In an election year, both US parties are competing to outdo one another with hawkish rhetoric on the Korean Peninsula, leaning heavily into the strategy of confrontation with China through the US-South Korea-Japan tripartite alliance; a flawed vision that threatens to “erupt into a regional war, a full-scale war, or even a nuclear war.”
In her closing speech during the 2024 Democratic National Convention, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris presented the most openly militaristic take on Washington’s Korea policy “since the GOP convention that nominated [Senator Barry] Goldwater in 1964.” Harris’ hawkish view all but discards diplomacy to focus on herding South Korea and Japan together to form a US-led military triad to confront Chinese interests in East Asia. The candidate’s stance, echoed by the majority of the democratic party, raises what has been called a “truly baffling” prospect of a “Democratic president more aggressive towards [North Korea] than her Republican counterpart.”
This comes at a time when the virtually nonstop US-led war drills in South Korea have achieved a level of scope and intensity that far exceeds even that of the Cold War. Taking place in the heavily militarized Korean Peninsula and ostensibly directed at the ubiquitous “North Korean threat,” these exercises are in fact a preparation for a future US-led war against China as part of Washington’s bold new Indo-Pacific strategy.
These momentous developments cap two years of virtually unabated military maneuvers at North Korea’s doorstep, beginning in 2023 with:
- 250+ days of US and South Korean joint war drills
- 21 instances in which US strategic assets, including nuclear-capable weapon platforms, were deployed to South Korea
- 10+ UN Command joint military maneuvers
From January 1 to August 10, 2024 there have been:
- 180 days of US and South Korean joint war drills
- 17 instances in which US strategic assets, including nuclear-capable weapon platforms, were deployed to South Korea
With the advent of the Biden administration, the prospect of a negotiated peace with North Korea all but vanished with the ultimate collapse of the modest confidence-building agreement in 2018 between Seoul and Pyongyang and South Korea, and Washington’s North Korea policy shifted to empowering South Korea’s autocratic Yoon administration to spearhead the “end of the North Korean regime” while the US steadily incorporates Korean military potential into its anti–China front.
The “North Korean threat” has long served as the justification for the increasingly formidable US forward military position in Asia, but how much of a threat does North Korea actually pose to the US?
North Korea spends only $4 billion annually on defense while the US annual defense budget is close to $900 billion. For North Korea to engage in the offensive use of its military against the US would be little short of suicide.
In addition to this basic fact, the commander of US Forces Korea himself, Gen. Paul LaCamera, has openly stated that North Korea’s military posture and policy is to establish deterrence and defend its sovereignty, and has characterized Kim Jong-un’s top priorities as “regime survivability” and “preparing to defend his nation.”
Kim himself has repeatedly stated that North Korea: “will never unilaterally unleash a war.” Kim’s most urgent priority has been economic development under the “Regional Development 20×10 Policy,” an ambitious 10-year-plan to provide badly-needed improvements to civilian infrastructure and services for ordinary North Koreans.
In spite of the relentlessly “manufactured image of a war-mad Kim Jong-un,” recent opinion polls show that only 2% of Americans named North Korea as a threat to the US, apparently evincing the common-sense realization that a weak country’s deterrent posture is not regarded as a real threat to the United States.
Coexistence is an overlooked option
Current US policy in the Korean peninsula is an extension of its Indo-Pacific doctrine, and relies on coupling economic warfare with military and political pressure against Pyongyang to maintain the level of tension required for the continued deployment of US forward assets against China.
As Washington veers ever further into its collision course with China, it has recast South Korea as a “linchpin of the US-China strategy in Northeast Asia”; deepening the integration of US assets with South Korean conventional forces and inducting local troops to serve under US command as cannon fodder for a brewing regional war far beyond the confines of the Korean Peninsula.
The US considers tensions in the Korean Peninsula necessary to justify its forward position in East Asia, which is underpinned by the garrisons it maintains in South Korea and Japan and solidified by its de facto control over the nominally independent military forces of these states. The US has been attempting to prod Beijing into a conflict over Taiwan in the same manner as it has provoked Russia into war over the Ukraine.
One consequence of this strategy is that Washington’s hostility towards North Korea is becoming ever more entrenched in US foreign policy, with the US provoking South Korea, a US client state that lacks strategic independence, to escalate tensions with Pyongyang as a prelude to instigating a regional conflict with China. Under the pretext of deterring North Korea, the US is forcing South Korea into a brewing confrontation with China, in which the primary role of the South Korean military would be to tie down vital Chinese forces in a bloody inter-Korean conflict, giving the US a freer hand in the broader theater of operations.
To help cement its hold over South Korea at this crucial juncture in Washington’s grand Indo-Pacific strategy, the Biden administration has propped up the authoritarian and deeply unpopular President Yoon Seok-yeol, whose signature foreign policy platform is a steadfast commitment to allowing his nation to be dragooned into the brewing US war with China. According to the latest opinion survey, more than 66% of South Koreans think that Yoon’s subordination to the US Indo-Pacific strategy makes Korea less safe.
But what if relations with the North were treated as an inter-Korean or even a purely regional issue, and were decoupled from Washington’s broader anti-China strategy? The prospect of coexistence with the North possesses immense potential for stability and prosperity in the region.
A North Korea free of US-led sanctions and unburdened by an overriding drive to shore up national defense could arguably be a regional economic powerhouse. Given that North Korea has been vigorously pushing for ambitious economic development since its last nuclear weapons test in 2017, analysts foresee the North achieving meaningful economic development under the right conditions.
If geopolitical conditions evolve to the point where some initial meaningful economic engagement becomes possible for the US and South Korea, Kim’s domestic agenda offers important benchmarks for collaboration and support that should be a starting point for helping him achieve success on improvements in the lives of the North Korean people.
An economically integrated Korean peninsula in a multipolar Northeast Asia has the potential to be the “world’s next epicenter of change,” placing the combined economy of the Korean peninsula second only to China, the US, and India, with the North accounting for approximately one-fourth of this total economic potential.
Arguably, a fundamental geopolitical shift with respect to North Korean economic integration is already underway: namely, the gradual erosion of US economic isolation as the North strengthens its ties with the two of the world’s largest economies: Russia and China. These developments occur at a critical historical juncture shaped by an increasing trend toward multipolarity coupled with the shifting geopolitical balance of power in Northeast Asia.
America’s long-term strategic interest lies in unlocking the potential domestic benefits to the US of opening up the North Korean economy rather than attempting to maintain its hegemony through the relentless pursuit of regional destabilization in preparation for a future Sino-American conflict.
Washington should instead work to reduce regional tensions by halting the increasingly provocative nuclear-conventional war games in the Korean Peninsula and putting US-North Korea normalization at the center of US foreign policy.