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.
Very good take on this. I agree strongly with your last paragraph. I do not see any reason for North Korea to exist as an independent substandard version of South Korea. It literally has no reason to exist as a separate state, which is why it is frustrating when people suggest North Korea reform along the lines of China, as if that would be possible for the Kim regime to do so and survive.
We’re forgetting the last nail in this idea’s coffin: the Korean people won’t allow it.
Nobody remembers the World Cup. The moment the North is opened up, public sentiment will involve millions of people in streets and intense pressure to open up the borders to free flows of people, with cheerful hugs and Ajummas dancing in the streets. The social force will be almost unstoppable. Even if it’s just 20% of the population – and it’s more likely to be a huge majority – it will be contagious and uncontrollable. Think Berlin Wall, magnified by Korea. The DMZ will be erased as a border, after which all else is commentary.
I hear all kinds of bureaucratese in Korea about how management strategies will instantly come into play, but in private, more honest moments, officials will tell you that it’s going to be utterly hopeless to prevent the absolutely inevitable result.
Anyone who thinks this won’t happen knows nothing about Koreans, is participating in motivated reasoning to serve other argument, or is protecting an alternative vision unconnected to actual reality.
There’s not a lot of honest talk about this in Korea, because to plan for the eventuality is to admit that this is very likely to be the only possible route to unification. Even more dishonest is the lack of interest in dealing with the catastrophic social costs that will result, let alone the financial ones, which by comparison will be incidental. The social ramifications will take generations to work out, presuming they are worked out.
A lot of people have invested huge amounts in scenario analysis, not least within Korea itself, but nobody is intellectually honest about this subject.
Imagine the news headlines; imagine the social pressure; imagine the institutional reactions; imagine the reaction of millions of Koreans.
None of this is particularly mysterious or entirely unpredictable. What’s sad is the bury-head-in-sand attitude of virtually every “serious” (motivated) commenter on the pragmatic realities of unification.
Every scenario that hovers over “one nation, two countries” solutions is a rank hallucination. It tires me to have to listen to people plan complex integrationist procedures when virtually none of this process will be manageable past the first three days.
There’s so much wishful thinking in this field, it’s hard to credit planners at all.
South Korean soldiers are going to have to shoot South Korean Halmonis and halabojjis, and ajummas en masse.
If they’re unwilling to do this, there’s literally nothing the South Korean government can do to prevent unification in a post-KWP Korea. Absolutely nothing – nothing whatsoever.
And I just don’t see the 20-somethings I know shooting their grandparents and parents. It’s not going to happen.
The upshot is this: One of the biggest stakeholders in maintaining the status quo is the South Korean government. They have no real control over what happens in any unification scenario, and the result is almost certainly going to be total social chaos; it will cause political pandaemonium in the South and reconfigure the entire political scene in unpredictable ways.
Leading up to such a scenario, I’ll bet the chief resistance to opening up North Korea will come from South Korea, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the bulk of the South Korean people.
So long as a brutal dictator remains at the helm in North Korea, South Korea remains strangely safe. The moment talk starts, the moment the North Korean people push back and if they start to gain against a brittle regime, all bets are off.
I quietly wonder if South Korea doesn’t have a strong interest in maintaining the status quo – perhaps just as strong as the North Korean regime’s interest.