Two (Kinda) Free Koreas?

My friend, Adrian Hong, argues in an op-ed for The San Diego Union-Tribune that we should sacrifice one free Korea for specific, pragmatic goals — disarmament, the cessation of Pyongyang’s proliferation and “export of terror,” the closure of the prison camps and other human rights abuses, and ending the North Koreans’ perpetual hunger:

Regional stakeholders regularly reaffirm their desire to see a unified Korea. They do not mean it. They do not desire the status quo — only Pyongyang’s rulers prefer that. But the sudden reunification of Korea would result in enormous uncertainty in the region, and South Korea and its neighbors are rightfully apprehensive.

South Korea is unprepared and unwilling to accept the massive burden of absorbing tens of millions of impoverished North Koreans at once. Both China and the United States know that a reunified Korea would result in a profound shift in the balance of power — but do not know in which direction that shift would turn. The possibility of such world-remaking tectonic shifts begets the great likelihood of dramatic escalation by heavily armed regional players. Greater wars have been sparked over less. [….]

The retention of North Korea as a distinct political state would enable Beijing to keep a buffer between it and the South, and by extension American troops, and retain the present regional balance of power. A new government in Pyongyang could renounce provocations and proliferation, and end biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs. Changes to the future of regional alliances could be managed deliberately and collaboratively, instead of in a panic and piecemeal. An understanding that there would effectively be a freeze on changes on the Korean peninsula beyond a change in government in Pyongyang would maximize chances for peaceful resolution and military deconfliction. [Adrian Hong]

Instead of reunification, Hong advocates something like a Sunshine Policy with a (presumably, more receptive) post-Kim Jong-un government in Pyongyang, in which South Korean capital and expertise would help the North recover as a friendly, but independent, neighbor to both South Korea and China. 

I’ll confess my sympathy for some of Hong’s arguments. I agree that we should seek to accommodate China’s security interests by keeping U.S. forces out of northern Korea. I can even envision agreeing to a remove U.S. ground forces from a unified and stabilized Korea. (Keeping U.S. air power, naval facilities, and missile defense systems in the South is another matter. If the South wants them and is willing to pay a fair share of the cost, those should stay.)

China also has commercial interests in northern Korea that a unified Korea may or may not choose to recognize. These interests give China an incentive to reach a diplomatic settlement to help disarm and reform North Korea.

I also agree that a post-collapse North Korea will require some heavy (if temporary) controls on internal and external migration to help stabilize and pacify it, deal with its humanitarian needs and public health, and set the stage for land reform and reconstruction. (This might be a good time to review Bruce Bennett’s paper on dealing with a North Korean collapse.) As reconstruction progresses, these controls can be relaxed gradually.

A post-collapse North Korea will need time to prepare itself for self-government. Democratization is not an event, but a process that will require years of accelerated public education about the most basic values of a free society — the respect for different views, different faiths, and private property; respect for the law; and the suppression of corruption. There will have to be a phased transition from totalitarianism to benevolent authoritarianism, and then to experiments with elections at the local, province, and national levels.

Critically, this transition might not work without a large commitment of South Korean police and military personnel to stabilize it. The North Korean military is probably too brutal, too undisciplined, and too hated to maintain order in a non-totalitarian society.

What troubles me most about this proposal, however, is the suggestion that foreign powers should do another secret handshake to decide Korea’s destiny. Most Koreans still haven’t forgiven us for the first time we did that. But then, near the end of his piece, Hong writes that “the Koreas will be one, someday.” This leaves me wondering just what Hong has in mind — a two-state solution? One country, two systems? And for how long?

What I have much less sympathy for is the concession to Chinese or U.S. interests in maintaining a regional balance of power, or that maintaining this balance requires us to maintain the status quo. 

After all, it is China that has upset this balance during the Obama years, with its military buildup, its bullying of neighboring countries, and its expansionist claims on Senkaku and the South China Sea. If China continues this behavior, its neighbors will need an alliance to restore that balance. A reunified Korea with a large, well-trained, highly disciplined (and perhaps, if tacitly, nuclear-armed) military could be to a future Asian defense alliance what Britain is to NATO, containing an increasingly militarized and expansionist China.

Nor is it safe to assume that China would long respect the independence of an “independent” North. Given Xi Jinping’s hegemonic streak, how is this not a formula for an Outer Chosun Autonomous Zone? How long would a broken and vulnerable North lie prone to Chinese predation before it is devoured? 

In the end, my differences with Hong are really matters of timing, degree, and semantics. No, there will be no instant unification. But the idea that a post-Kim North Korea can persist, much less rebuild itself, as an independent nation defies both reality and destiny.