Reports & Papers

The Korean Missile Crisis of 2017 presented General Brooks with a unique opportunity to rethink deterrence and develop a dynamic playbook to change Kim Jong Un’s calculus. The result he called “micro deterrence signaling.”

Over the last decade, financially motivated operations have come to play a central role in North Korea’s cyber strategy. The illicit revenue those operations generate helps blunt the impact of tough global sanctions and supports the regime’s ballistic-missile and nuclear-weapons programs. This report explores North Korean financially motivated actors’ convergence of interests and tradecraft with cybercriminals, focusing on their dealings with the Russian-language underground.

The Biden administration has emphasized the importance of alliances and core values of democracy in its foreign policy approach. Given this emphasis, public diplomacy—activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign audiences—should be considered an essential tool in achieving our long-term policy objectives in North Korea. Public diplomacy has the potential to spur domestic change in North Korea—change that could result in improved human rights conditions, leading to behavioral change in the Kim regime, and eventually denuclearization.