When North Korea Falls

Robert Kaplan, author of "Imperial Grunts", brings us this lengthy essay in which he looks at the long term effects that will ensue when the odious Kim Family Regime comes to its inevitable and pathetic end. Kaplan looks at how such a collapse might occur and how the major players in the area will jockey for position to take advantage of the situation in order to increase their dominance in the region, with a particular emphasis on what the Chinese can be expected to do. How things play out will be the result not only of strategic considerations and the events on the ground, but of local culture and history as well.

Given that North Korea’s army of 1.2 million soldiers has been increasingly deployed toward the South Korean border, the Korean peninsula looms as potentially the next American military nightmare. In 1980, 40 percent of North Korean combat forces were deployed south of Pyongyang near the DMZ; by 2003, more than 70 percent were. As the saying goes among American soldiers, “There is no peacetime in the ROK.” (ROK, pronounced “rock,” is militaryspeak for the Republic of Korea.) One has merely to observe the Patriot missile batteries, the reinforced concrete hangars, and the blast barriers at the U.S. Air Force bases at Osan and Kunsan, south of Seoul—which are as heavily fortified as any bases in Iraq—to be aware of this. A marine in Okinawa told me, “North Korea is not some third-rate, Middle Eastern conventional army. These brainwashed Asians—as he crudely put it—“will stand and fight.” American soldiers in Korea refer to the fighting on the peninsula between 1950 and 1953 as “the first Korean War.” The implicit assumption is that there will be a second.