Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un’s father, once said, “I would destroy the world or take the world with me before accepting defeat on the battlefield.”

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently warned that South and North Korea are on a collision course. The first summit between Trump and Xi could not reach any new agreement on the North Korean nuclear issue and Trump has ordered the Carl Vinson Strike Group to sail to the Western Pacific to counter North Korea’s escalating military threat. All these indicate that South Korea is facing the calm before the storm. What should South Korea do at this crucial moment? In order to deal with this oncoming storm, South Korea has to find the origin of this storm.

Since the International Atomic Energy Agency discovered in 1992 that North Korea had already begun to produce nuclear bombs, South Korea and the US have tried to stop North Korea’s nuclear development, first through the US-North Korea bilateral negotiations (1993-1994) and the six-party talks (2003-2008), but they have failed to realize the complete denuclearization of North Korea.

Since then, both sides have been blaming each other for this failure and have been engaging in a war of words. South Korea and the US have been resorting to two forms of economic sanctions: UN Security Council economic sanctions and secondary boycotts by UN member states. But these two measures are ineffective because they are not comprehensive economic sanctions and it cannot be expected that all members will fully implement them.

More importantly, China and Russia do not observe the UN Security Council resolutions as strictly as the US and South Korea. South Korea and the US have particularly put pressure on China to impose secondary boycotts more strictly, but to no avail. Russia also behaves evasively. Under the circumstances, South Korea and the US cannot expect such UN sanctions to be able to force North Korea to come to the negotiating table unless all UN members, particularly the four powers, impose comprehensive sanctions.

History changes but geopolitical conditions do not. Throughout history the Korean Peninsula has been a victim of the power struggles among and between the surrounding great powers -- China, Russia and Japan. After World War II, the US as a global power joined this power struggle.

The division of the Korean Peninsula into two separate states has made the security environment more complicated. In the beginning, the ideological division between the Western democratic camp and the communist bloc divided the four great powers and the two Koreas into four power group complexes: the northern triangle (the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea), the southern triangle (the US, Japan and South Korea), the big power quadrangle (the US, Japan, the Soviet Union and China), and the inter-Korean complex. These complexes influenced one another.

Changes in the four power relations brought about changes in the two regional triangles and the inter-Korean complex. On the other hand, the inter-Korean complex and the two triangles influenced each other. The end of the cold war has not changed the dynamics of these geopolitical complexes.

Since the cold war began in 1948, the northern triangle has gone through the following changes: the alliance between China and the Soviet Union and its complete support of North Korea (1945-1963); the Sino-Soviet split (1963-1990) and North Korea’s policy of equidistance toward the two powers; and the Sino-Russian-North Korean cooperative relationships (1990-the present).

After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, US-Russian relations turned sour. After Putin’s annexation of Crimea and support of the separatists in Ukraine, they became hostile.

During the same time frame, China began to adopt a double-edged strategy toward the US and a more friendly and cooperative relationship with Russia, as China had been alarmed by the US invasion of Iraq, its pivot to Asia strategy (2011) and its increasing hostile attitude toward North Korea.

Consequently, a new cold war period has emerged in Northeast Asia. Despite the changes within the big power quadrangle and the northern triangle, there have been few changes within the southern triangle and the inter-Korean complex. Japan is bound by its peace constitution but also almost completely depends on the US nuclear umbrella.

The above geopolitical dynamics explains why China takes an ambiguous position toward North Korea and why Russia cannot be trusted as far as the North Korean nuclear issue is concerned.

After North Korea conducted its second nuclear test in 2009 China adopted the principles of its Korean Peninsula policy in the following order of importance: peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula; stability of the North Korean regime; and denuclearization. However, if we consider the geopolitical dynamics of Northeast Asia, denuclearization is needed first for both peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and stability of the North Korean regime, not vice versa.

The same can be said about China’s strong opposition to the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-missile system in South Korea. This kind of equivocal policy of China is tantamount to China’s support of North Korea as a nuclear power. China’s basic policy toward the Korean Peninsula is to maintain the status quo, which means China wants to have North Korea as a buffer against the other big powers, as it is impossible to have the entire Korean Peninsula under its control or influence. It is also beneficial to China to complicate the US regional strategy and undermine the US’ position in Asia. Russia can also benefit from this dualist strategy.

In the final analysis, South Korea’s best strategic choice is to consolidate the southern triangle and form a three-power joint strategy to deal with the North Korean nuclear issue. China and Japan are both former rulers of Korea. But in geopolitics there is neither a permanent friend nor a permanent enemy. Considering the complex geopolitical characteristics and the nature of the North Korean regime, a negotiated solution is better than a confrontational one. 


By Park Sang-seek

Park Sang-seek is a former rector of the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University and the author of “Globalized Korea and Localized Globe.” -- Ed