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Transnational Thursday for January 18, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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North Korea

Kim Jong Un says he no longer wants to reunify with South Korea:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country would no longer pursue reconciliation with South Korea and called for rewriting the North’s constitution to eliminate the idea of shared statehood between the war-divided countries, state media said Tuesday.

The historic step to discard a decades-long pursuit of a peaceful unification, which was based on a sense of national homogeneity shared by both Koreas, comes amid heightened tensions where the pace of both Kim’s weapons development and the South’s military exercises with the United States have intensified in a tit-for-tat.

Not that all that much progress was happening towards reunification before, but still I guess its newsworthy.

North Korea has also sent its Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui to Russia to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In the west this has raised suspicions on North Korea provided more weaponry for Russia in the Ukraine conflict.

If the United States gets embroiled in simultaneous hot wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the Taiwan strait, it massively changes the potential success calculus for a North Korean Invasion. Especially now that it’s starting to become apparent that ammunition stocks for Western advanced weapons are not very well supplied. That doesn’t mean that Kim will necessarily go for it, but at the very least it gives him a card to bluff with.

South Korea could put up a good fight conventionally. The casualties would be immense because of the extreme volume of artillery pointed at Seoul, but much of NK’s weaponry and missile stock is extremely degraded, missile defense is antiquated and troops are poorly fed and trained. Leadership is extremely concentrated in Pyongyang. There are a lot of reasons to believe it would be a pretty quick war.

If the US pulled out China would be even less likely to intervene in support of Kim, and honestly even now I suspect they’d let SK take out the leadership (in the event of Kim making a move) and then step in to put someone in power in the north, and everyone would tacitly be fine with it because it’s better for China to pay for reconstruction.

South Korea unlike most of the countries in NATO actually has decent artillery capability and the ability to conscript. I suspect North Korean equipment is in better shape than expected. Most of the lines about their starving troops and rusted artillery sound suspiciously similar to the media line about Russia in the first year of the Ukraine war.

IMO the real danger is the Chinese armies in that theatre. They have the training and technology that North Korea lacks and no shortage in numbers. It's unlikely that North Korea would strike without Chinese approval and assistance, though they are wary of Chinese influence.