A long time ago, in a university far, far away, I spent late evenings reading dusty and dated international relations texts.
In the North Korea watcher world, where access is scarce and status is conferred by proximity to power or time on CNN, vanity is more than a character flaw—it’s a vulnerability. For analysts, journalists, and policy wonks who dedicate their careers to decoding the Hermit Kingdom, reputation is currency.
Kenneth Waltz’s “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better” seems to have passed from academic to popular reading in South Korea. I saw an ajumma in the park reading it while her poodle panted beside her in a dog pram. It was a very unique situation.
Single sentence summary
Not every state can, or should, try to understand every other state on its own. For small and medium-sized states like Australia or Canada, when it comes to deeply opaque regimes such as North Korea, pursuing direct analytical insight is an exercise in futility.
North Korea has transformed into the perfect “Hollywood” cyber villain. From ransomware outbreaks to phishing operations and crypto heists, North Korea is now cited so frequently in attribution reports and press briefings that its involvement often appears less as an empirical finding than a rhetorical reflex. But this ease of attribution—often accompanied by scant verifiable detail—carries consequences, especially for South Korea.
So, you completed your liberal arts degree and discovered there were no jobs. You enrolled in a master’s degree in international studies and at the halfway point with poor grades, realized there are still no jobs. What do you do?
Ideas in foreign and strategic policy are no longer formulated in academia and passed to the government in cheap lunchtime meetings or over stale coffee at poorly catered academic-government 1.5-track conferences.
Read about Korea policy for more than ten minutes and you’re head explodes in a cloud of tedious talking points, over-technical documents, and dense strategy papers that have not changed for 30 years. If the goal is to craft better policy, then traditional methods are no longer enough. It is time to embrace a sharper tool: speculative fiction.
It is a strange time to be a thinktank policy analyst in Washington. On one hand, the policy papers keep coming—well-researched, sober, often sensible attempts to offer realistic paths forward on North Korea and the ROKUS alliance.
