North Korea’s 2018 Foreign Policy U-turn: Using Levels of Analysis to Understand Kim Jong-un’s Rationale

In March, 2018, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) unexpectedly announced that it would re-start negotiations with the United States (US) with regards to nuclear weapons development, signaling an unexpected, but significant, U-turn in its foreign policy. Whilst many academics have put this down to the effect of increased sanctions on the DPRK, I argue that leadership changes in both the US and Republic of Korea (RoK) were the main factor, since these leadership changes brought about foreign policy changes in their respective states. Changes at the system and unit level do not appear to be significant to the DPRK’s foreign policy on their own, whereas shifts at the individual level have been more drastic than usual. This allowed the DPRK’s leadership to take advantage of the situation, at a point when the US and RoK had domestic disunity. As such, in this paper I analyze the main events at the three major levels; system, unit, and individual levels, using the IR theory of classical realism to support the thesis.