The two Koreas

While world attention has been focused on the dramatic political upheaval in Eastern Europe, the same forces of failed communist ideology, dictatorial power and national separation continue to work quietly but aggressively on the Korean peninsula, a geographic area that was important during the Cold War and which will have even greater strategic significance in the emerging global economic competition.

Like that of the divided Germany, the day of Korean unification may not be far off. In the meantime, the circumstances there require a continued U.S. presence, and patience. North Korea at one time was edging closer to agreement with the South on the political issues of reunification. That movement stopped abruptly when Chinese tanks crushed the democratic uprising in Tiananmen Square.

North Korea, unlike the satellite countries that have broken away, politically if not physically from the Soviet Union, so far has managed to cling to an outdated political and economic notion that is being swept away in the rest of the world by the tide of democracy and capitalism. The North continues to behave as if there is a future in being a client state of either the Soviet Union or China. The reality of the global political and economic order says otherwise. In the coming trade wars, North Korea is an ally that neither Beijing nor Moscow can afford. Like Nicaragua and Cuba, it is a monument to the failure of an ideology — one that must be abandoned in order for its country to survive.

The reunification of the Koreas is a goal shared by people on both sides of the border. Again, like the Germans, Koreans want the artificial boundary removed, but unlike East Germany, North Korea has an entrenched, charismatic leader in the aging Kim Il Sung, a man who like Mao and Ho Chi Minh can maintain control by sheer strength of personality.

The immediate obstacles to unity are the slowed pace of liberalization in China and Sung’s power. When China surges into the future, North Korea, already abandoned by the Soviets, will be left standing virtually alone. Without Sung, it will be bereft and leaderless. In a demilitarizing and increasingly economically driven world, its people will stare over the 38th Parallel at the five-times-more-prosperous South.

Despite the inevitablility of North Korea’s eventual sagging and collapse, the United States would make a serious mistake if it accelerated the rate of troop withdrawal from the Korean peninsula.

Approximately 43,000 U.S. troops remain in South Korea (7,000 will be brought home in the next three years), which at this time offers the U.S. its only secure location for major bases and presence in the Pacific Rim. Korea is a key U.S. ally in the region, together providing an economic buffer against both China and Japan, providing a measure of security and stability in a dynamic region. It is a valued trading partner and an important key to the Asian market.

As the United States and its international allies near the 40th anniversary of the “forgotten war” that took 54,000 American lives, America should not forget that it was in Korea in the 1950s for important strategic and geographic reasons.

In the next milennium, the strategic imperatives will be different, but Korea’s vital geography will not have changed.