Benjamin R. Young

In Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World, Benjamin R. Young argues, “Third Worldism formed a fundamental part of North Korea’s national identity during the Cold War era,” with Third Worldism representing “a global commitment to anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism” amid “North Korea’s internationalism and broad engagement with the decolonizing world” (pg. 4). Young focuses on four primary themes. First, he examines North Korea’s efforts to export the ideology of Juche to the third world as a developmental model, particularly in contrast to Maoism and Stalinism (pg. 5-8). Second, he investigates “Pyongyang’s support of national liberation movements” (pg. 9). Young’s third and fourth themes involve inter-Korean competition and the way the Kim regime balanced ties to the Third World and its place within the Communist world (pg. 9). Young’s work fits within the growing Cold War historiography focused on smaller nations (pg. 11).

Situating North Korea within the historiography of other small nations during the Cold War, Young writes, “The leaders of these small Communist governments [in Pyongyang, Havana, and Hanoi] understood the necessity of forming a unified internationalist front of Third Worldism as the great Communist powers could not always be relied upon as protectors of the world revolution” (pg. 16). Kim Il Sung capitalized on North Korea’s reputation as having defeated the U.S. during the Korean War for cachet among Third World nations (pg. 27). Further, North Korean leadership broke with larger Communist countries when they “privately criticized the Chiense for their lack of cooperation in assisting the Vietnamese” (pg. 40). Kim Il Sung sought to export both Juche and his own cult of personality beyond North Korea’s borders, though Kimilsungism often failed to reach a broader audience due to many of the logistical issues in exporting his philosophies (pgs. 59, 79). Juche, however, succeeded, and even made inroads in the United States among the Black Panther Party (pg. 66). By the mid-1970s, however, North Korea used the Third World to advance its own nationalist agenda and directly compete with South Korea (pg. 74). Similarly, Kim saw foreign conflicts such as the Yom Kippur War as an opportunity for training his own military (pg. 83). Kim Jong Il, the heir to Kim Il Sung, reframed Juche as a form of native chauvinism divorced from Marxism-Leninism as he escalated tensions through military support in exchange for cash and terrorist activities (pgs. 97, 124, 135).

Young’s work offers an alternative perspective on the Cold War beyond the focus on ideological conflict between the U.S. and larger countries such as the Soviet Union or China. His analytical focus guides the reader that may be unfamiliar with the history of North Korea as he teases out the significance of their influence in areas as disparate as northern Africa, the Caribbean, islands in the Pacific, and Compton, California. He crafts a narrative that explains how the Kim government managed to attain early international recognition beyond the Second World in such a way that it can still make inroads among developing nations thirty years after the end of the Cold War. Young further explains how the Kim regime transitioned from a focus on exporting ideological concepts to a rogue state involved in terrorism through the government’s excessive spending on vanity projects. Despite the current popular view of North Korea as backward, these vanity projects and ideological exports created a lasting nostalgia in the former Third World for “a bygone era when the DPRK was truly the Global Korea” (pg. 151).… (más)