Heads Up
Here’s a smart move by the US Senate which could just hasten along the coming collapse of North Korea:
The Bush Administration is expected to back plans to provide thousands of North Koreans with asylum in America, supporting efforts to transport them out of China, in a significant policy shift.
“We will see the United States adopt very generous provisions for North Korean refugees, including relocating them from China and South Korea into processing camps in the region and into localities in the US,” said Chuck Downs, a long-time Washington consultant on North Korean human rights.
The US Senate recently passed a measure that would allow North Korean asylum seekers to apply for refugee status in the US, a move that is expected to be supported soon by the full Congress.
The story goes on to compare allowing North Koreans to come here, with the effect that free travel to the West had on East Germany (remember them?) in the summer and fall of 1989. But the comparison can go only so far.
If you’ll recall, after Soviet Premier Gorbachev declared an end to the Brezhnev Doctrine, Czechoslovakia and Hungary started to freely hand out travel visas for points west — even to East Germans. The floodgates were opened, and, before long, East Germany looked on the weekends like a Old West ghost town made of bad concrete. Not long after that, of course, the Wall came down and we had a single Germany.
It’s hard for a totalitarian state to allow just a little freedom, as China and Iran are also discovering. But I worry about the eventual Korean reunification in a way I never worried about the Germans.
Not that there wasn’t (or isn’t) anything to be concerned about by having one Germany around rather than two. Dennis Miller said it best in his “Black and White” special 14 years ago:
I feel about that the way I feel about Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis; I didn’t particularly care for any of their old stuff, and I’m not looking forward to any new material.
Funny stuff — because all good comedy is based on a nugget of truth. However, that’s not my concern with North and South Korea.
Unified Korea isn’t going to be a threat to anyone. Who are they going to invade? Japan? China? Russia? Hardly. Korea is the Poland of Northeast Asia — a small nation trapped between bigger, and often antagonistic, neighbors. No, a single Korea would likely have a smaller (although still very potent) military than does just South Korea today.
So what’s the problem?
Let’s go back to 1989 once more. West Germany had 62 million people, and the world’s third-largest economy. East Germans numbered a mere 17 million, and by Communist standards, they were quite rich. In fact, the old DDR was the richest Communist nation ever, period, full stop. So while reunification was an expensive proposition, West Germany could afford it without too much pain. Also, East Germans had been under the Communist yoke for “only” 45 years. There were still people alive with some memory of how a civil society functions. Easing matters, East Germans could often watch Western TV, and many were allowed limited travel to the west.
South Korea has fewer than 50 million people, and while they’ve made great strides, their per capita income is still only up to that of modern Poland. They aren’t poor, but they aren’t nearly as rich as West Germany was. In addition, their economy isn’t as mature or robust, as the Asian Financial Crisis of a couple years back showed.
Up north are 22 million of their starving brethren. Before the Communist dictatorship, they lived a brutal existence as virtual slaves of Japan. “Chosen,” as Tokyo called Korea, was annexed by the Japanese Empire 93 years ago. It’s safe to say that there is no one in North Korea with any experience living in a politically modern, free, democratic, or tolerant state. Travel is forbidden. Only a small handful of South Koreans are allowed north. There is only one radio station, and it runs nothing but the foulest sort of propaganda. And according to a story in US News & World Report a few weeks ago, North Korea even has concentration camps bigger than the District of Columbia.
Through no fault of their own, the people of North Korea simply aren’t ready to enter the modern world, and South Korea can’t afford to feed, house, re-educate, and re-civilize them all.
Whether or not there’s a war, when North Korea collapses there’s going to be a humanitarian crisis on a scale the world has never seen — 22 million scared, hungry, and desperate people left without any semblance of anything familiar.
And whether or not there’s a war, the United States is going to have to spend an awful lot of treasure and troops to help set things right.
Quite a daunting scenario indeed. But I think it’s a big mistake to be so intimidated by the prospects that we decide to prop up the Kim regime, if only temporarily, in order to defray the cost of clean up. It seems as though this understandable but mistaken logic has guided a lot of the strategic thinking in Seoul and Beijing over the last 10 years. And maybe in many corners of Washington too.
This must be the desired outcome. The sooner Juche collapses, the sooner the world is rid of that poison. The disruption, de-stabilization, and chaos are preferrable to the survival of tyranny and nuclear blackmail.
“Korea is the Poland of Northeast Asia — a small nation trapped between bigger, and often antagonistic, neighbors. ”
Small? Poland is at least as big as Germany, and at its height covered an area of land roughly equal to all of Western Europe. The ultimate downfall of Poland was establishing proto-Constitutional Democracy, and the subsequent chaos it produced, a few centuries before its neighbors did.
I know, it has nothing at all to do with North Korea, but I’ve gotta speak up for the old country.
The whole reason that there even is a North Korea and that it continues to exist is China. NK won’t collapse without outside intervention because it is too valuable an asset to China.
Human rights violations in China? Don’t pay attention there, look how much worse they are in North Korea.
Crazy dictator? The Chinese politburo looks downright tame next to Kim Jong.
Threatening Taiwan? What does America care about that when North Korea is threatening to build missiles and nuke L.A.?
The bonus that China has is that unlike the Soviet Union, it is growing in economic and military power. The USSR had to let its satellites go because it couldn’t control or support them any longer. China may not be pulling the strings directly in Pyongyang, but you can bet that thay have plenty of influence over what happens there.
North Korea needs to be divorced from Red China and brought down from the outside, the sooner the better. Otherwise we face the Pacific nightmare scenario of a simultaneous Chinese invasion of Taiwan and invasion of South Korea from the North. Bush needs to make it clear that he wasn’t kidding when he included North Korea in the axis of evil and do something about it.
Rantburg has some good stuff on this the past year.
There is a scandal brewing there, the Sorks and Chicoms not only were sending those who escaped back, but told the Norks if they found out it was going to happen. Some Rantburgers posted your thought, Stephen, that the Sorks paid attention to Germany’s reunification and want some kind of glacial movement reunification. Germany’s reunification was too expensive.
Frankly, they’re ingrates and we should let that area pick up the bill for reunification.
Bank’s closed and our troops are needed to protect the homefront elsewhere.
The collapse of North Korea will be very messy indeed, but it should not be permitted to absorb large amounts of our military strength. We have just begun the war with fascist islamism, and they are the evil center we should stay focused on.
Spend enough to secure the nukes and other weapons in North Korea, and let the South Koreans and Japanese deal with the rest. North Korean nukes and other wmds are the only valid concern we have.
We simply cannot control events there…there are too many forces that don’t want us to, including the South Koreans. And our attention must be directed elsewhere, to the people and ideologies that want to destroy our civilization. That battle has barely been started, and already absorbs a large chunk of our military capacity. The mullahs of islamism would love to see us tied down in North Korea.
North Korea is a sideshow, and once the cameras get in, it will become a hypnotic one…for awhile. We must stay focused on our central struggle.
“Chosen,” as Tokyo called Korea
OBNitpick:
True, but a simplification. North Korea uses the term for itself, in contrast to South Korea, where variations on “Han” are used. (“Hanguk” in Korean, “Kankoku” in Japanese, where “koku” means country.) Actually, there is one newspaper in South Korea called the Chosun Ilbo. There’s complicated reasons why.
Korean names for Korea.
It’ll be interesting to see how both China and SK cover themselves when the North falls, and the true extent of the desperation of the citizenry is fully revealed…
On a MUCH lighter North Korean note, the latest MYONGWATCH! is up at my site.
Stephen:
Some additional thoughts:
The South Koreans have, in some ways, the most fantastical course of action:
a truly controlled soft-landing, over the course of 20-30 years, where the North opens up, allows foreign investment, keeps its population under control, and eventually re-merges with South Korea (on the latter’s time-table!) as more of an East Germany than a Liberia.
Exactly WHY the North Koreans, if they could achieve this, would choose to re-merge is generally ascribed to some kind of “We are all Koreans” kind of magical thinking.
A reunified Korea may be a Poland, but it is one that would be feared by neighbors to both sides.
China would be worried because of continued irredentist claims (common throughout Asia) to certain parts of Manchuria—especially those where there are substantial ethnic Korean enclaves.
Japan, of course, would be worried given the luverly Japanese behavior in “Chosen” in the first half of the 20th Century.
In the midst of this, posit the following:
A reunified Korea, as you note, would require enormous money and resources. At the same time, South Korea would bear the bulk of the burden. To what extent, then, would South Korea benefit from the option of an Eisenhower “New Look”? That is, using nuclear weapons to allow conventional force cuts (conventional forces, of course, being much more expensive to maintain).
If you think that they might prefer that (in the process demobilizing a substantial part of their military), then South Korea today would, in fact, be UNinterested in complete North Korean nuclear disarmament, in the belief that they will inherit what could be a very useful weapon. Instead, if they were betting that the South would dominate, they might well WANT North Korea to do the hard part of building a nuclear force, in the hopes of “inheriting” it in the reunification process, and using it to hold the Chinese and Japanese (neither of whom like the Koreans, and vice versa) at bay while they rebuild North Korea to Southern standards.
Just a coupla thoughts….
>And whether or not there’s a war, the
>United States is going to have to spend
>an awful lot of treasure and troops to help
>set things right.
Umm…No.
The South Koreans forfeited any American aide post-collapse through thier secret agreements that funded North Korean nuclear and missile development.
America is leaving South Korea, and it is simply a matter for the ROK government to decide whether they over run the North before or after the North Koreans start shelling Seoul.
America is going to take out the North’s nuclear program, regardless in the near future.
Remember, Seoul is only a hostage to American action as long as the ROK acts lile a real ally.
It hasn’t.
>>Korea is the Poland of Northeast Asia <
What Stryker said and this: in 2003, Poland could savage thump unified Germany (if the U.S. let it), and the Germans damn well know it. The Poles ain’t gonna take no shit no more nohow from nobody.
The cold war actually ended in 1988 with the exchange of defence ministers between the US of A and the USSR.
All the rest after that was the fallout from the war’s end.
I believe we exchanged Defence Ministers with the Chinese a few years back.