Reunified Korea Could Put Interests of Major Powers on Collision Course

No one likes to talk about it, but the quiet international battle over the future of Korea is now under way in earnest. It is a complex, high-stakes affair, one that could ultimately pit the United States against China, or Japan against Korea, or China against Japan.

At stake is the reunification of Korea. Will South and North Korea ultimately join together once again, as West and East Germany did after the fall of the Berlin Wall? How will the reunified Korea operate? Who will govern it?

And then there are the submerged issues of particular importance to Washington: What would a reunified Korea’s foreign and defense policies be like? Would the new Korea preserve the existing South Korean alliance with the United States? Would American troops be stationed in a reunified Korea?

The truth is that all the major powers involved in Northeast Asia have their own hidden interests in how these questions are resolved. And over the next few years, these interests are likely to conflict.

For the past two years, questions about the future of Korea have been overshadowed by the more immediate crisis over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Now two new developments have brought Korean reunification into focus once again.

The first was the deal with the Clinton Administration on June 13 under which North Korea, in exchange for freezing its nuclear weapons program, will get two South Korean nuclear reactors, along with hefty supplies of fuel oil from the United States and its allies.

The new agreement merely spells out the details of an earlier deal made by the Clinton Administration last October. But it shows for the first time that, for better or worse, the previous nuclear deal is really going to stick. And it also demonstrates that North Korea urgently needs the new energy supplies it will get under the agreement.

The second development was North Korea’s stunning decision a few days later to ask South Korea for free rice. That action ran contrary to decades of North Korean commitment to an ideology of juche , or self-reliance. And it showed, even more than the nuclear deal, that North Korea’s economy is reaching the point of desperation.

The Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, or whoever else is running things in North Korea, is having trouble feeding his 22 million subjects. The rice deal raises the prospect that North Korea might someday collapse or, to avoid that, be willing to enter into a deal for reunification.

The problem is that even if South and North Korea should want to reunite, they will not be working in a vacuum. Other countries will be pursuing their own agendas for the future of Korea. What follows is a handicap sheet for the most important strategic battle in Asia today.

JAPAN: Of all countries, Japan seems to have the strongest interest in keeping Korea divided. Korea reunited could threaten it militarily and economically.

Think what it would mean for Japan to have a neighbor with the combined military strength of the two Koreas, with the sense of revived nationalism that would come with reunification and with the anti-Japanese sentiments that are part of Korean history. At the moment, South Korea has more than 600,000 troops and North Korea has more than 1 million; Japan’s Self-Defense Forces have a strength of about 240,000.

Economically, Korean reunification would mean that South Korean companies would have access to a new source of cheap labor in North Korea. Where Japan has to move factories to other countries to take advantage of lower labor costs, the Korean companies would have new workers on their own soil, speaking the same language.

Over the past few years, Japan and the United States have often worked closely together in their policies toward Korea. Both want to stop the North Korean nuclear program. But when it comes to Korean reunification, they may not cooperate so well.

What will Japan do? It could attempt to develop close ties to North Korea and give the country plenty of aid, in an effort to keep it alive as long as possible. Japan has made moves in this direction before, such as when former Deputy Prime Minister Shin Kanemaru led a Liberal Democratic Party delegation to North Korea in 1990.

If reunification seemed inevitable, Japan would try to make sure the new Korea was demilitarized to the greatest extent possible. It could argue, logically, that the two Koreas kept large armies mostly for use against one another and that many of these forces should be demobilized.

CHINA: The Chinese, with an army of about 4 million, would not face the same potential military threat from a reunified Korea that Japan would. But on the whole, China seems to prefer things the way they are now. After all, it already has ties with both Koreas.

For China, North Korea serves as a convenient buffer between its own territory in Manchuria and the outside world. A reunited Korea, if it is capitalist, would amount to a new ideological threat on China’s borders.

Korean reunification also would increase the potential for conflict between China and the United States. If a united Korea had the same defense ties as South Korea now has, then there could be American troops right across the border from China. The last time Chinese leaders faced that prospect was in 1950, during the Korean War, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s forces approached the Yalu River. In response, China sent its own forces into battle.

RUSSIA: No one can know for sure these days what Russia’s policies toward Korea, or the rest of East Asia, are going to be. For the moment, Russia is too unpredictable.

But the Russians had close ties with North Korea for a long time, and they know so much about the country that they find it hard to stay away. Until last month, the Russians were hoping that somehow, the nuclear deal could be arranged in such a way that they would get the contract to supply North Korea with nuclear reactors.

Russia doesn’t seem to have any reason to oppose the reunification of Korea, and indeed might be enthusiastic about the idea. It might offer itself as some sort of diplomatic intermediary to help out on reunification, hoping that such a role would enable it to expand its influence in that part of the world.

THE UNITED STATES: Unlike Japan and China, the United States has no strong interest in keeping the Koreas divided. Indeed, Korean reunification would create a big country in Northeast Asia directly between those two great powers.

A reunited Korea would appear to be a natural ally for the United States. But that raises the most delicate question of all: What about the U.S. bases and the 37,000 American troops in South Korea? Would they stay?

The Pentagon’s latest official statement of Asian strategy, issued in February, carefully notes that American forces are in South Korea not just in defense against the North Korean threat but also “in the interest of regional stability.” In other words, the United States would want its troops there, even if there were no North Korea.

Two weeks from now, South Korean President Kim Young Sam will make a state visit to Washington for a new round of talks with President Clinton. You can bet that the possibility of Korean reunification will be on the minds of both men.

You can also bet that, when it comes time for Clinton and Kim to hold a joint news conference, neither will want to talk about a reunified Korea or its defense ties.

Such news conferences are frequently heavily larded with questions about domestic U.S. issues that have nothing to do with the subjects that Clinton and his fellow head of government have been talking about. This is one instance when both leaders would welcome that.

Sure, Clinton and Kim will both say they favor a reunified Korea. But how that happens is a subject too important and just too touchy for them to talk about right now.