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Old 10-09-2006, 03:13 PM
DVaut1 DVaut1 is offline
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Default When North Korea Falls

A very good article in the Atlantic Monthly about what the eventual end-game might look like on the Korean peninsula:


When North Korea Falls



<font color="#666666">"Kim Jong Il’s compulsion to demonstrate his missile prowess is a sign of his weakness. Contrary to popular perception in the United States, Kim doesn’t stay up at night worrying about what the Americans might do to him; it’s not North Korea’s weakness relative to the United States that preoccupies him. Rather, if he does stay up late worrying, it’s about China. He knows the Chinese have always had a greater interest in North Korea’s geography—with its additional outlets to the sea close to Russia—than they have in the long-term survival of his regime. (Like us, even as they want the regime to survive, the Chinese have plans for the northern half of the Korean peninsula that do not include the “Dear Leader.”) One of Kim’s main goals in so aggressively displaying North Korea’s missile capacity is to compel the United States to deal directly with him, thereby making his otherwise weakening state seem stronger. And the stronger Pyongyang appears to be, the better off it is in its crucial dealings with Beijing, which are what really matter to Kim."

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"The truth is, many South Koreans have an interest in the perpetuation of the Kim Family Regime, or something like it, since the KFR’s demise would usher in a period of economic sacrifice that nobody in South Korea is prepared for. A long-standing commitment by the American military has allowed the country to evolve into a materialistic society. Few South Koreans have any interest in the disruption the collapse of the KFR would produce."

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"Meanwhile, China’s infrastructure investments are already laying the groundwork for a Tibet-like buffer state in much of North Korea, to be ruled indirectly through Beijing’s Korean cronies once the KFR unravels. This buffer state will be less oppressive than the morbid, crushing tyranny it will replace. So from the point of view of the average South Korean, the Chinese look to be offering a better deal than the Americans, whose plan for a free and democratic unified peninsula would require South Korean taxpayers to pay much of the cost. The more that Washington thinks narrowly in terms of a democratic Korean peninsula, the more Beijing has the potential to lock the United States out of it. For there is a yawning distance between the Stalinist KFR tyranny and a stable, Western-style democracy: in between these extremes lie several categories of mixed regimes and benign dictatorships, any of which might offer the North Koreans far more stability as a transition mechanism than anything the United States might be able to provide. No one should forget that South Korea’s prosperity and state cohesion were achieved not under a purely democratic government but under Park Chung Hee’s benign dictatorship of the 1960s and ’70s."

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"The long-term success of America’s basic policy on the peninsula hinges on the willingness of South Koreans to make a significant sacrifice, at some point, for the sake of freedom in the North. But sacrifice is not a word that voters in free and prosperous societies tend to like. If voters in Western-style democracies are good at anything, it’s rationalizing their own selfishness—and it may turn out that the authoritarian Chinese understand the voters of South Korea’s free and democratic society better than we do. If that’s the case, there may never actually be a Greater Korea in the way that we imagine it. Rather, the North’s demise will be carefully managed by Beijing in such a way that the country will go from being a rogue nation to a de facto satellite of the Middle Kingdom." </font>



So, how much does the US gain/lose by ceding its interests in a unified Korean peninsula and allowing the Chinese to establish a de facto client state once the Kim government collapses (a fate that is seemingly inevitable)? Is this a paradigm other parties in the region (i.e., Japan &amp; Russia) can accept?

Kaplan (the author) makes the case that it *might* be better to let the Chinese deal with post-Kim North Korea (by tacitly allowing the Chinese to establish a more benign dictatorship in North Korea, which, while much less repressive than the current Kim government, would still be autocratic enough to maintain stability) -- as such a stabilization effort by South Korea and its allies (read: the US) could present monumental, if not impossible challenges. The Herculean task of unifying Greater Korea -- a task which is surely to be very painful and quite costly (read: likely exponentially more expensive than the rebuilding of Iraq) -- is a frightening proposition at best, even if all the parties were willing -- such scenarios, while dire in isolation, become even more calamitous when it's accepted that unification is almost certainly not in the best interests of many South Koreans AND that the continued presence/intervention of American troops on the Korean peninsula is becoming increasingly unpalatable to the ever-more powerful South Korean left.
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Old 10-09-2006, 03:30 PM
bobman0330 bobman0330 is offline
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Default Re: When North Korea Falls

I read the full version of this article. The author seemed to me to overestimate the goodwill China has in the region. Sure, the S.Koreans are annoyed with us, hate Japan, and trade a lot with China. A lot of this stuff is superficial though, and you have to recall that Chinese troops have been in Seoul more recently than the Japanese.

The point that SK won't be eager to absorb the remnants of NK is interesting and likely true, to some extent. I'm not sure how Germany's reunification experience relates, either as a roadmap for how it can be done or a cautionary tale of problems that arise. In any case, I think their wishes are not especially relevant. If NK collapses in a war, the probably result is US/SK occupation of the whole peninsula, followed by US withdrawal, leaving them more or less stuck. If NK collapses internally, there would be more opportunity for a Chinese buffer state of the sort the author postulates, but I don't think he really accounts for how strongly the N.Koreans will want to be absorbed by the South. Whether they want to or not, it's hard to see how Seoul could decently ignore an open request for annexation.
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Old 10-09-2006, 04:41 PM
AzDesertRat AzDesertRat is offline
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Default Re: When North Korea Falls

Germany is still dealing with the incorporation of the former East Germany. I think SK has looked at that experiment and has had second thoughts. NK would be many times worse than E. Germany too, as the latter had been considered one of the most industrialized in the Eastern Bloc.
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