Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement

Chapter 1
THE PARALYSIS OF AMERICAN POLICY
The question is not will this country disintegrate, but rather how it will disintegrate, by implosion or explosion, and when.
--Gen. Gary Luck, commander of U.S. forces in Korea, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, March 16, 1996

When you hear about starvation in North Korea, a lot of very level-headed people think, "There is no way a country like that can survive." Well, I can guarantee you this: I'm here to tell you with absolute certainty those guys will tough it out for centuries just the way they are. Neither the United States nor any other country is going to be able to force a collapse of that government in North Korea.
--Eason Jordan, president, CNN International Networks, in a lecture at Harvard University, March 10, 1999, reporting on nine visits to North Korea
The debate over whether North Korea will collapse--and whether the United States should promote its collapse--has paralyzed American policymaking relating to Korea. Unable to resolve this debate, the United States has been marking time, watching to see what develops in Pyong-yang and keeping its options open with a policy of "limited engagement." In the absence of coherent, long-term goals, successive administrations have improvised ad hoc responses to a series of crises precipitated by Pyongyang in pursuit of its own objectives.
The debate has been framed simplistically in terms of a stark choice: on the one hand, implosion or explosion, leading to the collapse of the North Korean state; on the other, the survival of the Kim Jong Il regime unaltered. Yet a realistic assessment conducted without ideological blinders suggests that the most likely outcome is an intermediate one in which the North Korean state survives, but only after major changes in the character of the Workers Party regime and its leadership. In the chapters that follow I explain the four key factors underlying this assessment. Against this background, it will then be possible to define the policy choices confronting the United States with respect to the unification of Korea, the future of the American military presence, and the prevention of a nuclear arms race in Northeast Asia.
Expectations of a collapse increased steadily during the eight years of the Clinton administration, stimulated first by the death of Kim Il Sung and thereafter by famine and industrial stagnation in the North. When the United States concluded its nuclear freeze agreement with Pyongyang in October 1994, the White House and State Department openly defended the accord against Republican attacks by predicting a collapse. To critics who objected to building civilian nuclear power reactors for Pyongyang in return for the freeze, one official responded that it would take a decade to build the reactors "and that is almost certainly a sufficient period of time for their regime to have collapsed. The country simply won't exist then because it will have been absorbed by South Korea."1 Ten months later, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland wrote that "although they don't say so publicly, Clinton foreign policy aides assume that the isolated, destitute regime of North Korea will collapse before the promised reactors are built, taking the United States off the hook."2
On January 21, 1996, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake invited six nongovernment specialists to a discussion in the White House Situation Room. Lake was preparing for a trip to South Korea. Eight U.S. officials dealing with Korea participated, and all of them, including Lake, rejected my view that North Korea would survive as a separate state for the indefinite future. Most of them scoffed at my warning that the U.S. failure to honor the freeze agreement by lifting economic sanctions might lead North Korea to resume its nuclear weapons program, arguing that its economic plight and fear of a collapse make it dependent on the United States.
One of those present at the White House meeting, Stanley Roth, who served as director for East Asian affairs in the National Security Council during 1994 and 1995, told a Los Angeles Times reporter soon after leaving this post that U.S. policy was being formulated "in the context of an imminent collapse."3 Roth bet a former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Richard Solomon, that the collapse would come within a year.4 In March 1997, Vice President Albert Gore exemplified the thinking then prevailing in Washington when he pointed northward during a photo-op at Panmunjom, declaring that "the cold war survives here, but not for long because their system is collapsing."5