Surviving the Unipolar Era elucidates the conflict’s transformation, beginning with unprecedented U.S.-led efforts to achieve North Korea’s total collapse and elimination through maximum pressure, and ending three decades later with a subsiding of Pyongyang’s international isolation and the modernization of its economy, armed forces and nuclear deterrent. A. B. Abrams highlights how the small state has been able to hold its own in multiple standoffs with the world’s superpower, successfully weather economic sanctions, and prevent penetration of its information space, and the implications that this has had for the country, the region and the wider world. He details the strong consistency in American objectives, and the evolution of consensus across five separate administrations on how these should be pursued as the circumstances of the conflict transformed.

“In this timely, much-needed overview and analysis of North Korea in the world from the end of the Cold War to the current era of the Second Cold War, Abrams details how North Korea indeed “survived the unipolar era”, and how the emergence of a new geopolitical environment may be more conducive to it than any time since the late 1950s. This careful and well-researched study is an invaluable corrective to the stereotypical and ahistorical assumptions that underlie most Western views on the subject.” CHARLES K. ARMSTRONG, former Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies, Columbia University, author of numerous books and articles on North Korea.