Posted on November 19, 2009 in North Korea, Policy Research.

In his new report “Understanding North Korea’s Strategic Assessments in 2009 and the Reference Point Gap on the Korean Peninsula,” Jihwan Hwang of Myongji University studies offers new concepts for understanding North Korea’s international strategy.

In the East Asia Institute‘s Asia Security Initiative Working Paper #2, Hwang writes:

This paper emphasizes the importance of the concepts of “saving face” and “reference points” in assessing North Korea’s strategies.

... Regime choices may look irrational by Western standards, but may be rational in terms of the North’s way of thinking. Thus, it is necessary to understand the North Korean point of view regarding its strategic environment.

In order to explain the North Korean mindset, I hypothesize that North Korea’s face-saving is closely connected with gaining an objective or benefit. A corollary is that the North Korean regime is more likely to feel humiliated when it believes that it has failed to gain the benefit that it originally sought or expected. To explore this hypothesis, I turn to the concept of a “reference point.”

A reference point is a cost that people view as the limit of what they can concede—that is, they can concede no more than the cost involved. When people gain more than they expect, they are happy. When the outcome falls short of what they originally anticipated, however, they are disappointed. This reaction may be particularly true of North Korea. If the North Korean regime achieves its reference point, it will be satisfied. But if its reference point is threatened or appears impossible to attain, the North is likely to be seriously provoked and become aggressive, because it may feel that it has lost face. Thus the identification of the reference point is critical in understanding Pyongyang’s strategic mindset. Further, the reference point helps us understand the North Korean regime not by its emotional features but by its rational calculation of costs and benefits. The regime may often display unexpected behaviors to save face, but most of these actions can be explained in terms of the reference point, that is, the costs and benefits for North Korea from its perspective.”

Read the entire Working Paper here.