Mick Hartley

A look at Kim Jong-un's new "anti-reunification policy", from Fyodor Tertitskiy of Seoul's Kookmin University at the Daily NK:

In January 2024, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made a major shift in state ideology. Since the division of the Korean peninsula in 1945, North Korea had always held the reunification of North and South as one of its core goals. However, Kim abandoned this goal and declared that reunification was unnecessary. The word “reunification” cannot even be used in North Korea anymore. The Pyongyang subway system’s Unification Station became simply “Station” when authorities removed the word “unification” from its name.

The Korean People’s Army (KPA), for its part, was founded to reunify the peninsula. North Korea’s late founder, Kim Il Sung, who dreamed of reunifying the peninsula by force, worked to create the army even before the country was declared a state. In 1950, the KPA attempted to reunify Korea by force when it invaded the South, but failed. The Korean War ended in an armistice in 1953, but Kim Il Sung did not give up his dream of reunifying the peninsula by force. Kim even asked China for help in starting a second Korean War in the 1960s, while the KPA continued its propaganda about a “future great war of reunification” through the reigns of Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un.

This year, however, marked the beginning of a new era in North Korea’s state ideology. Kim Jong Un’s anti-unification policy will bring about obvious changes in North Korea and the KPA….

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has not only recognized South Korea as a separate country, but has even declared it an “enemy nation.” Previously, North Korean propaganda referred only to Japan and the United States as “enemy nations.”…

North Korean propaganda erases the humanity of Americans and Japanese. I believe that documents depicting South Koreans as inhuman are likely to emerge sometime soon. While “rotten South Korea” was to be liberated in the past, “the enemy state, the ROK” must now be wiped out.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol won by the smallest margin in the country’s electoral history, 0.73%. The possibility of a progressive candidate winning the 2027 presidential election cannot be ruled out. If a leftist government comes to power in South Korea, will North Korea abandon its “anti-reunification” doctrine?

I don’t think so. Kim Jong Un’s two-nation narrative is not just an expression of dissatisfaction with the Yoon administration. The real aim of the doctrine is to prevent the reunification of the Korean Peninsula under the leadership of South Korea.

As I see it, Kim Il Sung's great dream of reunification was predicated on the belief – not unrealistic at the time – that North Korea would be the stronger partner, and reunification would just be a matter of the South submitting to the North. Some seventy years on, that vision is truly dead and buried. North Korea is an economic basket-case and cultural desert only surviving through its links with China and Russia, while South Korea has become an economic and cultural powerhouse. The only conceivable reunification would see the North subsumed into the South. Clearly that is something the Kim dynasty cannot allow. So…two enemy countries, and no reunification.

I may be wrong, but I think perhaps for the majority of South Koreans the dream of reunification has receded over the years anyway. Why bother? They're doing fine, and the costs of reunification would be absolutely horrendous – never mind that China would probably intervene before that could happen, should there be a threat to the Kim dynasty.