What To Do About North Korea?

[Annie]

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11906064_1

[alot more comes before...this is the conclusion]

In my judgment, our best hope for North Korea is South Korea. Although the two have lived under separate regimes for six decades, before then they were one—the stable and undivided state of Choson, also known as the Yi dynasty—for more than 500 years, until the Japanese annexed the country in 1910. Korean unity has a real historical and cultural basis, every bit as real as the unity of the two Germanies, and there is reason to believe that opinion on both sides of the 38th parallel wishes it to come to pass sooner rather than later.

Neighboring countries fear this development, with reason. A united Korea would be as big as the former West Germany, would occupy a crucial strategic position—and would itself almost certainly be a nuclear power. (South Korea began to develop nuclear weapons decades ago, only to be stopped by the United States.) But if, for argument’s sake, such unification were to preserve South Korea’s democracy and extend it northward, the resulting state need not be any more frightening than, say, China already is. And if the United States and the democratic countries of the region were to support this unification, working always through and with South Korea, then the chances of things going well would be greatly improved.

It might be immediately objected that a nuclear Korea would inevitably mean a nuclear Japan. But that is a likely outcome in any case, given that North Korea already has nuclear weapons and will not give them up, and that the U.S. and Japan have no answer to the threat these weapons pose. Besides, is a nuclear Japan any more dangerous than a nuclear France or England? Not to mention a nuclear Pakistan or China?

The more difficult issue would be to keep a new Korea closer to Japan and to us than to China. In particular, Japan and Korea share a bitter and bloody past, flowing not least from Japan’s cruel colonial occupation of the peninsula. But China’s inveterate ham-handedness may help convince the highly nationalistic Koreans to keep their distance from Beijing. China, for instance, has recently completed “archaeological research” proving that northern Korea’s ancient Goguryo civilization was in fact “Chinese”—a classic example of preparing spurious historical justification for invasion or annexation.

I do not mean to suggest that the pathways to realizing this script are obvious, or that the script itself, whose premise is that nuclear proliferation has happened and will continue, remains other than very worrying. As Becker’s fine book brings home, North Korea is the model, and has shown us the stages that we may soon be going through in the case of other countries: fear as a nuclear program is discovered; greater fear as it is found to be more advanced than anticipated; tough words from world leaders, combined with empty threats; playing for time and trips down diplomatic blind alleys; recognition of the lack of diplomatic or military options; successful nuclearization nevertheless—and then the maddening dilemma of what to do with the world’s next nuclear power.

Now that Pyonyang has released the movie, we may expect many remakes, or attempted remakes. Unless we somehow close down the studios beforehand—and North Korea suggests how nearly impossible that is to do—the fundamental plot will remain the same, even as the casts speak different languages.

Arthur Waldron is Lauder professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and vice president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington, D.C.