ios criticizes the US motivation for aiding North Korea as being less for humanitarian reasons than for the purpose of making the country agree to nuclear-control talks. Nobody was fooled, and the ultimate result was that when food aid did arrive in 1997, "it was two years too late, was sent to the wrong regions of the country, and had no rigorous controls on its internal distribution to prevent the elites from stealing it" (2000, p. 163). For the donor countries, in other words, the whole matter was a lose-lose proposition because humanitarian motives intersected with "geostrategic" ones.
The method Natsios uses to create the narrative is at all times linked to the longtime military and political confrontation taking place between North and South Korea, which is to say between North Korea and the United States, which guarantees South Korea's security. In other words, where any issue involving North Korea is concerned, the Cold War is firmly and programmatically in place and influences virtually every geopolitical decision that is made. The author explains that his analysis is based on three "lenses" of observation. The first is what he calls famine indicators, or evidence of "subtle behavior of the population to cope with their diminishing access to food" (Natsios, 2000, p. xvi). That occurred in the form of increasing food and agricultural costs as well as incre
...