Abstract
By the end of 2009, Obama had fulfilled his pledges by reaching out to Iran, Cuba, Burma, and, like his predecessor, Libya; it may well be that this “engagement” train is leaving the station, and leaving North Korea behind. But that cannot be known at this writing, and so I want to focus on several cases of engagement and rapprochement with former enemies, in hopes of shedding light on Obama’s policies toward North Korea and Iran—two countries that we specialists keep separate, but that interact daily in the minds of policy-makers—and to critique the long-term American strategy of blockade and isolation toward regimes that Washington does not like.
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Notes
James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Nazila Fathi and Alan Cowell, “After Obama Overture, Iran’s Leader Seeks U.S. Apology,” New York Times, January 29, 2009.
Many would see Iran as an exception, but I agree with Max Rodenbeck that it is really “a strategic featherweight.” In a conventional war, a rather long list of countries would be able to devastate it, beginning with Israel, India, and Pakistan. See Rodenbeck, “The Iran Mystery Case,” New York Review of Books, January 15, 2009, 35–38. This article also lists a number of excellent new books on Iran.
See Michael R. Gordon’s investigative report, “How Politics Sank Accord on Missiles with North Korea,” New York Times, March 6, 2001, A-1 and A-8.
Naewoe Press, North Korea: Uneasy, Shaky Kim Jong-il Regime (Seoul: ROK Government, 1997), 143.
Bruce B. Auster and Kevin Whitelaw, “Upping the Ante for Kim Jong Il: Pentagon Plan 5030, A New Blueprint for Facing Down North Korea,” U.S. News and World Report, July 21, 2003. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/030721/21korea.htm.
See a particularly good column on this by Roger Cohen, “The Other Tehran,” New York Times, February 2, 2009.
Juan Cole, Engaging the Muslim World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 5, 231, 244.
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© 2010 Kyung-Ae Park
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Cumings, B. (2010). Rapprochement in Postwar History: Implications for North Korea. In: Park, KA. (eds) New Challenges of North Korean Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113978_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113978_10
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