‘Recognition’ is a diplomatic term going back to the era of royal courts, well before the American Revolution; only those to whom the monarch recognised were permitted to speak in court, if the king chose not to recognise them then they were silenced. It is refers entirely to the status of the relationship between states – how close they are not to whether they consider them real of not.
That's all well and good but your argument is flawed:
- despite the historical origin of the term, diplomatic recognition has evolved to refer to the status of relationships between governments and to whether or not one state recognizes the existence of another state (which in any case is only the most extreme point on scale of how states relate to each other). After all how do then account for the status of the relationship between Somaliland and the United States? Are you suggesting that the United States has
recognized the independence of Somaliland but simply has no relations with the Somaliland government? Or is it in fact that the United States does not recognize Somaliland's independent existence and considers the territory claimed by the Somaliland government to be a part of Somalia? And how then do we account for China's non-recognition of Kosovo? Are we to believe that China does in fact consider Kosovo to be an independent state and not a part of Serbia?
- the relationship between the DPRK and the USA in 1950 would not have been about recognition between states per se, since the USA did recognize an independent Korea. But the ONLY independent Korea it recognized was the ROK government based in Seoul. To recognize the DPRK would not have been to recognize a separate state as happened when Ireland seceded from the UK or Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia, but to recognize an alternative government for Korea as being legitimate. Which isn't possible. I know of no case where any country recognized TWO competing governments as both being the legitimate government of a single country. If you have any examples then please share them (along with any examples where the US declared war on a government it previously did not recognize before the declaration of war or against any state it did not recognize as having an independent existence).
To demonstrate how difficult it would be to actually draft a declaration of war aganst the DPRK one only needs to look back at the declarations of war in 1898, 1917and 1941. In all of them the declarations referred to a state of war existing between the United States and [put name of recognized nation here] or between the United States government and the government of [put recognized nation here]. A declaration of war against the DPRK would in essence be little different than a declaration of war against the Italian Social Republic after Italy switched sides in 1943. No such delcaration was made because it was not strictly speaking possible to declare war on the "government of italy" (again) since italy was now on the Allied side and the US was never going to recognize the Italian Social Republic since the ISR did not claim to be a separate northern Italian state but to be the legitimate government of the entire Italian state.