Looming Disaster in North Korea
Stories about North Korea usually focus on its nuclear program. But Perhaps they should start focusing more on what we will do when the place falls apart.To be sure, the nuclear program is a huge part of the problem. A collapse of the government in North Korea would potentially release onto the international black market vast quantities of nuclear technology, at a primitive but nonetheless deadly stage. North Korea also maintains large stockpiles of missiles potentially capable of being fitted with nuclear technology. China, Russia, and the United States have strong national interests in setting up contingency plans for securing such materials in the aftermath of a collapse of the Kim regime.
Potentially more serious but less dramatic (at least in the abstract) is the likelihood of massive refugee flows out of North Korea and into Manchurian China as the North Korean regime undergoes its inevitable death throes. Not only will the international media coverage provoke strong public pressure for humanitarian relief and associated security operations, but large refugee flows historically carry the potential for ethnic conflict as refugee groups compete with pre-existing populations for scarce resources. Furthermore, political chaos in a North Korea that holds massive stockpiles of conventional weaponry may lead to factional power struggles that may spill across international borders with China and Russia. National security planners in Russia and China as well as in the United States, Japan, and South Korea need to prepare for the likely necessity of substantial military deployments.
Not to be overlooked is the massive economic cost of reintegrating an antiquated North Korean economy into the modern economic world. The contrast between a backward North and a modern South recalls the challenges of reintegrating East Germany with the modernized West, a process that severely inhibited economic growth all across Europe for nearly a decade and which has lingering side effects that persist even now. South Korea and China will inevitably bear the brunt of these costs, but the second-order effects on the U.S. economy deriving from decreased demand for the U.S. treasury securities might threaten yet another hit on an already strained U.S. credit market.
The democratic world is on the verge of finally winning its half-century cold war against the despotic regime in North Korea. But the bill will be eye-popping.
