#58 The History of North Korea w/ Sheena Greitens

The Road to Now

Benjamin Sawyer

Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2017

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

North Korea is a hard place for most Americans to understand. Kim Jung-un and his inner circle keep a tight grip on information, and what the North Korean government does share with outsiders can be hard to decipher. What is clear though, is that the current state of relations between Washington DC and the regime in Pyongyang is growing colder every day, and North Korea's pursuit of long-range nuclear weapons makes resolving this conflict an urgent matter in US foreign policy today.

How did the standoff between the US and North Korea begin, and who is to blame for the conflict? How has the Kim family, now in its third generation of leadership, managed to stay in power this long, and what are the prospects of removing them from power? And how has our policy toward North Korea been shaped by its geographic proximity to China and Russia?

In this episode of The Road to Now, we get the answer to these questions and more in our interview with North Korea expert, Dr. Sheena Greitens.

Sheena Greitens is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Missouri. She is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for East Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution and an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.

For more on this episode and our podcast, please visit our website: www.TheRoadToNow.com

Transcript

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0:41.7	I'm Ben Sawyer, and this is the road to now.
0:46.3	North Korea is one of those countries that has long been a thorn in the side of the west.
0:52.9	And it's kind of remarkable in that it's this 20th century-style communist dictatorship that most of the world has gotten rid of.
0:56.6	Yet it seems to be stronger than ever, perhaps, this North Korean regime under the new leader,
1:02.1	Kim Jong-un.
1:03.4	It is also in some ways a hereditary monarchy.
1:06.6	You're looking back that this is now the third generation of Kim that has lived this country.
1:12.7	And one of the things about this country, it's so secretive. It's really hard to get at what's
1:16.8	going on there, what they're thinking. And with the importance of North Korea and in the news
1:22.4	today, we thought we'd owe it to our listeners to go and look into the history of this regime,
1:27.7	try to break it down, try to explain why they've been a problem, why it's so hard to work with
1:32.4	them, and think about what we could do moving forward to perhaps ease the tensions between
1:37.9	the two or at least get these guys perhaps under control.
1:41.2	So today on the road to now, we are happy to offer you our interview with Dr. Sheila
1:45.9	Gritens, who is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University
1:50.3	of Missouri. She's also a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for East Asian Policy
1:55.2	Studies at the Brookings Institution. She is an expert. She spent time in North Korea. She's expert
2:00.5	on China. And so we sat down with her and she gave us a really great breakdown of what's going on, the background to it. And we really hope that you enjoy this episode of The Road to Now and walk away a little bit wiser.
2:21.7	Sheena Grightens, welcome to the road to now.
	...

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