ABSTRACT
Assessing North Korea’s policies toward the United States is a complex task. In part, the complexity is due to the nature of the state embodied by the label Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea). To many nonNorth Koreans, and certainly to the great majority of Americans who focus on Korean affairs, the DPRK does not meet the normal criteria for “Democratic” or “Republic.” Nor does the North Korean form of authoritarian hierarchicalism centered on a relatively small elite seem to represent all of the “people” who reside there. Aside from that peculiar state label, the secretive nature of North Korean society, which is reflected in its approach to decision-making on all policy issues, reinforces the complexity of assessing the DPRK’s past, present, and future policies toward the United States.1
