermining ‘the global nonproliferation regime’.145 Relatedly, a US–Japan joint statement on the NPT declared that the two countries are committed to the so-called CVID of North Korea’s nuclear weapons in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions.146 On the other hand, the State Department has stressed the human rights issue in North Korea again. Accusing the DPRK, ‘one of the most repressive and totalitarian states in the world’, of violating North Koreans’ dignity and human rights, the department spokesperson urged that ‘the civilized world’ or ‘the international community’ must ‘promote accountability for the Kim regime’.147 In response, the DPRK has test-launched dozens of missiles, including multiple ICBMs, since 2022, thereby breaking its self-imposed moratorium after more than a 4-year hiatus. What is remarkable here is that the UN Security Council has failed to adopt a resolution condemning North Korea, as China and Russia repeatedly vetoed on a US-led pushes to impose more economic sanctions on the communist country, publicly undermining the global nonproliferation regime for the first time since it started sanctioning Pyongyang in 2006. Under the shadow of the Ukraine War and the growing rivalry between authoritarian great powers and the liberal West, the present US administration’s efforts to make the DPRK a global pariah is bound to fail.148 Indeed, Biden’s 144. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and Moon Jae-in, ‘Remarks by President Biden and H.E. Moon Jae-in, President of the Republic of Korea at Press Conference’, The White House, 21 May 2021. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/05/21/ remarks-by-president-biden-and-h-e-moon-jae-in-president-of-the-republic-of-korea-atpress-conference/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 145. Jen Psaki, ‘Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki and National Economic Director Brian Deese’, The White House, 22 January 2021. Available at: https://www.whitehouse. gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/01/22/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psakiand-national-economic-director-brian-deese/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 146. Department of State, ‘U.S.–Japan Joint Statement on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons’, 20 January 2022. Available at: https://www.state.gov/u-s-japanjoint-statement-on-the-treaty-on-the-non-proliferation-of-nuclear-weapons/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 147. Ned Price, ‘On the Occasion of North Korea Freedom Week’, Department of State, 28 April 2021. Available at: https://www.state.gov/on-the-occasion-of-north-korea-freedom-week/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 148. Andrew Yeo, ‘Why Further Sanctions Against North Korea Could Be Tough to Add’, The Washington Post, 5 July 2022. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/05/north-korea-sanctions-weapons-unsc-security-council-veto-russia-china/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. Cha 27 North Korea policy seems to backslide into ‘strategic patience’,149 chanting empty slogans for unconditional dialogue while producing little progress. Realist Minorities: The Rise of the Arms-Control School and Their Interim Solutions In this light, the rise of the so-called arms-control school as a minoritarian voice in the contemporary US foreign policy circle is a noticeable phenomenon.150 The traditional mantra, such as CVID or Final, Fully Verified Denuclearization, expresses a dominant punitive posture, defining North Korea as a pariah state and, in effect, demanding its unconditional surrender without slightly considering the related dynamics of security dilemmas. Sometimes, even a radical liberal social engineering drive is tacitly involved in the approach in the form of a regime change or a reunification project. In contrast, the arms-control approach seeks to strike a ‘realistic’ bargain with North Korea.151 Fully recognizing a given fact that Pyongyang succeeded in developing nuclear weapons and will not abandon its atomic stockpile as ‘the ultimate insurance’ under current hostile anarchy, this newly formed faction aims for a more ‘modest’ trade between the US and the DPRK as an ‘interim’ step.152 Namely, although maintaining the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula as an ultimate ideal, the arms control paradigm concentrates more on creating ‘conditions for regional stability’ by ‘minimizing the risks’ of nuclear war with the DPRK.153 Such a measured approach would mean ‘tacitly accepting Pyongyang’s status as a nuclear-armed state and focusing on curbing nuclear development and avoiding use of existing weapons’ for a period of time.154 In addition, 149. Ryo Nakamura, ‘Biden’s Call for Dialogue Alone Aids North Korean Ambitions’, Nikkei Asia, 14 February 2022. Available at: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Comment/Biden-scall-for-dialogue-alone-aids-North-Korean-ambitions. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 150. Taesuh Cha, ‘Confronting the North Korean Question in a Post-Unipolar World’, The National Interest, 6 November 2022. Available at: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/koreawatch/confronting-north-korean-question-post-unipolar-world-205736. Last accessed August 26, 2023; Toby Dalton and Jina Kim ‘Rethinking Arms Control with a Nuclear North Korea’, Survival 65, no. 1 (2023): 21–48. 151. Eric Brewer and Sue Mi Terry, ‘It is Time for a Realistic Bargain with North Korea’, Foreign Affairs, 25 March 2021. Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ north-korea/2021-03-25/it-time-realistic-bargain-north-korea. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 152. Michael O’Hanlon, ‘What Donald Trump Should Have Done with North Korea – and What the Next President Should Do’, The National Interest, 1 September 2020. Available at: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/what-donald-trump-should-have-done-northkorea%E2%80%94and-what-next-president-should-do. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 153. Van Jackson, ‘Risk Realism: The Arms Control Endgame for North Korea Policy’, Center for a New American Security, 24 September 2019. Available at: https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/files.cnas.org/backgrounds/documents/CNAS-Report-North-Korea-VanJackson-Final.pdf, 2. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 154. Edward White, ‘Trump Exit Prompts Calls for Arms Control Offer to Kim Jong Un’, Financial Times, 1 December 2020. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/7ad578afe493-4974-9aa4-63e971662ab0. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 28 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) it is advised that the US should adopt ‘a series of unilateral measures’, including announcing stable coexistence, issuing a no nuclear deployment executive order, and declaring an end to the Korean War, to soothe North Korea’s excessive siege mentality and to jumpstart a confidence building process between the two Cold War enemies.155 Of course, before constructing a genuine peace regime, the US should contain the DPRK and its revisionist, emboldened moves, such as adopting a preemptive strike doctrine and deploying tactical nuclear weapons, through the classic mechanism of nuclear deterrence and arms control.156 The arms-control school’s pursuit of an intermediate compromise, although unable to provide a satisfying ‘ultimate solution’, echoes central insights from reflexive realism we discussed before. By abandoning the goal of the perfect world via grand social engineering and by gathering courage to choose the lesser evil, the school can open a space for dialogue and enact an interim eclecticism between the US and the DPRK. Such a realist ethics of modus vivendi,157 which audaciously recognizes that any political success in this tragic world of sinners is ‘at best approximated through the ever temporary balancing of interests and the ever precarious settlement of conflicts’,158 paves a road to the stable coexistence in the Korean Peninsula, thereby avoiding catastrophic results, such as an intense arms race or a nuclear escalation. Conclusion The present article has argued that Trump’s unusual presidency did create an opportunity for the American foreign policy elites, by asking them to interrogate old – and flawed – presuppositions about their country’s relations to the world. After the egregious farce in the Capitol Hill at the end of his presidency, it is a Herculean job to defend Trump’s political legacy. Even in his final foreign-policy score card, ‘Trump’s presidency was a missed opportunity’, as Walt concluded.159 Still, this should not hastily lead to a reconfirmation of the foreign policy establishment and its liberal interventionist doctrine. To be certain, Trump did not give us the answer to an important question on the potential alternative relations between the US and illiberal Others. Yet, his unorthodox approach shed a new light on US policy toward the periphery. In a nutshell, meaningful cracks on the existing hegemonic discourse are created by his disputed presidency. Maintaining 155. Jackson, ‘Risk Realism’, 7–8. 156. Ankit Panda, ‘North Korea’s Tactical Nuclear Plans Are a Dangerous Proposition’, Foreign Policy, 28 April 2022. Available at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/28/north-korea-tactical-nuclear-plans-dangerous-proposition/. Last accessed August 26, 2023; Adam Mount and Jungsup Kim, ‘North Korea’s Tactical Nuclear Threshold Is Frighteningly Low’, Foreign Policy, 8 December 2022. Available at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/12/08/north-koreatactical-nuclear-threat/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 157. Molloy, ‘Morgenthau’. 158. Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘Another Great Debate: The National Interest of the United States’, American Political Science Review 46, no. 4 (1952): 962. 159. Stephen M. Walt, ‘Trump’s Final Foreign-Policy Report Card’, Foreign Policy, 5 January 2021. Available at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/05/trumps-final-foreign-policy-reportcard/. Last accessed August 26, 2023. 29 Cha and enlarging the new strategic opening pioneered by the Trump doctrine toward the rogue states would be productive. In particular, Trump’s realist approach to North Korea gives us a chance to reconsider a question of how enmity is to be managed. We need to ask how an orthodox approach of ‘America’s mission’160 has dealt with the three-decade-long nuclear problem in North Korea and what the outcome has been. When hearing hawkish liberals and neoconservatives armed with hegemonist tenets harshly criticize Trump’s ‘appeasement’, we should also ask what really occurred in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, in which their mission civilisatrice was thoroughly applied and disastrously crumbled. Indeed, Trump’s new trial posed a critical question on how to depart from old ontological assumptions that frame the dominant liberal internationalist/neoconservative approaches toward a more dialogical and equal negotiation and compromise. A peaceful resolution of the North Korean dilemma is inherently related to a larger reflexivist project that promotes a thorough interrogation of the self-righteous US identity and a great transformation of America’s imperialist monologue toward the Third World in general. Acknowledgements The author offers his thanks to Young-Sun Ha, Bi Hwan Kim, Hee-ok Lee, Hong Lim Ryu, Heajeong Lee, Cheol-Hee Park, Chaesung Chun, Jung-Chul Lee and the editors of Millennium for their constructive feedback on different iterations of this piece. His sincere thanks also to the three anonymous reviewers for their close reading and incisive comments. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article. Funding The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper was supported by Samsung Research Fund, Sungkyunkwan University, 2019. ORCID iD Taesuh Cha https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5186-3207 160. Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).