The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 12 | Issue 52 | Number 4 | Article ID 4244 | Dec 21, 2014

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Stranger than Fiction: The Interview and U.S. Regime-ChangePolicy Toward North Korea 小説より奇なり　「ザ・インタビュー」と米国の対北朝鮮体制変革政策

Christine Hong

“And if it does start a war, hopefully people willsay, ‘You know what? It was worth it. It was agood movie!’”

—Seth Rogen

“Wacky dictators sell newspapers, andmagazines—for example, the 2003 Newsweekcover depicting Kim [Jong Il] in dark sunglassesover a cover line that read ‘Dr. Evil.’ …Butdemonization, and ridicule, can be dangerous.At its worst, dehumanizing the other side helpsto lay the groundwork for war.”

—Donald Macintyre

Representations of North Korea as a buffoon, amenace, or both on the American big screenare at least as old and arguably as tired as theGeorge W. Bush-era phrase, “the axis of evil.”Along with the figure of the Muslim “terrorist,”hackneyed Hollywood constructions of the“ronery” or diabolical Dr. Evil-like NorthKorean leader bent on world domination, thesinister race-bending North Korean spy, therobotic North Korean commando, and otherpost-Cold War Red/Yellow Peril bogeymen havefunctioned as go-to enemies for the commercialfilm industry’s geopolitical and racist fantasies.Explaining why the North Korean leader wasthe default choice for the villain in his 2014regime-change comedy, The Interview, SethRogen has stated, “It's not that controversial tolabel [North Korea] as bad. It's as bad as itcould be.”1 Indeed, one-dimensional caricaturesof North Korea flourish in the Western media inno small part because “[w]acky dictators sell.”2

Yet when it comes to Hollywood’s North Korean

regime-change narratives, the line between factand fiction, not to mention the distinctionbetween f reedom of express ion andgovernment propaganda, is revealingly thin.Whether in Hollywood or Washington, the onlypermissible narrative for North Korea is whatDonald Macintyre, former Seoul bureau chieffor T ime magaz ine , has ca l led “ thedemonization script.”3 Not only have the dreammachines of the entertainment industry longplayed an instrumental role within Americantheaters of war, but also, U.S. officials andpolitical commentators often marshal thelanguage of entertainment—for example, thedescription of U.S.-South Korea combinedmilitary exercises as “war games” and theObama administration’s references to thePentagon’s “playbook” with regard to NorthKorea—when describing U.S. militarymaneuvers on and around the Koreanpeninsula.

Beyond the American entertainment industry’sinsatiable appetite for evildoers, how might weaccount for the anachronistic place of NorthKorea as a Cold War foe that outlasted the endof the Cold War within Hollywood’s post-9/11rogues’ gallery? With the eyes of the worldtrained on various flashpoints in the MiddleEast, what mileage of any kind can be gottenfrom the North Korean “bad guy” inHollywood? If American moviegoers might bedepended on to possess a vague awareness ofgeopolitical context, perhaps even to havesome sense of the history of U.S. “hot”involvement subtending Hollywood’s latestIslamophobic interventionist adventure, by

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contrast, North Korea, routinely depicted in theU.S. media as shrouded in mystery and beyondcomprehension, can be counted on to draw acomplete blank. Truth, we are often told, iswilder than our wildest imaginings in NorthKorea, therefore the rule-of-thumb when itcomes to representing North Korea inHollywood appears to be that anythinggoes—even films featuring Kim Jong Un’s headdeconstructing and bursting into flames.Violent spectacle thus stands in for substantivetreatment, leaving more complex truths aboutNorth Korea elusive. It is worth recalling thatNorth Korea has been dubbed a “black hole” byformer CIA director Robert Gates, “the longest-running intelligence failure in the history ofespionage” according to ex-CIA Seoul stationchief and former U.S. ambassador to SouthKorea Donald Gregg, and the “Heart ofDarkness” in the words of congresswomanIleana Ros-Lehtinen.4 It’s against this backdropof near-total ignorance about North Korea, aplace about which Americans possess greatconviction but little knowledge, that NorthKorea serves as a malleable screen onto whichthe entertainment industry’s fantasies can beprojected—fantasies that reflect less realityabout North Korea than commentary aboutHollywood’s own murky ideological substratum.

Here, it merits considering two post-9/11, “axisof evil” films that move in opposite directionsbut intersect with U.S. policy in ways fewcritics have observed: Red Dawn 2, MGM’s2012 reboot of the 1984 Cold War original, inwhich North Korean invaders vaingloriouslyattempt regime change on U.S. soil only to beoutdone by a pack of suburban Americanteenagers who ca l l themselves “ theWolverines,” and The Interview, Sony’s 2014screwball comedy in which a fatuous AmericanTV talk show host and his producer are enlistedby the CIA to “take out” Kim Jong Un as a sure-fire means of ensuring North Korean regimecollapse.5 If Red Dawn 2, described by Wired as“the dumbest movie ever,” inadvertentlydescended into farce by expecting that

American viewers would “take North Koreaseriously as an existential threat,” TheInterview, catapulted to unlikely world-historical importance, has become the focus ofserious controversy and incessant Westernmedia commentary.6

North Korea furnishes the central villain in TheInterview—though, in this case, a rube of a“dictator” who has crippling “self-esteem and‘daddy issues,’” according to leaked Sonyemails.7 Yet, in the media-storm around theSony hacking, North Korea has transitionedbeyond the screen into an easy fall guy. At ajuncture in which the White House has turned anew page with Cuba, even going so far as todescribe a half-century of ineffectual U.S.isolationist policy aimed at Cuban regimechange as a failure, North Korea, also long thetarget of U.S. regime-change designs, risksresuming i t s o ld p lace on the Sta teDepartment’s list of state sponsors of terrorismfrom which it had been removed, by George W.Bush no less, in 2008.8 In other words, at amoment when Cuba stands to step off the four-country list, which also includes Iran, Sudan,and Syria, North Korea, accused of hackinginto Sony and issuing terrorist threats over therelease of The Interview, faces the prospect ofstepping back on.9 At this moment, we are thuswitness to two radically different dynamics: theprospect of long-awaited rapprochement,normalization, and engagement with Cuba instark contrast to a war of words, threats ofretaliation, and escalation when it comes toNorth Korea. In reference to the hacking ofSony, which the FBI has insisted can be tracedto North Korea—an assertion of culpability thatThe New York Times dutifully reported as factdespite proliferating assessments andoverwhelming opinion to the contrary in thelarger cyber-security community—U.S. StateDepartment spokeswoman Marie Harf, onDecember 22, 2014, laid out an astonishinginjury claim, on Sony’s behalf, against NorthKorea: “The government of North Korea has along history of denying its destructive and

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provocative actions and if they want to helphere they can admit their culpability andcompensate Sony for the damage, damagesthat they caused.”10

Yet missing in this lopsided discussion ofreparations and national amnesia is anygrappling, on the part of the United States,with the profound human costs of six decadesof hostile U.S. intervention on the Koreanpeninsula, much less the fact that the officialrelationship between the United States andNorth Korea remains one of unfinished war. Inthe mid-twentieth century, the United States,which set the stage for bloodshed by cleavingthe Korean peninsula in two with no Koreaninput in 1945, and by supporting separateelections in the South in 1948, then militarilyintervened in 1950 on behalf of its SouthKorean ally Syngman Rhee (a ruthless dictator,no doubt, but “our guy,” in the parlance of theCold War State Department) in a war ofnational reunification that followed. That war,the Korean War, remains tragically unresolvedto this day. During the war’s battle-phase, theUnited States wielded near-total aerialsuperiority, an index of asymmetrical warfare,to devastating consequences, especially in theNorth. When the dust settled, an estimated fourmillion Koreans has been killed, seventypercent of whom were civilians, millions morewere transformed into refugees, and one inthree Korean families was separated by adividing line that had been hardened by warinto an impassable, intensely fortified,militarized border, which U.S. presidents eversince have referred to as “Freedom’s Frontier.”As historian Bruce Cumings notes, memoryplays out differently north of the DMZ: “What isindelible is the extraordinary destructiveness ofthe American air campaigns against NorthKorea, ranging from the widespread andcontinuous use of firebombing (mainly withnapalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemicalweapons, and finally to the destruction of hugeNorth Korean dams in the final stages of thewar.”11 This memory of ruin, so central to North

Korea’s consolidation as a state, registers little,if at all, within the United States where theKorean War is tellingly referred to as “theForgotten War.” Indeed, few in the UnitedStates realize that this war is not over, whereasno one in North Korea can forget it.

Fig. 1. Obama Peers into North Korea fromWhat He Calls “Freedom’s Frontier” onM a r c h 2 5 , 2 0 1 2 .(http://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/34502)

Yet, whether they realize it or not, Americansview and naturalize North Korea through a lensthat is clouded by the fog of an unfinished war.In what has unfurled as one of the strangest PRcampaigns for a Hollywood Christmas releaseever, the FBI’s assertions that North Korea wasbehind the cyberattack on Sony—anintelligence assessment presented withoutevidence yet framed as self-sufficient fact bythe Obama administration—highlights thecentrality of intelligence as the filter throughwhich we are urged to perceive North Koreaand other historic enemies of the United States.It is worth remarking that the two primaryways that Americans “know” North Korea arethrough forms of intelligence—defector andsatellite, precisely the two types of supposedlyairtight evidence that then-Secretary of StateColin Powell presented to the UN SecurityCouncil in early 2003 as incontrovertible

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“proof” that Iraq possessed weapons of massdestruction. Then as now, information about alongstanding U.S. military target is not aimedat producing a truthful picture about thatsociety or its leadership but rather at defeatingthe supposed enemy—in short, paving the wayto regime change. It is precisely within thishaze of disinformation about North Korea thatHollywood churns out films that walk inlockstep with a relentless U.S. policy of regimechange.

With Obama stepping into the role of booster-in-chief for The Interview, we might examinethe blurred lines between what both the U.S.President and Seth Rogen have insisted is anissue of freedom of speech and artisticexpression, on the one hand, and governmentpropaganda, on the other. The collusionbetween Sony, the White House, and themilitary industrial complex, as revealed byleaked emails, merits a closer look. Not onlydid Obama, in his final 2014 press conference,manage to avoid any discussion of the CIAtorture report, but also he gave outsizedattention to a film that Sony had reportedlyshelved, in effect giving an invaluablepresidential thumbs-up for The Interview. Withthe spectacle of North Korea implausiblyrearing its head in the president’s remarks as“the biggest topic today,” the pressing issue ofU.S. accountability for torture, with even majormedia outlets calling for a criminal probe intothe responsibility of former Vice President DickCheney, former CIA director George Tenet,legal architect John Yoo, among others, wasdeflected.12 Instead, North Korea was launchedto front-page news and Sony’s temporary,arguably savvy, PR decision to pull TheInterview was framed, in accordance withObama’s comments, as a capitulation tocensorship by “some dictator someplace.”13 Wemight ask: what political capital stands to begained from maintaining a hard line on NorthKorea, at a moment of détente with Cuba? Ashacked emails from the head of SonyEntertainment, Michael Lynton, disclose,

Sony ’ s t ê te -à - t ê te w i th the Obamaadministration over The Interview must bedated back to the production stage. Havingscreened a rough cut of the film at the StateDepartment, Sony appears to have queriedofficials, including Special Envoy for HumanRights in North Korea, Robert King, specificallyabout what it worried was the over-the-topviolence of the head-exploding assassinationscene of Kim Jong Un (played by Randall Park).Harboring no such qualms, the StateDepartment gave the green light.

Fig. 2. Obama Vows to Respond toCyberattack on Sony at December 19, 2014Y e a r - E n d P r e s s C o n f e r e n c e .(http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1153681-obama-vows-response-to-north-korea-hacking-sony/)

Asked by The New York Times in a December16, 2014 interview whether they werefrightened by “the initial ambiguous threatsthat North Korea made,” lead actor JamesFranco stated, “They went after Obama asmuch as us,” adding in tongue-in-cheek fashion,“Because Obama actually produced the movie.”Seth Rogen, co-lead and, along with EvanGoldberg, co-director of The Interview,clarified, “They don’t have freedom of speechthere, so they don’t get that people make

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stuff.”14 Within the space of the same NYTinterview, however, Rogen offered a lessinnocuous account of the production process:“Throughout th is process , we maderelationships with certain people who work inthe government as consultants, who I’mconvinced are in the C.I.A.” Indeed, in additionto State Department officials, Bruce Bennett, aNorth Korea watcher and regime-changeadvocate at the Rand Corporation, the U.S.military-funded think tank, and a consultant tothe government on North Korea, also served asa consultant with Sony on this film. Hisprimary, albeit hardly novel, thesis on NorthKorea is that the assassination of the NorthKorean l eader i s t he su res t way o fguaranteeing regime collapse in North Korea.In a June 25, 2014 email to Sony EntertainmentCEO, Lynton, who also sits on the Rand Boardof Trustees—an indication of Sony’s cozyrelationship with the military industrialcomplex—Bennett implied that a North Koreanregime-change cultural narrative, by dint of itspoliticized reception within the Koreanpeninsula, might oil the machinery of actualregime collapse. As he put it, referring to his2013 book, Preparing for the Possibility of aNorth Korean Collapse, “I have been clear thatthe assassination of Kim Jong-Un is the mostlikely path to a collapse of the North Koreangovernment. Thus while toning down theending [the assassination scene] may reducethe North Korean response, I believe that astory that talks about the removal of the Kimfamily regime and the creation of a newgovernment by the North Korean people (well,at least the elites) will start some real thinkingin South Korea and, I believe, in the North oncethe DVD leaks into the North (which it almostcertainly will). So from a personal perspective,I would personally prefer to leave the endingalone.”15 In their defense of the film’s creativeintegrity (prior to the email leaks), both Rogenand Goldberg claimed that their decision toexplicitly identify the North Korean leader ofthe film as “Kim Jong Un” was met with “someresistance” at Sony, yet as The Daily Beast

subsequently reported, the leaked emails“strongly suggest that it was Sony’s idea toinsert Kim Jong Un in The Interview as thefilm’s antagonist” following consultation with“a former cia [sic] agent and someone whoused to work for Hilary [sic] Clinton.”16

Perhaps none of this should come as a surprise.Hollywood, after all, has given us Black HawkDown, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, and otherpropaganda films. Yet it runs counter to areading of The Interview as harmlessentertainment, much less as a matter offreedom of speech or pure artistic expression.It might also remind us that culture, when itcomes to U.S. enemies, has always been aterrain of manipulation and war. During theKorean War’s hot-fighting phase, the UnitedStates dropped a staggering 2.5 billionpropaganda leaflets on North Korea as part ofits psy-war “hearts and minds” operations.Throughout the Cold War, the CIA, as is well-known, funded American arts and letters in akulturkampf with the social ist b loc,maneuvering behind the scenes to foster“democratic” cultural expressions that would,in turn, be held up as evidence of thesuperiority of the culture of American freedom.Today, the National Endowment for Democracy(NED), a supposedly non-governmental agencyestablished in the Reagan era to do what theCIA did covertly during the Cold War andfunded almost entirely by Congress, sponsorsand disseminates defector narratives, what theCIA calls “human intelligence,” as the truthabout North Korea.1 7 Central to NED’sobjectives is the promotion of “second cultural”products about target or “priority” countries,for example, the “dissemination of books, filmsor television programs illuminating oradvocating democracy,” as a means ofdelegitimizing and ultimately destabilizing theleadership of “closed societies.”18 In its work onNorth Korea, NED supports defectororganizations in South Korea and Japan, whichit mobilizes as an exogenous alternative toNorth Korean civil society—a second culture

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whose propaganda can be infiltrated via radiobroadcast, balloon drops, smuggled USBdrives, and other underground distributionalmeans into North Korea. Although leakedemails indicate that Sony’s South Koreandivision opted early on not to screen TheInterview in South Korea, citing an aversion toits caricature of the leader of North Korea andspoof of a “North Korean” accent, SouthKorea’s centrality as a site for a more sinisterdistribution of the film might give us somepause.19 Much along the lines advocated byBennett, organizations like the U.S.-based,right-wing Human Rights Foundation headedby the self-professed Venezuelan “freedomfighter” Thor Halvorssen Mendoza as well asSouth Korean defector groups asserted theirreadiness, even prior to Sony’s temporarypulling of the film, to conduct illegal balloondrops of DVD copies of The Interview fromSouth Korea into North Korea. We might notethat one of the Korean subheadings on Sony’spromotional poster for the film reads explicitlyto a North Korean audience: “Don’t believethese ignorant American jackasses.” Of thefilm’s propagandistic value, Halvorssen, whodescribes comedies as “hands down the moste f f ec t i ve o f coun te r revo lu t i onarydevices”—here, echoing Rogen’s cavalierassessment of the film’s supposedly subversivepotential, “Maybe the tapes will make their wayto Nor th Korea and s ta r t a fuck ingrevolution”—told Newsweek, “Parody andsatire is powerful. Ideas are what are going towin in North Korea. Ideas will bring down thatregime.”20

Fig. 3. Propaganda Balloon DropsLaunched into North Korea by HumanR i g h t s F o u n d a t i o n .(http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sony-hack-activists-drop-interview-758529)

Revealingly, those who profess to be soconcerned about democracy when it comes tothe release of The Interview rarely, if ever,consider the profoundly undemocraticimplications of Obama’s militarized “pivot”toward Asia and the Pacific. Here, Hollywood’sNorth Korean “bad guy” merits criticalconsideration against the context of U.S. policy,past and present, within a larger Asia-Pacificregion in which the United States seeks toensure its dominance. Although BarackObama’s foreign policy is unavoidablyidentified with the Middle East where he hascontinued and intensified Bush’s interventionistpolicies, his foreign policy vision from theoutset has been explicitly oriented toward thePacific. As Obama’s Secretary of State, HillaryClinton signaled the significance of Asia bymaking it her first overseas destination,bypassing Europe, the customary grand tourdestination for her predecessors. Offering ablueprint of twenty-first-century U.S. powerdesigns within the Asia-Pacific region, which heidentified as America’s “future,” “the world’sfastest-growing region,” and “home to morethan half the global economy,” Obama, in aNovember 2011 speech before the AustralianParliament, stated, “Our new focus on thisregion reflects a fundamental truth—the United

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States has been, and always will be, a Pacificnation.”21 As both Obama and members of hisadministration have taken pains to convey, theUnited States must be globally understood tobe “a Pacific power.”22

Ripped from the script of Red Dawn 2, the bait-and-switch narrative Obama has adhered towith regard to Asia and the Pacific requiresNorth Korea to fulfill a necessary devil-function. Here, it is worth recalling that in2012, MGM, facing a barrage of criticism fromnews media in China—not coincidentally thesecond largest movie market in the world, onethat brought Hollywood an estimated $1.4billion dollars in the year of Red Dawn 2’srelease—announced it had decided, at theeleventh hour, to replace the film’s Chinese badguys with North Korean villains. North Korea,of little significance as an open consumermarket in today’s global entertainmentindustry, could be pasted in as China’s proxy,with few financial consequences. Digitallyaltering PRC flags, military insignia, andpropaganda posters to appear “North Korean”would cost the studio well over a million dollarsin the post-production phase. AlthoughObama’s policy toward North Korea hasofficially been one his advisers dub “strategicpatience,” or non-engagement, North Koreahas served as a corners tone in th i sadministration’s interventionist approachtoward the Asia-Pacific region. Although anexpanded American military role in the region,including a “rebalancing” of U.S. naval forcesto 60% (in contrast to 40% in the Atlantic), maybe aimed at containing a rising China, thegrowing U.S. regional military presence, underObama’s “pivot” policy, has been overtlyjustified by the specter of a nuclear-armed,volatile North Korea.

Fig. 4. The Chinese North Koreans HaveInvaded. Still from Red Dawn 2 (2012) inwhich the original PRC flag was digitallyaltered to appear as a DPRK flag.(http://www.confusedcoyote.co.uk/2013/03/north-korea-invades-washington.html)

Not merely the stuff of Hollywood fantasies,North Korea, inflated as an existential menace,has been indispensable, for example, to “thedeployment of ballistic missile defenses closerto North Korea,” not to mention sales ofsurveillance drone technology to regionalallies.23 Indeed, central to the staging of U.S.f o rward -dep loyed miss i l e de fensesystems—Aegis, Patriot, and THAAD (TerminalHigh-Altitude Area Defense)—in and off thecoast of Hawai‘i, Guam, Taiwan, Japan,Okinawa, and South Korea (including,eventually on Jeju Island) has been thepurported dangers posed by an armed,dangerous, and totally unpredictable North

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Korea to both the western coast of the UnitedStates and regional allies in the Pacific. Inrecent years, this portrait of an unhinged,trigger-happy North Korea has justified theacceleration of the THAAD missile-defensesystem in Guam, a second U.S. missile defenseradar deployed near Kyoto, Japan, thepositioning of nuclear aircraft carriersthroughout the Pacific, and lucrative sales ofmilitary weapons systems to U.S. client-statesthrough the Asia-Pacific region. Albeit all keyelements in U.S. first-strike attack planning,this amplified militarization of the “AmericanLake” is justified by the Pentagon as a“precautionary move to strengthen our regionaldefense posture against the North Koreanregional ballistic missile threat.”24 As early asJune 2009, then-Secretary of Defense RobertGates, in announcing the deployment of boththe THAAD and sea-based radar systems toHawai‘i, explained, “I think we are in a goodposition, should it become necessary, to protectAmerican territory” from a North Koreanthreat.25 In early April 2013, in a press releaseannouncing its missile defense deploymentthroughout the Asia-Pacific region, thePentagon stated, “The United States remainsv ig i lant in the face of North Koreanprovocations and stands ready to defend U.S.territory, our all ies, and our nationalinterests.”26 Advertised as safeguarding “theregion against the North Korean threat,” the X-band radar system, which the United Statessold to Japan “is not directed at China,” as U.S.officials were careful to state, but simply adefensive measure undertaken in response tothe danger posed by Pyongyang.27

Fig. 5. Red Dawn 2 Redux? LockheedMartin product page for Terminal HighAlt i tude Area Defense (THAAD).(http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/thaad.html)

As critics have pointed out, “There is…nothing‘defensive’” about any of this, least of all the“B-52 and B-2 nuclear strategic bombers,”which the Obama administration put into playin early 2013 on the Korean peninsula.28

Indeed, such “flights were designed todemonstrate, to North Korea in the firstinstance, the ability to conduct nuclear strikesat will anywhere in North East Asia.”29 Yet,even as the North Koreans have had to hunkerdown, with “single-minded unity,” inpreparation for the prospect of a David-and-Goliath showdown with the United States, thetrue audience of the U.S.-directed dramaturgyo f war s t y l ed a s the “p i vo t ” po l i c yunquestionably has always been China.

Claiming to have done conducted “a lot” ofresearch on North Korea, Seth Rogen hasinsisted that The Interview holds up a mirror toNorth Korea’s reality: “We didn’t make upanything. It’s all real.” His conclusion aboutNorth Korea after conducting exhaustiveresearch? “It was f--king weird.”30 Yet, even asthe curtains go up in movie theaters across theUnited States for The Interview, the centrality

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of the North Korean demon to Obama’s pivotpolicy within Asia and the Pacific, itself ahistoric theater of U.S. war, may prove to befar stranger than fiction.

Christine Hong is an assistant professor at UCSanta Cruz. She is on the executive board ofthe Korea Policy Institute, the coordinatingcommittee of the National Campaign to End theKorean War, and part of the Working Group onPeace and Demilitarization in Asia and thePacific.

Recommended citation: Christine Hong,"Stranger than Fiction: The Interview and U.S.Regime-Change Policy Toward North Korea",The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 52, No.4, December 29, 2014.

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Notes

1 Josh Rottenberg, “Seth Rogen and EvanGoldberg Like that Kim Jong Un Doesn’t Getthe Joke,” LA Times 3 December 2014 . AsRogen’s comments in this interview with the LATimes reveal, the biographical particulars ofthe North Korean leader did not matter;

indeed, one leader was interchangeable foranother. Rogen and his fellow filmmaker EvanGoldberg initially envisioned Kim Jong Il as thearch-villain of the film but, with his death inDecember 2011, simply replaced him with KimJong Un.

2 Donald Macintyre, “U.S. Media and theKorean Peninsula,” Korea Witness: 135 Years ofWar, Crisis and News in the Land of theMorning Calm, ed. Donald Kirk and Choe SangHun (Seoul: EunHaeng Namu, 2006), 404.

3 Ibid., 407.

4As quoted in Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas:A Contemporary History (New York: Basic-Perseus Books, 2001) 60; “North Korea’s Heartof Darkness,” Dong-A Ilbo, 23 May 2012,a v a i l a b l e h e r e(https://apjjf.org/admin/site_manage/details/foreignaffairs.house.gov/news/story/?2445).

5 Sandy Schaefer, “‘The Interview’ Red BandTrailer: Rogen and Franco Serve TheirC o m e d y , ”(http://screenrant.com/the-interview-red-band-trailer/) Screen Rant, September 2014 .

6 David Axe, “North Korea Invades America inD u m b e s t M o v i e E v e r , ”(http://www.wired.com/2012/08/north-korea-invades-america/) Wired 4 August 2012.

7 Sam Biddle, “Leaked Emails: Sony ExecsScared of ‘Desperately Unfunny’ Interview,”(http://defamer.gawker.com/leaked-emails-the-in t e r v i e w - s u c k e d - f o r - s o n y - e v e n -befor-1671234001) Defamer, 15 December2014.

8 As reported in The Daily Beast, Obama, inclarifying a new U.S. policy approach to Cuba,stated, “‘I do not believe we can continue doingthe same thing for five decades and expect adifferent result,’ said Obama in a none-too-subtle allusion to a popular definition ofinsanity.” See Christopher Dickey, “Obama

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Realizes What 10 Presidents Didn’t: IsolatingC u b a D o e s n ’ t W o r k , ”(http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/17 /obama-ends - fa i led -po l i cy - towards -cuba.html) The Daily Beast, 18 December 2014.

9 See Amy Chozick, “Obama Says He’ll WeighReturning North Korea to Terror List,”(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/us/politics/obama-cuba-north-korea-cyberattack.html) TheNew York Times, 21 December 2014.

10 State Department, Daily Press Briefing(http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2014/12/235472.htm), Washington, DC, 22 December 2014.Noting that a heavy regime of U.S. andinternational sanctions prevents direct financialdealings with North Korea, AP reporter MattLee asked Harf to clarify what she meant by“compensation”: “‘How could Sony legallyaccept compensation from North Korea? Isthere an exception?’ Lee asked. ‘Because as faras I know, if you’re getting a payment, a directpayment, from the North Korean government,you’re breaking the law.’” See “ReporterDismantles State Dept Suggestion that NorthKorea Pay Compensa t ion to Sony , ”(http://freebeacon.com/national-security/reporter-dismantles-state-dept-suggestion-that-north-korea-pay-compensation-to-sony/) Free Beacon,22 December 2014. On skepticism from cyber-security experts that North Korea wasresponsible for the hacking, see ElissaShevinsky, “In Plain English: Five Reasons WhySecurity Experts Are Skeptical North KoreaM a s t e r m i n d e d t h e S o n y A t t a c k , ”(http://www.businessinsider.com/why-security-exper ts -are - skept ica l - tha t -nor th -korea -masterminded-the-sony-attack-2014-12)Business Insider, 22 December 2014 and MarcRogers, “No, North Korea Didn’t Hack Sony,”(http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/24/no-north-korea-didn-t-hack-sony.html) TheDaily Beast, 24 December 2014.

11 Bruce Cumings, “On the Strategy andMorality of American Nuclear Policy in Korea,

1950 to the Present,” Social Science JapanJournal 1:1 (1998): 57.

12 “Remarks by the President in Year-End PressC o n f e r e n c e , ”(http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/12/19/remarks-president-year-end-press-conference) The White House, 19 December2014; The New York Times Editorial Board,“Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses,”(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opinion/prosecute-torturers-and-their-bosses.html?_r=4)The New York Times, 21 December 2014.

13 “Remarks by the President in Year-End PressConference.”

14 Dave Itzkoff, “James Franco and Seth RogenT a l k a b o u t ‘ T h e I n t e r v i e w , ’ ”(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/movies/james-franco-and-seth-rogen-talk-about-the-interview.html) The New York Times, 16December 2014.

15 Although purportedly an expert on theKorean peninsula, Bennett of fers anassessment of South Korean receptivity to TheInterview that is contradicted by Sony’s owninternal emails. Fearing controversy, Sony’sSouth Korean division passed on opening thefilm in South Korea. For an account of howanother “axis of evil” film, the Bond thriller, DieAnother Day (2002), incited widespreadprotests in South Korea, see Hye Seung Chung,“From Die Another Day to ‘Another Day’: TheSouth Korean Anti-007 Movement and RegionalNationalism in Post-Cold War Asia,” HybridMedia, Ambivalent Feelings, ed. Hyung-SookLee, special issue of Spectator 27:2 (2007):64-78.

16 Rottenberg, “Seth Rogen and Evan GoldbergLike That Kimg Jong Un Doesn’t Get the Joke”;William Boot, “”Exclusive: Sony Emails SayStudio Exec Picked Kim Jong-Un as the Villaino f ‘ T h e I n t e r v i e w , ’ ”(http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/18/exclusive-sony-emails-say-studio-exec-

APJ | JF 12 | 52 | 4

11

picked-kim-jong-un-as-the-vil lain-of-the-interview.html) The Daily Beast, 18 December2014.

17 On this point, William Blum writes: “AllenWeinstein, who helped draft legislationestablishing NED, was quite candid when hesaid in 1991: ‘A lot of what we do today wasdone covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’” SeeWilliam Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to theWorld’s Only Superpower (Monroe, ME:Common Courage, 2000), 180.

1 8 NED, “Statement of Principles andObjectives: Strengthening Democracy Abroad:The Role of the National Endowment forD e m o c r a c y , ”(http://www.ned.org/publications/statement-of-principles-and-objectives) NED.

19 See Biddle, “Leaked Emails.”

20 Josh Eells, “Seth Rogen’s ‘Interview’: Insidethe Film North Korea Really Doesn’t Want Yout o S e e , ”(http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/seth-rogen-interview-north-korea-controversy-cover-story-20141217) Rolling Stone, 17December 2014; Paul Bond, “Sony Hack:Activists to Drop ‘Interview’ DVDs over NorthK o r e a v i a B a l l o o n , ”(http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sony-hack-activists-drop-interview-758529) TheHollywood Reporter, 16 December 2014;Katherine Phillips, “Activists to Send DVDs of‘The Interview’ to North Korea by Balloon,”(http://www.newsweek.com/activists-send-interview-north-korea-balloon-292767) Newsweek,17 December 2014 .

21 Barack Obama, “Remarks by PresidentObama to the Australian Parliament,”(http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/11/17/remarks-president-obama-australian-parliament) 17 November 2011.

22 Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,”(http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/americas-

pacific-century/) Foreign Policy, 11 October2014.

2 3 Barbara Starr and Tom Cohen, “U.S.Reducing Rhetoric That Feeds North Korea’sB e l l i g e r e n c e , ”(http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/04/politics/koreas-u-s-/) CNN 13 April 2013.

24 Department of Defense, News Release No.2 0 8 - 1 3(http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=15909), 3 April 2013.

25 John J. Kruzel, “U.S. Prepares MissileDefense, Continues Shipping Interdictions,”(http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=54833) U.S. Department of Defense, 18June 2009.

26 “Department of Defense Announces MissileD e p l o y m e n t , ”(http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=15909) Press Release, Department ofDefense, 3 April 2014.

27 Lolita Baldor and Matthew Lee, “US andJapan Revamp Defense Alliance to CounterN o r t h K o r e a n T h r e a t , ”(http://www.businessinsider.com/us-japan-revam p - d e f e n s e - a l l i a n c e - t o - c o u n t e r - n -korea-2013-10) Business Insider, 3 October2013.

28 Peter Symonds, “Obama’s ‘Playbook’ and theT h r e a t o f N u c l e a r W a r i n A s i a , ”(http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/05/pers-a05.html) World Socialist Web Site, 5 April2013.

29 Ibid.

30 Judy Kurtz, “FLASHBACK—Seth Rogen: NoRegrets about Making ‘The Interview,’”(http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/227501-flashback-seth-rogen-no-regrets-about-making-the-interview) the Hill, 17December 2014.