2. Friends and Foes: An Orthodox Story

Once upon a time, there was just one Korea. Isolated, traditional, and fearful of its surroundings, Choson’s forced opening, at the hands of unscrupulous foreign powers, left the kingdom depleted and with little understanding of the diplomatic world. After a 30-year colonization, a partition, and a bitter war, the world the twenty-first-century North Korea operates in is framed by its relationships with its antagonists (United States, Japan), its partners (the PRC, the USSR, and the Communist world), and its significant other and brother-in-arms South Korea. But it is Pyongyang’s status as a small state, fighting for its own state legitimacy and survival in a conflicted peninsula that sets the stage for its foreign policy and diplomatic choices.