How North Korea could control the South without ever conquering it
The much larger ROK is too unwieldy to absorb, but DPRK could still exact monetary tribute and exert political power
Andrei Lankov July 4, 2022
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A North Korean soldier stands next to a map of the Korean Peninsula at the Demilitarized Zone | Image: NK News (Jan. 11, 2022)
For reasons that remain unclear, North Korea has yet to conduct its much-anticipated nuclear test. But when it does, most analysts expect a test of a tactical nuclear weapon, a capability that raises anew the question of Pyongyang’s ultimate military goals.
Most likely, the DPRK seeks low-yield tactical nuclear weapons in order to neutralize the serious military advantages the South Korean army has. The nuclear devices that North Korea has tested so far are far too powerful and destructive for use in actual combat, but tactical weapons would bring Pyongyang one step closer to realizing its old dream of subjugating the South and bringing the peninsula under Kim family control.
Realizing this dream will still require decoupling Seoul and Washington. Most likely, North Korean strategists hope that at some point in the future, a U.S. administration will lack the will to get involved in a direct fight with a nuclear-armed enemy and seek to skip its treaty obligations, providing an opening for DPRK military victory.
Such a scenario is not highly likely, and it is not going to be realized in near future, but it’s becoming conceivable. Yet even if the DPRK does conquer the South, there remains the tricky question of what it would do next.
For decades, the answer was that North Korea would seek to communize the entire peninsula, but the political feasibility of this has been increasingly doubtful since around 1990. South Korea has twice as many people as the North and has developed into a very rich and sophisticated society, with a per capita gross domestic product at least 25 times that of the DPRK.
Unification with the North, even after a military defeat, would be destabilizing for a Kim-led unified Korean state. North Korean commoners would likely be influenced by the high living standards and cultural habits of their unbelievably rich South Korean brethren, leading to the quick collapse of the DPRK’s ideological constructs.
In other words, South Korea is too large and unwieldy for the North to successfully absorb. So the country’s leaders will have to find another model to maintain rule, and they might find what they’re looking for in real-world examples — from Finland during the Cold War to Hong Kong and Ukraine now.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced his country’s “special military operation” against Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022l | Image: KremlinEXPANDING THE DMZ
For a long time, the official North Korean line on unification implied that the two Korean states would form a confederation at some point in the future, which would pave the road to eventual unification much later. In the case of a military victory, it’s quite possible that the North Koreans will just force an unequal confederation on the South instead of attempting to absorb its rich neighbor.
Some hints at such a solution, strangely enough, can be found in the demands that Vladimir Putin put forward in February when Russia invaded Ukraine. In the first stages of the war, before the initial blitzkrieg went wrong, Moscow expressed its ultimatum in the somewhat strange terms of the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine.
It’s easy to understand what Russia means by demilitarization. Moscow implied that this would mean the Ukrainian army would be fully or largely disbanded and disarmed, with the country only allowed to keep small police forces at best.
The denazification slogan is more complicated. Partially, it’s a function of official Russian propaganda, which claims that the Ukrainian state is under the control or at least the deep influence of some Nazi forces.
What this most likely translates to in terms of policy is Moscow establishing political control over Ukraine’s central government. Russian supervisors would retain the right to control all domestic politics, and all political parties, media outlets and individuals that do not follow their prescribed line would be branded as Nazis and banned from politics (at best).
North Korea could follow the same approach in a scenario in which it wins a second Korean War in say the 2030 or 2040s.
Pyongyang would first disband the ROK military so the country would be helpless in the face of DPRK pressure. Then, North Korea would probably demand the removal of what it would label reactionary forces from South Korean politics, arts, education and culture — a thorough purge of the country’s society.
In practice, this would mean the DPRK would reserve the right to intervene in South Korean politics, easily silencing all political forces, individuals and media outlets hostile to the new system.
Massive anti-government protests in Hong Kong in 2019 in response to Beijing’s efforts to exert greater political control over the city | Image: Studio Incendo (Aug. 18, 2019)FINLANDIZATION
In other regards, South Korean life would continue in established ways. The country would keep its market economy, and ROK engineers would design new cars and microchips. Life in Seoul will lose some glamor but would not change in many regards.
This seems even more likely when we consider that the victorious North Koreans would need to extract material gain from their hypothetical victory, and to get what they want, they should not disturb the finely tuned mechanism of the South Korean economy. Thus they will seek to find ways to extract their due through some forms of obligatory payments and money transfers, though this could be a difficult task.
In a sense, such an unequal confederation under nearly complete North Korean control would amount to the Finlandization of South Korea. The term Finlandization, coined during the Cold War, refers to the special arrangement that allowed Finland to keep its market economy and remain a political democracy despite being a neighbor of the Soviet Union.
However, Finland had to operate under a great number of explicit and implicit constraints, which Moscow designed to ensure that Helsinki would not become a direct threat to the Soviet Union or a bulwark of the western forces that were ideologically and politically close to Finland. The country’s foreign policy was thus extremely cautious, and its domestic policy proceeded while keeping a close eye on its mighty eastern neighbor.
But the level of intervention and control over South Korean society under such a model would far exceed what one could see in Finland of the 1960s or 1970s. The sorry fate of Hong Kong in the 2010s thus might provide a better example of what the arrangement would look like. While the city still has its system with freedom of press, independent judges and so on, Beijing has increasingly intervened in recent years every time such institutions threaten its control over the city.
Again, this remains a low-probability scenario, as decoupling the U.S. and ROK to enable a North Korean invasion will not be an easy task. But this should still be kept in mind with the world in turmoil and many things previously unthinkable becoming possible. There are ways for North Korea to control the South without fully conquering or absorbing it.
Edited by Bryan Betts
ECONOMY
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