by Donald Rosenberry

Created on: May 07, 2009

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea, is an enigmatic, mysterious and unavoidable political reality for the United States and her new president. The last and most tragic remaining political experiment of the twentieth century, the People's Republic of North Korea has already begun to challenge the new administration with the renewed threat of test firing an intermediate range ballistic missile theoretically capable of reaching the United States and of being armed with a nuclear warhead.

On the surface, it is easy to simply write off such hubris as so much ideological blather. That would be a mistake. While the administration arguably has its hands full with the domestic economy looming as one of its largest problems and its global responsibility largely taken with the inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the North Korean situation is minimized at our peril. This is a serious challenge for the new administration.

One need look only as far back as 1997 to see the global effect of disturbances in Asia. At that time, the government of Thailand decided to float the baht instead of setting it at a steady rate against the U.S. dollar, as described by Narisa Laplamwani In her thesis, A Good Look at the Thai Financial Crisis in 1997-98. Given that the Thai government already had bad real estate problems and was overextended with foreign debt, it resulted in the collapse of the Baht. This brought on a cyclic devaluation of currencies throughout Asia and eventually led to collapses of major banks in both South Korea and Japan. Much like the situation in which the US now finds itself, the solution was a monetary input (we now call it a bailout) of $40 billion by the international monetary fund. It still took two years for the region's economy to stabilize and it resulted in the end of the Suharto regime in Indonesia after 30 years in power.

Following the reconciliation between East and West Germany, the world watched with hopeful eyes to see if the Korean peninsula would take its turn and reunite. But that ignores the stark differences between the two situations. The difference in economic strength between East and West Germany was large, but nothing like the differences between North and South Korea. It has been stated that if the DMZ separating north and south were to be removed, mass immigration of North Koreans to the South would ensue. Unchecked, such an emigration would overwhelm South Korea and collapse

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>