North Korea

North Korea

The Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific theater threatened this arrangement, however. When the Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945, Japan's governor-general ceded power to the Provisional Committee for Korean Independence (PCKI). Soviet troops marched into Pyongyang, becoming the first Allied forces to occupy the peninsula. The Soviets agreed to recognize the PCKI as Korea's official government on the condition that communists are appointed to fill half the committee's seats. The PCKI readily accepted the Soviet Union's demand, and assumed power under the title of the People's Republic of Korea (PRK).

The United States, however, did not accept this state of affairs. On September 8, 1945, American forces entered the city of Seoul in the central part of Korea. In response, Soviet representatives created the Five Provinces Administrative Bureau, a fledgling government for the area that eventually became North Korea and existed outside the influence of the USMGIK.

To resolve the situation, the United States and the Soviet Union formed the Joint American-Soviet Commission. However, in May 1946, the commission dissolved without achieving a compromise. Worried that the Korean peninsula faced a permanent division, the newly chartered United Nations established a commission in November 1947 to oversee the movement toward Korean independence.

For the next four decades, relations between the two nations shifted violently between open hostility and tentative stabs at reconciliation. During this period, South Korea gradually became more democratic and fostered a capitalistic economy. North Korea, however, became more isolated and struggled as its economic policies, such as agricultural collectivization, continued to fail. Frustrated with its development, North Korea frequently threatened South Korea when its own fortunes were waning to prove that it remained a viable nation.

In 1963, for instance, the Soviet Union withdrew all economic and military aid to North Korea when that nation sided with China in its split with the Soviet Union. This loss devastated the already struggling North Korean economy. To cover this weakness, North Korea lashed out at South Korea. During January 1968, North Korean commandos attacked the presidential compound in South Korea, the North Korean navy seized the United States ship Pueblo off the coast of Korea, and North Korean guerillas harassed villages along South Korea's eastern coast.

Condemned by its own isolationist mentality, postwar North Korea probably would have become increasingly ignored by the world's power brokers, were it not for its ever-developing nuclear capabilities. Confronted by the United States, the DPRK agreed in 1994 to freeze and subsequently dismantle its nuclear-weapons installations in exchange for international food and energy relief. Over the next seven years, however, North Korea played a game of hide-and-seek with the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which demanded hard proof that the nuclear programs had indeed been disassembled.

In October 2002, U.S. officials accused North Korea of developing precisely such programs, in complete violation of the 1994 agreement. All efforts by South Korea (one of America's strategic partners in the region) to engage the northern leadership in productive dialogue on the nuclear issue were shattered, as the DPRK adopted ...