Red Rogue: The Persistent Challenge of North Korea

by Bruce E. Bechtol Jr.

Book Overview

In Red Rogue, Bruce Bechtol analyzes the changing nature of North Korea's national defense, foreign policy, and illicit economic activities in the post-9/11 era. He describes how North Korea has adapted to a changing global and regional environment to ensure regime survival and has often dictated the agenda in East Asia. Bechtol explains why North Korea frequently resorts to brinkmanship and provocations as foreign policy tools and why North...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1597971111
• ISBN13: 9781597971119
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Potomac Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Window Into a Rogue Nation

This book is an excellent introduction to post-9/11 North Korea. The author is a former intelligence officer and a professor of international relations at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College who holds a doctorate in national security and has lived and worked in South Korea. This book contains plenty of details on the inner-workings of North Korea. The author details the extensive amount of anti-U.S. propaganda that North Koreans are routinely subjected to. Evidently, North Korean citizens are told that they are just days away from being annihilated by the U.S. and that Kim Jong Il's regime is generously protecting them. The chapter on how North Korea, a country that seems to exhibit zero economic productivity, manages to finance its enormous military is very informative. North Korea's extensive financing activities include counterfeiting U.S. dollars, producing and trafficking illegal drugs and counterfeiting cigarettes. From reading this book, you will also learn about up-to-date estimates on North Korea's military capabilities. This includes information on North Korea's plutonium program, their uranium program and their long-range missile capability. You will also learn about significant confrontations that North Korea initiated with its neighbors. These include testing a Nodong missile by firing it over Japan as well as North Korea's crossing of the Northern Limit Line off the west coast of the Korean peninsula and firing upon a few South Korean patrol boats back in 2002. Finally, I thought that the chapter discussing the future prospects of a post Kim Jong-Il North Korea to be especially valuable. Kim Jong-Il, being a diabetic, is not in the greatest of health and he has not been grooming any of his sons to assume power upon his passing. The author delineates and explores the many challenges that Kim Jong-Il faces to ensure that his regime will be preserved. I highly recommend this book for anyone seeking to untangle the imbroglio of North Korea.

Red Rogue: valuable perspective on North Korea

Notwithstanding the diversity of the numerous books recently published on subjects North Korean, many aspects of this reclusive nation's inner workings and policy priorities have yet to be adequately dissected and explained. Making a major contribution to filling some of these gaps is Bruce Bechtol's "Red Rogue: The Persistent Challenge of North Korea." Bechtol brings to his work a unqiue voice and perspective molded by service as a Marine, an all-source Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, and, most recently, Marine Corps Command and Staff College professor. My personal goal in reading "Red Rogue" was to learn more about North Korean strategic thinking and military operations, and, in this regard, two areas of discussion stand out, each strong enough alone to justify picking up this book. The first of these is Bechtol's discussion of a Northern Limit Line (NLL) naval skirmish that occurred in June 2002. Some media and analytical reporting had treated the deadly incident as an example of a rogue military element expressing disatisfaction with Kim Chong-il's policies. To the contrary, as Bechtol's expert analysis indicates, this was a carefully-staged action that required considerable coordination and practice to execute. The second of the major analytical contributions Bechtol makes is his focus on North Korean motivations for specific actions and general policy courses. He handles this as a coda to his deconstruction of the NLL incident and in a more general way elsewhere in the book. In his introduction, for example, Bechtol references the U.S. Department of Defense's instruments of national power (IOPs) analytical framework used to assess the diplomatic, informational, military, and economic instruments that any foreign power has at hand to advance its national interests. Regarding a nation such as North Korea, where so much of foreign analysis is riveted on the idiosyncratic behavior of Kim Chong-il, this focus of Bechtol's is a welcome reminder that North Korea as a nation has interests based on carefully-crafted IOPs that transcend the personal inclinations of its authoritarian dictator.