The Future of the Korean Peninsula

Korea 2032 and Beyond

Mason Richey, Jagannath P. Panda, David A. Tizzard, Mason Richey, Jagannath P. Panda, David A. Tizzard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000414110
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book considers both Koreas - North Korea and South Korea - to examine possible pathways for the years leading up to 2032 and beyond, thus offering a composite picture of Korea and its strategic relevance in Asia and the world at large.

Through a combined South-North Olympic team and an effort of jointly hosting the Games, Republic of Korea president Moon Jae-in has marked the year 2032 as special in the future of the Korean Peninsula. Although the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has expressed scepticism about a combined hosting of the Games, the expectation in Korea is that this event will underline the shared destiny of the people inhabiting the peninsula and realign two states still caught in an ideologically fraught civil conflict that is one of the last vestiges of the Cold War. Chapters begin with a brief historical review and analysis of the present, before moving to consider how these will shape the next decade, drawing comparative and complementary analyses. No matter how contrasting the contemporary trajectories of both North and South Korea might appear, 'Korea' as a singular entity is an old concept still containing great possibilities. As the ongoing inter-Korean reconciliation process underscores, the futures of North and South Korea can be found in a complementary singular Korea, which would again represent an important political, strategic, cultural, and social space in Asia.

An evaluation of the future trajectory, social awareness and perception of the Koreas, this book offers a valuable contribution to the study of North and South Korea and Asian Politics.

Part I

The contemporary Korean Peninsula

1 Promise and peril

Korea in Northeast Asia

Mason Richey and Leif-Eric Easley

DOI: 10.4324/9781003148890-3

1 Introduction

Korea is the center of Northeast Asia and a transitional geographic space where the Eurasian landmass meets the Asia-Pacific maritime domain. Hence Korea is a “pivot point” and a “bridge” between China and the Japanese archipelago in the terminology of logistics managers (Armstrong et al. 2006). Korea’s importance has risen with economic globalization, but its strategic significance dates back much further in the history of regional rivalries, as a star in the China-centered universe or as a “dagger pointed at the heart of Japan,” as military strategists put it in the nineteenth century. Beyond sheer geography, Korea’s connectedness to the region’s key states is also significant. Both Koreas have an alliance with a major power, and the US–South Korea alliance and China–North Korea friendship treaty inevitably help shape Asia’s security architecture. The Peninsula is also optimally placed to become a comprehensive regional economic hub. South Korea partially serves this role already, despite its blocked land-access to China, suggesting the economic promise that the two Koreas could enjoy together if North Korea were to normalize licit economic connections with neighboring states.

Korea’s geopolitical, strategic, and economic centrality highlight the challenges and opportunities the Peninsula presents for international relations theorizing and empirical patterns in foreign policy. On the theoretical side, international relations scholars have used tenets of liberalism, realism, constructivism, and selectorate theory to study the South’s surprisingly rapid transformation into a wealthy, high-income, democratic country; puzzle over the North’s anachronistic survival in a post-Cold War environment; analyze how Seoul employs the US–South Korea alliance to flourish in a rough neighborhood; elucidate Pyongyang’s long-standing ability to play (frequently well) a weak diplomatic hand; and examine how North Korea could reform and/or how North Korea and South Korea could develop trust and cooperative practices (Kim 2000; Bueno de Mesquita 2004; Kim 2012; Nah 2013; Snyder and Easley 2014; Chun 2015; Sherrill 2016).

Meanwhile, the international community—and in particular other Northeast Asian regional states—have devoted great attention to the Korean Peninsula over the last 70 years. The Korean War, of course, had the support of Stalin’s Soviet Union (USSR), involved a multi-state military response led by the USA under the auspices of the United Nations (UN), and eventually witnessed massive intervention by Chinese forces. In the post-Korean War period, the international community has worked to establish conditions by which the South and North could develop economically, achieve reconciliation and peace, and perhaps unify. Efforts have included UN missions, UN Security Council resolutions, Four-party talks (South Korea, North Korea, USA, China), Six-party talks (South Korea, North Korea, USA, China, Russia, Japan), Sunshine Policy (led by South Korea with international support), hardline policy (e.g., maximum pressure), and strategic patience, none of which has sustainably met its objectives. The bilateral US–South Korea and China–North Korea treaty relationships devote significant effort to preserving stability—ranging from deterrence to cooperation—on the Korean Peninsula and in the larger Northeast Asia region (Easley 2020). Serious conflict on the Korean Peninsula has been prevented since 1953, but periodic crises threaten to unravel a fragile truce. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal occasions South Korean and Japanese experts to study the efficacy of US-backed extended deterrence, and, under certain scenarios, whether they should also develop nuclear weapons (Kim 2019; Lee, B. 2019; Song 2019; Yonhap News Agency 2020). The international community opposes this development, and relies on international institutions, regimes, and norms to prevent it.

This chapter focuses on three major themes to reconceptualize and assess the centrality of the Korean Peninsula in Northeast Asia. Section 2 examines the Koreas’ respective relationships with their alliance partners (Washington–Seoul, Beijing–Pyongyang) and how they fit into the overarching great power regional competition in Asia, especially US–China rivalry. Also critical is how these relationships frame efforts at maintaining peace and creating conditions for inter-Korean cooperation, and perhaps one day, unification. Section 3 considers the complexities of nuclear deterrence on the Korean Peninsula, both from the perspective of Seoul, which benefits from US extended nuclear deterrence, and Pyongyang, which claims its security is ensured by its own nuclear deterrent. This section also shows how the trajectory of nuclear deterrence on the Korean Peninsula has implications for the international nonproliferation regime. Section 4 turns to the promise of what could be: the economic strength of an integrating Korean Peninsula. A particular focus will be the possibility for inter-Korean rail linkages and the promise they hold for deepening connections between the Korean Peninsula and the wider region. Finally, Section 5 concludes by bringing together these strands of argument into a picture of how a changing Korean Peninsula can transform the Northeast Asian region.

2 Korea and alliances

In the contemporary period, the dialectic of South–North relations on the Korean Peninsula has emerged from decisions both haphazard and strategic, trivial and momentous. In many ways the haphazard and trivial have led to the strategic and momentous. Two famous incidents illustrate this. Toward the end of World War II (WWII), the Korean Peninsula was hardly treated with strategic gravitas by US policymakers. Indeed, two lieutenant colonels—Charles Bonesteel and Dean Rusk (later US Secretary of State)—with little planning and using a National Geographic map, drew the line delimiting the US occupation zone on the Korean Peninsula (Oberdorfer and Carlin 2013).

This area—later formalized into a demilitarized zone (DMZ) surrounding a military demarcation line (MDL)—running roughly along the 38th parallel north has been the site of Korean division ever since, with enormous strategic consequences. The first of which arrived several years later, in 1950, when US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, perhaps inadvertently, excluded South Korea from the “Acheson Line,” the defense line set by the USA against Soviet and other communist forces in Asia (Matray 2002). Although North Korea was already planning to attack the South, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung was emboldened, taking it as a sign of US abandonment of South Korea in case of the North’s invasion. However, Cold War logic dictated that the USA could not allow an anti-communist South Korea to fall to communist North Korea aligned with the Soviet Union (USSR) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Consequently, the USA entered the North–South civil war under a UN mandate, made possible by the fact that the USSR boycotted the UN Security Council (UNSC) votes as a protest against Chinese UNSC representation via the Republic of China (Taiwan), thus depriving it of a veto against UNSC Resolutions 82 and 83 authorizing international military action to restore the status quo ante following the North Korean-caused “breach of peace” on the Korean Peninsula. The US-established multinational force of UN sending states, under a US-led UN Command, pushed North Korea back across the 38th parallel and northward toward the border with mainland China. Following both the dictates of its own perceived national security interests and appeals from both Stalin and Kim, China intervened on North Korea’s side in October 1950 with a large “volunteer” army.

By late Spring 1951 the opposing forces had mostly fought to a stalemate, with lines settled within a few kilometers of either side of the 38th parallel. The war continued in this stalemated fashion until its exhausted conclusion in an armistice signed in July 1953. A reduced UN Command remained on the Korean Peninsula south of the DMZ, the USA established a formal treaty-based alliance with South Korea in 1954, and Washington and Seoul grew ever closer together economically and militarily, notably with the establishment of United States Forces Korea (USFK) in 1957 and the US–South Korea Combined Forces Command (CFC) in 1978. Despite a rockier post-Korean War relationship, in 1961 North Korea and China also formed an alliance, indeed the only formal mutual defense treaty that either Pyongyang or Beijing has signed with any other state. The 1961 Sino–North Korean Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty is expected to be renewed in 2021 as it was in 1981 and 2001.

In 1954 and 1961 it would have been difficult to imagine how today the existence of US–South Korea and China–North Korea alliances would play such a pivotal role in geopolitical and security issues in Northeast Asia. The main US ideological rival was the USSR, and both states were far more focused on the European theater than Asia. China was an economic and political basket case during most of the 1950s–1970s, and both South and North Korea were impoverished. Few predicted that South Korea would become a rich nation, a major trading partner in a global capitalist system, and a beacon of technological innovation. Even fewer predicted that North Korea would become a de facto nuclear weapons power.

Today, of course, the Korean Peninsula—both rich South and nuclear North—are at the juncture of Sino–US great power competition in East Asia (indeed in the wider Indo-Asia-Pacific). The US–South Korea alliance is a critical part of the US-led security architecture in the region, which is transitioning from a “hub-and-spokes” to networked alliance system including also Japan, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and nontreaty (but still important) defense partners like India and Singapore. This adaptable architecture has helped maintain a rules-based order in the region since WWII. At the same time, the US–South Korea alliance has expanded in several dimensions to become more comprehensive. A US–South Korea Free Trade Agreement underwrites large volume, high-quality bilateral commercial trade, while shared republican political values and friendly diplomatic and inter-cultural relations ensure free flow of information and reciprocal socio-cultural influence between the two partners. In its most focused utility, the US–South Korea alliance serves principally to deter North Korea from attack against the South, or other destabilizing actions on/around the Korean Peninsula. Along with the US–Japan alliance, it also serves as a potential check on China’s rising power in Northeast Asia, which naturally exposes South Korea to additional risk of coercion from China (South Korea’s largest trading partner).

A clear example of this was Beijing’s incessant pressure on Seoul following the latter’s decision to permit installation of a US THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missile defense battery on South Korean territory. As retaliation for Seoul’s acceptance of THAAD installation, Beijing imposed informal economic sanctions (covering everything from impor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Prelude to Korea 2032
• PART I     The contemporary Korean Peninsula
• PART II     Korea’s role in regional and global affairs
• PART III     Economy, politics and socio-culture on the Korean Peninsula
• Index