Matt Yglesias

The Long Road Back From Reunification

Had some conversations early today with a minister in the government of Saxony that touched on some of the economic difficulties inherent in the transition from being a province of East Germany to being part of the united Germany state. Viewed from one direction, the transition has been quite successful. The West Germans ponied up a huge amount of money to help do adjustments, and the Saxony government quite smartly spent the bulk of it on infrastructure investments—and you can really see very high-quality roads, transit, etc. in the parts of the province I’ve seen. Everything looks quite spic-and-span, even moreso in many ways than in richer parts of the country. And as a consequence, average incomes in Saxony are now around 70 percent of what’s found in the West compared to less than 40 percent at unification. And an unemployment rate of 16 percent (compared to 12 in the West) is way lower than the 25 percent or so that immediately followed reunification.

Another way of looking at it, of course, is that West Germany invested a ton of money, East Germany was fortunate to be integrated into a big capital-rich country with access to all the markets of the EU, and 20 years later there’s still much higher unemployment and much lower incomes.

What this makes me think of most of all is the dilemmas that will be facing the government of South Korea if the DPRK ever collapses. The DPRK is much poorer and more backwards than the GDR ever was. They’ve been separated for longer. South Korea is smaller relative to North Korea than West Germany was to East Germany. And South Korea is also poorer than West Germany. All told, I think there’s ample reason to believe that the South couldn’t really manage a reunification process. Which is something their government seems to realize without quite admitting—their official policy is reunification, but in practice they fear a DPRK collapse. And they’re right to fear it. But political debates about North Korea policy aside, the fact of the matter is that that horrible regime can’t last forever. And I think it would make sense for a broader international community to start thinking about what we can do to support a transition process that’s going to be too big a task for South Korea to shoulder on its own.

After North Korea

Lurking in the background of yesterday’s interesting Robert Farley post on North Korea is a point that I really think doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves, the fact that in some ways the real nightmare scenario is a North Korean collapse rather than a North Korean attack. West Germany pursuing reunification with East Germany with a great deal of enthusiasm, and it turned out to be a pretty enormous economic catastrophe. It caused a lot of dislocations in the West German economy, inspired the government to try extensive fiscal stimulus that didn’t really work, etc.

And yet East Germany was in much better shape than North Korea is. East Germany was, by most measures, the wealthiest and most successful of the Communist countries. There’s also a substantial time difference. The end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall was 45 years. That was 20 years ago, meaning that if North Korea collapses in the next few years the DPRK regime will have lasted about 50 percent longer than East Germany. North Korea’s population is bigger relative to South Korea’s than East Germany was to West Germany, and North Koreans have been much more brainwashed and cut off from outside information. The upshot is that a North Korean collapse could put a nearly intolerable burden on the South if they tried to reintegrate the countries. And there are no real plans in place for international assistance, and no real way for South Korean politicians to disavow the claim to represent the entire peninsula.

I don’t have any novel solutions to this problem, but it’s important to keep in mind as part of the background to how these various North Korea crises are dealt with.

The Virtue of Unfought Wars

Michael Cohen makes the excellent point that it’s necessary to get U.S. strategic thinking outside the “counterinsurgency vs. big army” dynamic that has us—or, rather, the military and military-affiliated organizations—stuck debating whether in the future we should be fighting a lot of counterinsurgencies or fighting a lot of conventional wars against medium-sized countries. As he puts it with admirable brevity:

In the end, perhaps the focus of the US military and American foreign policy, writ large, should be to avoid counter-insurgencies — AND AVOID CONVENTIONAL CONFLICTS.

Quite so. Obviously one doesn’t want to rule out the use of military force as a matter of principle, and a country of our wealth and size can easily afford to maintain significant military capabilities. But it still makes much more sense to be dedicating time, attention, and resources to avoiding U.S. involvement in significant hostile military operations. Gian Gentile observes, against the counterinsurgents, that “A North Korean march on Seoul will not be a fight for hearts and mind.” No, it won’t. But a North Korean march on Seoul is a scenario we can almost certainly avoid. And since South Korea has twice the population of North Korea and five times the GDP, our strategy should be based around the idea that the South Koreans can and should be shouldering the bulk of the responsibility for coping with this scenario.

Some U.S. participation in South Korean defense is, I think, a good idea but this is primarily about stabilizing the overall situation in northern Asia and reducing the likelihood of conflict not that there’s some pressing need for us to be gearing up to refight the Korean war. In general, it’s the wars you don’t fight that tend to do you the most good.