A Rift Between the Koreas: Implications for Russian Policy

... 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 receive aid and assistance from the South without ceding its own positions, and ideally to achieve South Korea’s decoupling from ...