For reasons that readers of this column will certainly be aware of, the world seems consumed with Ukraine right now.
In the face of what one Chinese scholar recently called the most important conflict since World War II, other important issues have been falling off the radar, starting with what has the ominous appearance of a mounting crisis of COVID-19 infections in China itself, after two years of success in containing the virus.
The rest of the world is not standing still because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, of course, whatever appearance the headlines may give. Just beneath the surface, dramatic changes are taking place that will change region after region, or possibly even broadly affect life around the world in general.
Far more lives have been lost in recent months in a conflict in Ethiopia that the international media pays scant heed to than in Ukraine. The other day, meanwhile, India confirmed that it had accidentally fired an apparently unarmed missile deep into the territory of its neighbor and longtime adversary Pakistan.
The best example of ongoing largely subterranean conflicts, though, is in Northeast Asia, a region where I lived and worked for over a decade, beginning in 1998. Since that time, North Korea has alternated between moments of relative quiescence and periods that have ranged from outright belligerence to more carefully calibrated demonstrations of its growing capacities in nuclear weapons and ballistic missile development.
So far, in the global scheme of things, the muscle-flexing by Pyongyang has yielded surprisingly little change, whether that means negotiated understandings with outside powers or a meaningfully altered stance toward the country by the United States and North Korea’s neighbors. Now, however, with recent developments, it looks like that era of glacial movement is ending. In recent months, after nearly 10 years in power, Kim Jong Un has been rolling out ominous new weapons systems at an accelerating pace, including a new intercontinental ballistic missile system last week that Washington called a “serious escalation.”
Reports this morning of a failed North Korean missile test outside Pyongyang do nothing to change the significance of this development, which has been anything but a one-off. During the rule of the third member of the Kim Dynasty, the present leader—though once regarded as a spoiled and possibly dissolute political lightweight—has tested four nuclear weapons and launched more than 130 missiles, the latest of which were designed to be capable of reaching most of the continental United States. By comparison, his father, Kim Jong Il, whose rule I covered, launched a “mere” 16 missiles during 17 years in power.
The big, if quiet news here is only indirectly about North Korea’s new weapons systems. The more dramatic developments involve the still barely audible but momentous regional responses to Pyongyang’s development of them. In their separate ways, both Japanese and South Korean politics and national security policies are being transformed by North Korea’s actions.
Japan in recent days has seen the most public and high-level reconsideration of one of that country’s most important postwar principles: that the only country to have ever suffered attack by atomic weapons would never develop nuclear arms or even allow them to be hosted on its national territory. This came in the form of a statement by Abe Shinzo, the longtime Japanese prime minister who left office in 2020, saying his country should abandon the taboo on hosting U.S. nuclear weapons.
In their separate ways, both Japanese and South Korean politics and national security policies are being transformed by North Korea’s actions.
Abe’s ideas were publicly rejected by the current prime minister, Kishida Fumio. But the fact that he felt comfortable broaching such a topic should be seen as deeply significant in terms of the shifting national security outlook in the country with the world’s third-largest economy.
The changed political environment around defense and armament in Japan has been echoed recently in South Korea, and for similar reasons. Politicians in Seoul have recently urged the country to consider developing its own independent nuclear arms capacity, as well as the homegrown development of major new weapons systems, including nuclear submarines. South Korean President-elect Yoon Suk Yeol, meanwhile, has advocated for greatly strengthening his country’s alliance with the United States, while also proposing that Seoul develop the independent capacity to preemptively attack and defeat North Korea if it is menaced by its neighbor.
On the surface, developments like these, in both Japan and South Korea, may look like they strengthen the position of the United States in Northeast Asia. But in reality, they reflect a deep and growing concern among Washington’s most important allies in that part of the world that U.S. power in the region and its capacity to secure the decades-long peace there are wobbling. To both Seoul and Tokyo, the United States is not only a power in what seems for now like stately relative decline in the world, but also—and most importantly—one that is perennially preoccupied with problems in other regions of the world that are always deemed more urgent. As these have shifted from one place to another—from Iraq to Afghanistan and now to Russia, Ukraine and Europe—the existential security concerns in their own neighborhood have steadily grown.
While North Korea is the most obvious cause, both Japan and South Korea have increasingly come to view China as a power determined to change the status quo in their region, and to do so violently if it has to. The most ominous flashpoint in this regard is, of course, Taiwan, which Beijing publicly reserves the right to use force, if necessary, in order to bring that island under its long-claimed control. This has caused Japanese politicians—led by but by no means limited to Abe—to argue that Japan must defend Taiwan in the case of a takeover attempt by China.
During a recent talk I gave to a class of Chinese-speaking students in California, one of them raised his hand with a question. “As a Korean, I’m wondering what my country can do to guarantee its independence from China in the future,” he asked in Chinese.
This kind of anxiety is by no means a Korean monopoly. Each country in the region, including China, is haunted right now by a momentous form of change sweeping their society: aging and already existing or looming dramatic population decline. At first blush, this seems paradoxical for China, which is famously the world’s most populous nation, but the country’s working-age population is already in decline, and the total population of China will itself shrink rapidly in the decades ahead. As I have written in my book, “Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps China’s Push for Global Power,” this gives the country’s leaders the sense of a moment of high opportunity, but also urgency, now, in order to lock in geostrategic goals before aging utterly transforms the nation’s economy and ability to spend on the military.
Japan and South Korea are well ahead of China in the trend toward aging and population decline for the time being, and their sense of emergency is immediate, helping explain their dramatic reconsideration of nuclear weapons and military commitments.
The relative decline of the United States makes them all jittery, including China, even though it ardently hopes to realize a longstanding dream of preeminence in Asia. And that is because the unfamiliar road between here and there is mined with innumerable unknowns.
Howard W. French is a career foreign correspondent and global affairs writer, and the author of five books, including the recently published “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World.” You can follow him on Twitter at @hofrench. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.