North Korea's Strategic Intentions

North Korea poses a key challenge to the global community of states. Sometimes viewed as primarily a nuclear or proliferation challenge, Pyongyang actually presents the United States and other countries with multiple problems. As the 2005 National Defense Strategy of the United States notes, these challenges include "traditional, irregular, and catastrophic." While each dimension of these threat capabilities are fairly clear and, with the exception of the third, readily documented, North Korea's intentions are a much more controversial subject upon which specialists reach widely disparate conclusions. In this monograph, Dr. Andrew Scobell examines the topic of Pyongyang's strategic intentions. He first identifies a broad spectrum of expert views and distills this wisdom into three "packages" of possible strategic intentions. He then sets out to test which package appears to reflect actual North Korean policy.