WASHINGTON, Nov. 30: With North Korea reeling from economic and succession crises, American and South Korean officials early this year secretly began gaming out what would happen if the North, led by one of the world’s most brutal family dynasties, collapsed.
Over an official lunch in late February, a top South Korean diplomat confidently told the American ambassador, Ms Kathleen Stephens, that the fall would come “two to three years” after the death of Mr Kim Jong-Il, the country’s ailing leader, Ms Stephens later cabled Washington. A new, younger generation of Chinese leaders “would be comfortable with a reunited Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the United States in a benign alliance,” the diplomat, Mr Chun Yung-woo, had predicted.
But if Seoul was destined to control the entire Korean Peninsula for the first time since the end of World War II, China — the powerful ally that keeps the North alive with food and fuel — would have to be placated. So South Korea was already planning to assure Chinese companies that they would have ample commercial opportunities in the mineral-rich northern part of the peninsula.
As for the United States, the cable said, “China would clearly ‘not welcome’ any US military presence north of the DMZ,” the heavily mined demarcation line that now divides the two Koreas.
This trove of cables ends in February, just before North Korea began a series of military actions that has thrown some of Asia’s most prosperous countries into crisis. Three weeks ago it revealed the existence of a uranium enrichment plant, potentially giving it a new pathway to make nuclear bomb material. None of that was predicted in the dozens of state department cables about North Korea obtained by WikiLeaks, and in fact even China, the North’s closest ally, has often been wrong, the cables show. But the documents help explain why some South Korean and America suspects that the military outbursts may be the snarls of a dying dictatorship.