Following its defeat at the end of the Second World War, Japan was forced to end its colonial rule over Korea, which it had maintained for 35 years. With its infrastructure and institutions destroyed and its population left destitute and traumatized by Japanese domination, Korea was a hotbed of political and societal unrest. The peninsula was divided into two occupation zones divided at the 38th parallel, with the Soviet Union controlling the northern zone and the United States overseeing the southern. After a failed United Nations (UN) bid to reunify an independent Korea in 1948, two separate states were created: the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the South and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North (DPRK).
The status quo collapsed in 1950 when Kim Il-sung, the Supreme Leader of North Korea, invaded South Korea in an attempt to unify the peninsula under his dictatorial communist regime. Buoyed by military aid from the Soviets, this invasion was nearly successful; the Southern forces were pushed all the way to the southern tip of the peninsula, holding only the port city of Busan. Just before all was lost, a coalition of Western states under the banner of the UN led by the United States intervened on the side of the South. The coalition pushed the invading DPRK all the way to the Yalu River, which separates the Korean Peninsula from China, and were thereupon counterattacked by Chinese forces. Eventually, the conflict ended in a stalemate, and the peninsula was once again separated into North and South at the 38th parallel — only now with Korea significantly more destroyed than it had been before.
The following decades saw the two Koreas develop in completely different directions. Whereas the DPRK became isolated from the rest of the world, earning the moniker ‘the Hermit Kingdom’, the ROK engaged in trade and economic exchange with the West and its allies; while the North grew increasingly totalitarian and brutal towards its populace, the South democratized and held its first democratic elections in 1987, and subsequently spread its culture to the rest of the world through new forms of mass media. Today, North Korea remains a poor, backwards country ruled by a hereditary regime with a population cut off from the rest of the world, while South Korea is a rich, prosperous, and stable democracy with an outsized cultural and economic influence relative to its population and size.
This stark contrast between the two states has sustained the enmity created as a result of the Korean War. Though a brief period of détente between 2017 and 2021 punctuated decades of hostility, this proved to be fleeting. Beginning in 2022, North Korea has steadily ramped up its bellicosity towards the South. Along these lines, the Kim regime passed a law authorizing the use of its nuclear weapons in the event of an attack on its command and control structures, removed references in the North Korean constitution to cooperation and reunification with the South, and abolished three inter-Korean cooperation organizations. Recently, the DPRK launched balloons filled with feces and refuse into South Korea, sparking ROK retaliation in the form of propaganda — including everything from K-pop to government messaging — that was blared into the North through loudspeakers on the border. Of even more concern is the agreement signed between Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 19 pledging cooperation and mutual aid in the face of “aggression” from the West, marking the countries’ strongest show of allyship since the Korean War.
The 250 kilometer long demilitarized zone that bisects the peninsula has become arguably the most important land border between the authoritarian world and the liberal-democratic world, much like the Berlin Wall was 35 years ago. Although South Korea’s high tech military is one of the best in the world, strong alliances with liberal-democratic allies remain necessary for the country’s welfare. Despite the legacy of Japanese colonialism in Korea and the use of American atomic bombs on Japan, U.S. President Joe Biden, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met at Camp David last year promising to strengthen a trilateral partnership in the face of Chinese aggression. Both North and South Korea remain geopolitically critical to both the authoritarian and liberal-democratic world, as they are close to geopolitical hotspots like Taiwan and the South China Sea. This inherently makes South Korea a key strategic partner for the United States and likewise makes the ROK’s security concerns relevant to U.S. policymakers. It is thus in the United States’s interest to pay close attention to affairs on the Korean Peninsula, for while tanks do not face each other down on the border between North and South Korea like they once did at Checkpoint Charlie, the future of the two Koreas remains alarmingly uncertain.