North Korea Misperception Theory

When it came to China deciding to support North Korea, they made this choice because of the shared hatred for the enemy of North Korea (Yufan, Zhihai 94). In addition, this decision by China, also stems back to 1949 when Chairman Mao delivered a speech exclaiming how he is denouncing the United States as an imperialistic power seeking to dominate China, and with that he said China would now lean toward the side of the Soviet Union (Yufan, Zhihai 97). The Chinese Communist party did not want any more possibilities of United States ideals spreading into China, thus the reason for the Chinese leaning toward the Soviets. With that said, the Soviets joining North Korea is what made the Chinese join North Korea as well. In the aid of North Korea,
Starting off, the misperception theory will be discussed on whether or not the theory is supported by the evidence. According to the material listed in the historical summary part of the essay, the theory of misperception was indeed deemed to be true. The evidence in the historical evidence that supports this was the part where it said North Korea thought they were stronger in overall strength compared to South Korea. The misperception here was the fact that the United States ended up joining the conflict on behalf of the South Koreans. That is what the misperception was, as the North Koreas believed the United States was not going to intervene thus the misperception in thinking they were stronger than South Korea as a whole. Despite the history between South Korea and the United States, North Korea basically ignored that relationship to see what they wanted to see. A term to describe this is “motivated misperception”. As already mentioned, motivated misperception is where a country sees what they want to see when they are in pursuit of something. So in this case, the motivated misperception came about when The North Koreas ignored the presence of the United States and used strong reasoning on why they wouldn’t join to the Soviet Union because of how bad they wanted to attack South Korea. They were in the mindset of saying anything to get the
First, one pro of the alliance aggression theory is the hypotheses that were laid out in the theory by Leeds. This really provides a good understanding of the theory in terms of what factors into the legitimacy of the theory. A con of the alliance aggression theory in my opinion is that it is sort of vague. It does not explain what would happen if both the aggressor and defender had allies, instead it only shows what happens when one of them has allies on their sides. For the misperception theory, the pro that comes to my mind, is the exceptional job on illustrating and providing historical examples in aiding in the determination of the legitimacy of the theory. As far as cons for the misperception theory go, I cannot think of any cons that can be associated with the