The Korean peninsula: On the brink?

The stand-off on the Korean peninsula has long been considered a holdover from the Cold War that has held Northeast Asia back from entering head-long into the post-Cold War era. A generation after the end of the Cold War, it is fair to ask why and how conflict on the Korean peninsula persists; whether the region has already adjusted to a post-Cold War security framework even if it does not live up to the ideal representations that some analysts had hoped would be achieved; whether the nature of the conflict has either transmuted itself or been subsumed by new, equally intractable concerns regarding the possession and proliferation of nuclear arms; or whether the economic and political imbalance between the two Koreas has grown so great that reunification is only a matter of time. Following a background summary of the history of the division of the Korean peninsula, this chapter assesses the peninsular, regional, functional and international sources of conflict on the Korean peninsula and analyses the likely future course of Korea’s division and implications for peninsular and regional security in Northeast Asia.

The accidental division of the Korean peninsula at the hands of Gen. Charles Bonesteel and Lt. Col. Dean Rusk in the bowels of the Pentagon in the waning days of the Second World War was meant to mark a temporary division of responsibility between US and Soviet troops that had advanced to secure territory occupied by imperial Japan following Emperor Hirohito’s surrender announcement on 15 August 1945. Based on conversations held at Yalta in the closing days of the war, the conquering powers did not foresee a Korea able to autonomously participate in elections or to select a government following decades of Japanese occupation without a period of trusteeship to be administered by the international community (Oberdorfer 1997: 5ff.). In the early days following the end of the Second World War, however, the Korean

peninsula was one of the early regions of Cold-War competition, fuelled by the intensification of an ideologically based power struggle among pre-existing Korean factionsin-exile that had led an anti-colonial struggle against imperial Japan. The Soviet-backed

North Korean leader Kim Il Sung and the US-backed Southern leader Syngman Rhee sought not only to consolidate their rule on either side of the peninsula with backing from their respective external patrons, but also to lead a unified Korea. Rising tensions between separately administered territories in North and South Korea hardened and led to the outbreak of the Korean War and to interventions by the UN (largely led by US political and military efforts) and the People’s Republic of China (under the auspices of ‘volunteer’ forces), respectively. There has been an active debate among historians over the relationship between the international and domestic origins of the Korean War. Some historians have emphasized the international origins of the Korean War, viewing the conflict through the lens of a great power conflict between Washington and Moscow (Gaddis 1972; Stueck 1995), while others have emphasized the domestic origins of the war and the pre-existing ideological conflicts between leaders dedicated to achieving Korean unification on their own terms (Cumings 1994; Merrill 1989). Following the negotiation of an armistice that remains in place to this day, the two Korean states continued their competition for legitimacy on the international stage through the 1980s. South Korea’s economic rise, a political transition from military authoritarianism to

democratic government and Seoul’s hosting of the 1988 Olympics gradually illustrated that South Korea was outpacing the North. In the wake of the Olympic Games, South Korea pursued a policy of Nordpolitik. This led to South Korea’s diplomatic normalization with Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the PRC, and opened the way for the opening of an inter-Korean dialogue and the signing of a 1991 landmark Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression, Exchanges and Cooperation (also known as the Basic Agreement). The agreement envisaged a series of practical confidence-building measures designed to bring about mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence between the two Koreas in the security, political and socio-cultural spheres. Chinese efforts to promote a cross-recognition formula whereby the US and South Korea would normalize relations with an increasingly isolated and economically needy North Korea in concert with South Korea’s rapprochement with the former Communist world came to naught. Given North Korea’s diplomatic isolation and the collapse or economic reform path of its closest patrons, many analysts expected that Korean reunification might follow the model of absorption set in Germany; however, South and North Korean leaders took opposing lessons from the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and from German reunification. Faced with an increasing gap in conventional military capabilities, North Korean nuclear

weapons pursuits in the early 1990s provided new grist for an extended series of confrontations with the US as nuclear proliferation emerged as the top US concern in international security. The first crisis in the early 1990s ended with a bilateral US-DPRK negotiation that resulted in the Agreed Framework of 1994. This promised two 1000MW light water reactors (LWRs) and annual deliveries of 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil in return for North Korea’s freeze and eventual resumption of the full range of safeguards under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) (Agreed Framework 1994). However, there were delays in providing the light water reactors and problems with heavy fuel oil deliveries, while North Korea decided to covertly explore uranium-enrichment as a means to nuclear weapons development. The DPRK established links with the Pakistan military and the A.Q. Khan network in the late 1990s in an apparent exchange of Scud missile technology from North Korea that would help Pakistan to augment the range of its missile delivery capacity in return for nuclear expertise, including centrifuges, aluminium tubes and other components that could be used by North Korea to set up its own uranium-enrichment capacity.