By Thomas Klassen
North Korea is unique in its isolation, secrecy and brutal totalitarianism. It is also a remarkably useful country for the world’s great powers ― the U.S. and China ― and for other nations in East Asia.
For China, North Korea is a convenient buffer between the 28,500 U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea. The implosion of the Kim dynasty that has ruled North Korea for 66 years would likely cause South Korean institutions and economic arrangements to dominate the North. The experience of East and West Germany demonstrates how the stronger half dictates the terms of reunification.
A similar result on the Korean Peninsula would be an almost unthinkable for China: U.S. soldiers stationed at, or very near to, China’s borders, along with U.S. style democracy.
For the U.S., North Korea and its unpredictable actions provide the justification for an extensive American military presence in East Asia, including 50,000 troops in Japan. The U.S. personnel are as much in South Korea and Japan to monitor and confine the rise of China, than to constrain the North Korean threat. However, the convenient fiction, especially for an Asian audience, is that the U.S. might is directed at North Korea.
A united and peaceful Korean Peninsula would raise pressure ― both in Washington and abroad ― for a reduction of the U.S. military in Asia. However, such a move is contrary to recent White House decisions to bolster U.S. power in the region.
A united Korea would also be less in the U.S. orbit than is the South today. South Korea trades more with China than the U.S., and reunification would intensify the China-Korea link. Historically China and Korea have shared important elements of heritage and culture, such as language and Confucianism.
Japan also prefers a divided Korea. A unified Korea, more than twice the size of South Korea and with more than 75 million people, will be a fearsome economic competitor. If reallocated, the enormous expenditures on defense in both the North and South today, including mandatory and lengthy military service, will bolster productivity. Although initially burdened with the costs of reunification, Korea will emerge ― as did Germany ― as a more potent economic and geopolitical force that either of its halves.
Japan, still enmeshed in a two-decade economic malaise, and with a population that is on the decline due to low birthrates, hardly wants a more dynamic East Asian neighbor.
Russia, which borders North Korea, has its own reasons to prefer the existing situation. The expansive Pacific region of Russia has always been poorly developed: economically and militarily. The huge nation has limited resources in the Pacific and prefers the balance of power and status quo, especially between the U.S. and China.
Ironically, South Korea also has gained much from the partition of the peninsula. During the Cold War, the Korean Peninsula was much like the space program: a high-profile contest as to which ideology, and economic system, was superior.
Economic aid, expertise, preferential trade arrangements, and much more was granted to the South by the U.S. and other Western powers. The USSR and China supported the North in similar fashion.
The ``Miracle on the Han’’ (named after the river that bisects the South Korean capital of Seoul) since the end of the Korean War is nothing short of astounding. Over a handful of decades the South has been transformed from a dirt poor, rural and devastated backwater to a prosperous highly urbanized and industrialized nation. This outcome would have been impossible had the peninsula remained united and the object of a tug-of-war between powerful, ideologically opposed, neighbors.
Fear of the North and the desire to prove that the South’s embrace of both capitalism and the U.S. were correct, provide the national and individual ambition to excel. Samsung, LG and Hyundai are but a few of the examples of South Korea’s vigor.
South Koreans yearn for a united and peaceful Korean Peninsula. At the same time they grasp the benefits that arise from North Korea and its behavior. Reunification will be a lot tougher to achieve than usually assumed. It will certainly not happen any time soon.
Thomas Klassen is a professor of political science at York University in Toronto, Canada. He is currently in Seoul as a Korea Foundation Field Research Fellow. Email: tklassen@yorku.ca.