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We like an intelligent fight on things North Korean, and Foreign Affairs has obliged with an interesting exchange between SueMi Terry and Chung-in Moon and John Delury on Terry’s piece "A Korea Whole and Free."
Terry’s piece is cautious about “collapsist” claims—noting the failure for such predictions to transpire in both 1994 and 2011—but nonetheless argues that the most likely route to unification is that North Korea “implodes” and gets absorbed by the South. We have repeatedly warned against the use of metaphors like “collapse” and “implode” because their meaning is completely opaque. North Korea is poor, but it is not a weak state. State failure in the sense of the West and Central African civil war cases is highly implausible. Without a sharper sense of the scenario—elite conflict, coup, mass uprising--it is not clear what Terry means or how we would get from “collapse” to the outcome she envisages: “South Korea’s large, well-equipped, and highly trained military should be able to rapidly assume control of North Korea and provide basic services until a civilian government takes over.”
Nonetheless, these details are not the heart of Terry’s piece: collapse is the premise from which she argues that we should welcome such an outcome. Her argument is that any transitional costs would be more than offset by the strategic gains that would come from removing one of the main sources of uncertainty in the region. China and Japan might be nervous about the emergence of a new power on their doorstep, and even the US might have to do some hard rethinking of what the US-ROK alliance would look like in the wake of “collapse.” But Terry sees all these problems as solvable through a combination of American assurances and forward-thinking—not currently in evidence, I should add—on the part of China.
Moreover, she makes the ethical claim that such an eventuality would result in a vast improvement in the humanitarian and human rights situation in the country, another reason to view the outcome—as President Park did—as a bonanza or jackpot (see our dissection of the Dresden speech here).
However, her major claims are economic ones, some plausible and others more dubious. She leads with the gains to be had from shrinking the militaries of the two countries, allowing these workers to move into the workforce earlier and offsetting the problem of South Korea’s aging population. At present, South Korea actually has a significant problem absorbing younger workers into employment, as anyone familiar with the problem of the stay-at-home 20-somethings in Korea knows. In principle, shrinking the military in North Korea would yield economic gains as well, depending however on how quickly that labor can be redeployed. Integration of the two labor markets is more problematic: it could pose substantial political as well as economic challenges, particularly for lower-income South Korean workers.
Nonetheless, claims about the longer-run benefits of North-South integration are more plausible, as my colleague Marc Noland has shown. In a normal world, South Korea would clearly be North Korea’s leading trading partner, and by a large margin.
Given these benefits, Terry argues that South Korea and the US should stop propping up North Korea and get on the unification bandwagon. Nor should we be afraid to take tough responses to provocations or to tighten sanctions for fear of the consequences.
We are not entirely sure who Terry is arguing with; it seems like she is pushing on an open door. The US has hardly “propped up” North Korea since 2008, and not in any significant way extended aid since 2002 at the tail-end of the Agreed Framework era. The only North-South exchange currently “propping up” the regime is Kaesong; commercial trade and aid withered under Lee Myung Bak, and particularly after the sinking of the Cheonan.
On one point, however, we strongly concur with Terry. It is important to do more contingency planning than we have; see the excellent report by Victor Cha and Dave Kang on the numerous holes in unification planning. Indeed, these holes could well puncture Terry’s more rosy picture. We were struck—as were Moon and DeLury--by the parallels between the upbeat assessment of how the fall of Saddam Hussein would be the beginning of a new democratic era, with virtually all of the same arguments deployed about democracy, a market economy, and the management of the regional fallout. Put differently, for Terry’s happy vision to occur we certainly need much more thinking about scenarios, including those that might involve a more gradual approach to absorption than Terry envisions.
Chung-in Moon and John DeLury raise all of these issues and more, noting that the likely transition path does not match Terry’s presumptions and probably throwing more cold water on unification than is warranted. Although they call it reunification, Moon’s and DeLury’s solution is really more like détente: engage North Korea, wean it off its self-destructive track, and effectively kick the can of unification down the road, indeed off to a near-infinite horizon. In effect, their solution is a North Korea that pursues what for it would be a Third Way: abandoning the excesses of Kimism for a modified Dengism, but by no means embracing capitalist democracy.
Morally, my heart is with Terry: I don’t see much joy in engaging and propping up the Kim family dynasty, which is effectively what Moon and DeLury argue we have to do. But Terry’s most important message is that we really don’t know what we are doing with respect to a problem of the magnitude of absorbing North Korea, and this undercuts her “what, me worry?” stance. In the post-war period, the Afghanistans and Iraqs outweigh the Germanys and Japans, which were in any case already advanced industrial states at the time of their interwar descent into Nazism and militarism.
