Dimensions: 9'' x 6'' 384 pages University of Washington Press Publication Date: January 2002 Paperback ISBN: 0295981296

This volume provides scholars and policymakers with an in-depth analysis of the strategic challenges that face the great Pacific powers (China, Japan, Russia, and the United States) in the Korean peninsula and offers an assessment of the choices that lie ahead for their respective Korea policies. Can the Pacific powers cooperate in the Korean theater--even in the event of sudden, dramatic, and potentially destabilizing changes within the peninsula? More particularly, how could dramatic changes in Korea's political and security environment affect U.S. national interests--and how should America be prepared to respond to these long-range contingencies?

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. Richard J. Ellings is president and cofounder of the National Bureau of Asian Research. The contributors are Michael H. Armacost, Gifford Combs, Chuck Downs, Herbert J. Ellison, Robert L. Gallucci, Chae-Jin Lee, Michael McDevitt, Marcus Noland, Douglas H. Paal, Kenneth B. Pyle, and Robert A. Scalapino. This summary is adapted from the editors' introduction to the volume.

For more than a century, the Korean Peninsula has figured fatefully in the international strategies of all the major powers of the Pacific region: China, Russia, Japan, and the United States. A small, secluded, and impoverished kingdom--as Korea most assuredly was not so long ago--might not seem like an obvious prize for great powers to struggle over. But Korea is at the crossroads where the national interests of these Pacific powers converge, and their policies for protecting and promoting those interests impelled their involvement in this once-remote region.

Thus Korea became a stage upon which the drama of great power competition was played out--often to a tragic script. When the Pacific powers assessed their interests in Korea accurately, they were, on occasion, brought into bloody conflict with one another (as at the turn of the twentieth century). If a Pacific power neglected or misassessed its interests in Korea, however, that too could lead to war--as the United States learned in 1950.

In the half-century since the outbreak of the Korean War, Korea has undergone a monumental transformation; so has the character of great power politics in the Pacific. With South Korea's ascent to affluence and its emergence as an open, competitive democracy, and with North Korea's simultaneous descent into mass starvation in the midst of a focused campaign to develop weapons of mass destruction under its dynastic socialist dictatorship, the political and economic contradictions within the Korean Peninsula itself have perhaps never been so great. By contrast, with the end of the cold war, political hostilities between the Pacific powers have been vastly diminished. Though by no means impossible, it is far more difficult to envision a strategy-driven military confrontation between these Pacific powers today than it would have been just a few years ago.

At the dawn of a new century, these local and international developments seem to lay the foundation for a dramatic and indeed historic change in the Pacific powers' interplay with the Korean Peninsula. Heretofore, in much the manner that Poland long served as "God's playground" in European power politics, Korea has been akin to an anvil upon which the great powers of the Pacific have wielded their hammers to forge world history. In the strategic environment that is currently evolving, however, Korea looks to be increasingly positioned to act--deliberately or inadvertently--as a driver of international events.

Today, indeed, developments emanating from within the Korean peninsula stand to have a serious impact on the national interests of each of the Pacific powers. The prospective developments are poised not only to affect the security and well-being of these states directly, but also to challenge fledgling attempts to construct a durable regional order characterized by concerted cooperation among them. On the immediate horizon, North Korea's quest to develop an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons--and the ballistic missile systems to target distant countries with these deadly devices--threatens to alter the security calculus that has maintained stability and peace in the North Pacific region for the past five decades. Moreover, still greater Korean challenges to international peace and stability may also lie in store.

Divided Korea's two-state structure is under steadily mounting internal pressures because of South Korea's successes and systemic North Korean failures. Indefinite continuation of the now-familiar two-state arrangement on the Korean Peninsula is no longer a foregone conclusion. Yet quite clearly, termination of that arrangement could entail terrible upheavals, with repercussions reverberating well beyond the confines of the peninsula. Coping with radical change in Korea and devising a new architecture for peace and prosperity in a very different Korea from the one we know today may be urgent tasks confronting the Pacific powers and the international community in the uncertain years ahead.

To date, unfortunately, such prospective tasks have been afforded precious little attention. Instead, in the capitals of the four Pacific powers, policymakers and strategists seem to be more comfortable today positing a continuation of the status quo in Korea than contemplating what alternative Korean futures might portend for their own national interests.

The factors accounting for a lack of forward thinking about Korea at this relatively calm juncture in world affairs are, on the whole, quite understandable--indeed, all too understandable. To explain the phenomenon, however, is not to excuse it. For policymakers are always at a disadvantage when they are taken by surprise by the rush of events. When they have not considered well in advance the range of plausible problems they may have to confront, they are more likely to commit costly errors. Given Korea's importance in contemporary world affairs and some of the plausible problems that the peninsula could face in the not-distant future, the costs of Korean "surprises" for inadequately prepared governments with interests in the region at stake could prove to be especially high.

This volume is intended as a small step toward redressing this large lacuna in policy planning about Korea. It presents "background papers" analyzing prospective radical political changes on the Korean peninsula.

Korea and the National Interests of the Pacific Powers in a Post–Cold War Era

With the end of the cold war, one era in global politics has concluded, and another has begun. At the end of an international era, the shape of things to come is typically obscure--and so it may be today. Nevertheless, important preliminary indications may be divined about international relations in the Asia-Pacific region.

A new and very different dynamic today evidently governs the interplay of the great powers of the Pacific. Thanks to the dissolution of the Soviet Empire and the earlier categorical rejection by Chinese leadership of the Maoist path in favor of a more pragmatic augmentation of national economic and political power, it would appear that the prospects for military confrontations among the great powers of the Pacific have been immediately and remarkably reduced, and the scope for cooperation among the Pacific powers looks to be greatly magnified. The incentives for mutually beneficial intercourse between the Pacific powers have been enlarged and reinforced by regional and global changes in the decade since the end of the cold war. It may be fair to venture that there has been no previous period in modern history when animosities between all of the great powers of the Pacific were as attenuated as they are today--or when the international structure of security and economic relations so encouraged national advance through commercial cooperation and international economic integration among them.

At the same time, however, analysts have warned of some of the challenges to peace, stability, and prosperity that may arise in the decades ahead as a result of tensions--or failures--within the region's post–cold war order. Globalization does not forestall the possibility of international conflict--or even major conflicts between major economic actors. (One may recall that in early-twentieth-century Europe, interstate commerce was flourishing and political liberalization was much in evidence--until the eruption of the First World War.) History is replete with examples of national directorates that made fatefully bad choices when better options were available to them.

A forward-looking assessment of the geopolitical risks and opportunities that major changes in the Korean peninsula may presage for the United States and the other Pacific powers requires a careful analysis of the current policies of the major political actors that engage in the Korean problematik (including the underlying thinking and domestic or international constraints that frame those distinct national approaches); an appreciation of the economic realities and international economic forces that would shape any new role for Korea within the global market and financial structure; and rigorous reflection upon the strategic implications of a radically different Korean political architecture for the Pacific powers in general and the United States in particular. The eleven contributions to this volume present the separate components that together permit such a comprehensive assessment.

The pivotal question on the Korean Peninsula itself, of course, is the future of the DPRK. Because the North Korean polity is failing economically and calcified politically, its long-term viability is open to serious doubt--and under the pressure of events, systemic changes in North Korea in the years to come may well be radical and discontinuous rather than gradual and evolutionary. A fundamental alteration of the Korean equation at this date presupposes major changes in the North rather than the South. The ultimate disposition of the DPRK will shape, and possibly recast, the entire East Asian regional order; and that disposition lies in the hands of South Korea, the United States, China, Japan, and Russia. Factors within North Korea may be consequential in determining, for example, whether the process of systemic change is inclined to be orderly and peaceful or wracked by violence, yet the ROK and great powers will ultimately determine the DPRK's future and its place in history through their complex relations and unilateral actions.

The United States and China do not have identical views on the Korea issue but have basic interests in common. Hence, cooperation has been possible on key matters. The possibilities for future cooperation in Korea, however, will depend crucially upon the broader state of relations between the two governments--which is to say that tensions between Washington and Beijing over seemingly unrelated issues could seriously limit the prospects for constructive Sino-American cooperation in the Korean Peninsula. Teamwork in addressing Korean problems will be vastly more difficult to elicit if other, non-Korean disagreements are poisoning the Chinese-American relationship--and it is all too easy to imagine how such disagreements could arise in the years ahead. If a future Sino-American dispute over Taiwan (or some other issue) takes on a life of its own, even mutually beneficial agreements concerning Korea may prove hard to secure.

Russia is of course the other Pacific power with longstanding interests in Korea. With the collapse of Soviet communism, the breakup of the USSR into fifteen independent republics, the deliberate demobilization of the once-mighty Red Army, and the continuing travails of economic transition, both the tenor of Moscow's foreign policy and the capabilities for conducting it have changed radically in recent years. Moscow still has important interests in Korea, and the Russian Federation's concern about the future of this vital region with great potential for dangerous conflict can only be heightened by Moscow's recognition of its newly limited potential for influencing the outcome of events in Korea that may bear directly on Russian security.

One might presume that Korea's strategic importance to the Russian Federation, together with Moscow's suddenly diminished foreign policy capabilities, would concentrate state attention upon crafting a careful and consistent approach to advancing Russian interests in the Korean peninsula. Yet postcommunist Moscow has been something less than a consummate promoter of its own diplomatic advantage in the region. Rather Russia now suffers marginalization, not just in Korea but in the entire East Asian diplomatic arena--and much of the explanation for that predicament lies in Russian foreign policy itself.

Russian security interests require close cooperation with the United States, Japan, and South Korea, as well as China, and recognition of the necessity of American leadership in the regional security structure. When and where Washington and Moscow share interests, it may be incumbent upon American statesmen to persuade their Russian counterparts of the fact, so as to prevent resentful sentiment from standing in the way of mutually beneficial cooperation.

Japan, a great Pacific power in its own right, also happens to be the United States' most important partner in East Asia. Japan is a colossus (despite the past decade of stagnation, Japan is the world's second-or third-largest economy) with vital concerns next door but remarkably little leeway for independent action, given its historical legacy, its postwar polity, and the narrow international channel that contemporary Japanese policymakers wish to navigate. Although Japan manifestly has critical interests at stake in the resolution of nearby Korea's deep problems, Tokyo labors under constraints that render it unlikely to take the lead in resolving the complex issues involved and more likely to be reactive and adaptive, cautious and incremental, in response to changing Korean circumstances.

Exactly how events will in unfold in Korea in the years ahead is impossible to foretell. But the interests and perspectives of the Pacific powers in the shape that future takes are surprisingly enduring. Indeed, it is precisely the "embedded" nature of so many of these interests and perspectives that permits forward thinking about the Korean question.