The Koreas | Security | East Asia

North Korea’s Constitutional Amendments Signal a Policy of Assurance Toward South Korea

North Korea wants to assure the South – and Pyongyang’s Russian and Chinese allies – of its intention not to attack Seoul first.

After almost two years of speculation, changes to North Korea’s constitution have been made public. Of great interest was the country’s definition of its territory, which is a key indicator of its policy toward South Korea. 

The amendment reads that North Korea’s territory borders “China and Russia to the north and the Republic of Korea to the south, as well as territorial waters and airspace established on that basis.” This is the first time North Korea dropped its territorial claims against the South. 

Pyongyang also scrapped references to “peaceful unification” and “imperialist aggressors” in the document. Neither does it identify Seoul as the “primary foe.”

Without a doubt, this is a textual confirmation of Pyongyang’s two-state theory vis-à-vis Seoul that it adopted in December 2023 and the country’s lack of interest in any South Korean outreach. The constitutional amendments signal a major change in how North Korea defends itself. Instead of seeking security assurances from its neighbors – whether its Russian and Chinese allies or South Korean and American enemies – Pyongyang is now giving these countries assurances of its won to avoid miscalculation and clarify the conditions that it may resort to the use of force.

Coercive diplomacy, or the use of credible and explicit threats and assurances in combination to discourage other countries from undertaking unwanted behaviors, has been the essence of North Korea’s security strategy since the end of the Korean War. Pyongyang wants to discourage a South Korean march north as well as to weaken the South Korea-U.S. alliance. The country has invested much into the threats side of coercive diplomacy by stationing long-range artillery along the inter-Korean border and developing nuclear weapons. There has been little doubt that, if South Korea and the United States were to invade North Korea, Pyongyang would swiftly launch preemptive attacks, including possible nuclear strikes.

However, the assurance side of Pyongyang’s diplomacy has not received as much attention. Without this, North Korea building arms for deterrent purposes can be misperceived as preparation for an invasion due to the security dilemma. North Korea tried to explicitly assure the South that it had no intention to invade it first under the July 4, 1972 South-North Joint Communique. But in April 1975, as the United States-backed regimes in Indochina were collapsing, North Korean President Kim Il Sung adopted a militant unification policy and asked China for help with “liberating” the South. China demurred. 

In 1991, Kim again assured Seoul of his peaceful intention under the Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-Aggression, and Exchanges and Cooperation. However, such an assurance was not credible. In March 1994, North Korea threatened war against South Korea and the United States over IAEA inspections of its nuclear program. 

Joint North-South statements at the 2000, 2007, 2018 summits mentioned “peaceful unification,” but they were not enough to fully dissipate Seoul’s skepticism of a North Korean invasion because Pyongyang still laid claims over the entire Korean Peninsula. North Korea’s new territorial clause significantly changes the assurance dynamic. By renouncing its territorial claims over South Korea and officially calling its neighbor the “Republic of Korea” in the constitution, North Korea got rid of a legal pretext to attack South Korea. 

A stronger assurance contributes to North Korea’s effort to deter a foreign attack in two ways. First, it complements North Korea’s red line in using nuclear and conventional forces. Currently, Pyongyang’s red line against U.S. and South Korean provocations........

© The Diplomat