ABSTRACT
The politically divided Korean peninsula has been described as the setting of the final echoes of the Cold War. The high point during this period was a summit in 2000 between President Kim and his Northern counterpart Kim Jong-Il. The failure of the Sunshine Policy to produce tangible results also contributed to the election of the conservative Lee Myung-Bak and Park Geun-Hye governments in South Korea, who both advocated a harder approach to the North. The competing issues at stake ahead of the summit foreshadowed the complications awaiting each government. From the United States (US) perspective, the core issue was the security threat posed by the North's combination of nuclear weapons with ballistic missiles. In the broadest sense, critical geopolitics is concerned with how the foreign policy of states rest on a myriad of taken-for-granted assumptions about the relationships between space and power in international politics.
