With the establishment in 1948 of a Soviet-sponsored Democratic
Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the northern half of the Korean
peninsula and a U.S.-supported Republic of Korea (ROK) in the
South, a thousand years of political and administrative unity came
to an official end for the Korean nation. At the same time, the
political quest for Korean reunification may be said to have
commenced. For the DPRK government, the reunification of Korea --
on the DPRK's own terms -- has been an overriding policy objective
since its very inception.
Korean reunification on the DPRK's terms was not only feasible
but promising at one time. As Nicholas Eberstadt shows in The End
of North Korea, the cherished goal of Korean unification is drawing
closer -- but it is not a reunification on DPRK terms.
Eberstadt has an extraordinary ability to find meaning
observable signals of impending systemic dysfunction, although data
are sorely lacking from a regime resolutely dosed to the outside
world. He astutely pieces together a picture of North Korea trapped
in a self-perpetuating spiral of economic degeneration. The regimes
commitment to hypermilitarization (it has been near total wax
mobilization since at least the early 1970s) and its insistence on
an especially idiosyncratic variant of central economic planning
have taken their toll. The most vivid manifestation of systemic
woes was the widespread food shortages in North Korea of 1995 and
1996 -- and one incontestable indication of economic collapse is a
hunger crisis precipitated by a breakdown in the national food
system. Eberstadt observes that the therapies that might restore
the regime to health also threaten to destroy its power.
As theeconomic base beneath the North Korean state falters and
the prospect of state failure draws closer, the lethal power in the
hands of the regime and the leadership's incentives to exploit it
to secure foreign support increase. According to Eberstadt, North
Korea's endgame exposes all of Northeast Asia, and possibly even
countries outside the region, to immediate and mounting peril The
author looks at what steps can be taken -- and by whom -- to
maximize the likelihood of a benign outcome.
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