​We have to improve our information capabilities and win the information war with north Korea (and the other members of the CRInK)

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World News Jan. 5, 2026 / 6:10 AM

Why effective use of information is necessary to defend against Kim Jong Un's political warfare strategy

By David Maxwell

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/01/05/perspective-kim-jong-un-political-warfare/2591767610214/

Kim Jong Un's political warfare aims to fracture the Republic of Korea-U.S. alliance without firing a shot. Photo by Korean Central News Agency/EPA

Jan. 5 (UPI) -- The Republic of Korea and the United States face a familiar threat from North Korea, yet too often we describe it with the wrong vocabulary. This is not merely a contest of missiles, submarines or artillery. It is a contest of narratives, legitimacy and political will. Kim Jong Un wages political warfare every day, and he does so with patience, discipline and a clear understanding of his objectives.

If we misread his strategy, we will continue to respond with strength in the wrong places.

Recognizing the strategy

Kim's political warfare aims to fracture the ROK/U.S. alliance without firing a shot. He seeks to portray the alliance as obsolete, dangerous or morally compromised, while presenting his regime as inevitable, resilient and unjustly besieged. His tools are familiar. Coercive diplomacy paired with calibrated provocations.

Disinformation that exploits democratic debate. Psychological pressure on South Korean society to normalize the abnormal.

This is not improvisation. It is systematic. It reflects a long tradition of Leninist political warfare adapted to the information age.

Why do missile tests so often coincide with alliance exercises or domestic political moments in Seoul and Washington? Why does Pyongyang speak of peace while tightening repression at home? These are not contradictions. They are features of the design.

Understanding the strategy

To defend effectively, the alliance must understand how Kim thinks about conflict. He does not separate war and peace. He treats them as a continuum. In this, he follows the logic found in The Art of War, where victory comes from shaping perceptions before forces clash.

Kim seeks to win by erosion. He pressures the alliance to doubt itself, to argue inward, and to treat his regime as permanent and immutable. Each concession becomes precedent. Each silence becomes acquiescence. Over time, he hopes deterrence weakens not because of force ratios, but because resolve decays.

The uncomfortable question is this. Are we reacting to events, or are we shaping the environment in which those events occur?

Exposing the strategy

Political warfare thrives in shadows. The first task of defense is exposure. The alliance must consistently and publicly name Kim's actions for what they are. Not defensive measures. Not misunderstood signals. Political warfare.

This requires disciplined narrative intelligence. Every provocation should be framed within a pattern, not treated as an isolated incident. Every peace overture should be measured against behavior toward the Korean people in the North. Silence, in this contest, is not neutrality. It is ceding ground.

Some argue that exposure risks escalation. The opposite is more often true. Political warfare succeeds when ambiguity protects the aggressor. Sunlight imposes costs.

Attacking the strategy with superior information

Defense alone is insufficient. As Sun Tzu counseled, the enemy's strategy must be attacked directly. For the alliance, this means a proactive information strategy grounded in truth, consistency and moral clarity.

The alliance must speak not only to elites, but to societies. To Koreans in the South who fear war. To Americans who see Korea as distant. And critically, to the Korean people in the North, who are the true center of gravity Kim works hardest to isolate.

Information must be synchronized across diplomacy, defense, and even among business, industry, and the economic instrument of power which is one of many areas in which the ROK and U.S. dominate the North.

It must affirm the legitimacy of the alliance, the conditional nature of the Kim regime, and the reality that unification and freedom remain possible. It must show that the North's failed economy and suffering of the Korean people are a result of Kim Jong Un's bankrupt policy decisions. This is not propaganda. It is strategic communication rooted in facts Kim cannot refute.

A fair counterargument deserves attention. Some warn that an assertive information strategy undermines prospects for dialogue. But dialogue without leverage is theater. Information creates leverage by restoring asymmetry in the human domain, where authoritarian systems are weakest.

The strategic question

The alliance has unmatched military power. Yet, power unused in the information domain atrophies. Kim understands this. He invests accordingly.

The central question is simple and uncomfortable. If political warfare is being waged against us every day, why do we still treat information as an afterthought?

The alliance does not need louder voices. It needs clearer ones. It needs the entire range of capabilities: Korea's Hanminjok Radio, Voice of Freedom, Echo of Hope, loudspeakers, balloons, leaflets, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and civil society and commercial efforts to bring information to the oppressed Korean people in the North.

Recognize the strategy.

Understand it.

Expose it.

Then, attack it with a superior information strategy that aligns values with power and one single objective tying all efforts together: the pursuit of a free and unified Korea.

That is how political warfare is defeated, long before the first shot is fired.



David Maxwell, executive director of the Korea Regional Review, is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel who has spent more than 30 years in the Asia-Indo-Pacific region. He specializes in Northeast Asian security affairs and irregular, unconventional and political warfare. He is vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy and a senior fellow at the Global Peace Foundation, where he works on a free and unified Korea. After he retired, he became associate director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is on the board of directors of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the OSS Society and is the editor at large for the Small Wars Journal.