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 \o7 juche\f7 , 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.
