A Rift Between the Koreas: Implications for Russian Policy

... North initially hoped to complete the unsuccessful “campaign to liberate the South” that started in 1950 (and nearly ended in complete disaster, were it not for China’s intervention). Yet by the 1970s, amid détente between the United States and North Korea’s “patrons”—the Soviet Union and China—Pyongyang came to understand that its hopes of defeating a stronger South Korea, heavily backed by the Americans, were futile. Since then, the North’s goals have become more pragmatic: to ...