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Comment by maallooc | Hacker News Reader

The case of North Korea will be very different from (insert middle east/central american country here). It's surrounded with robust countries like China, South Korea and Japan. There are so many interests that it's impossible for a simple militia or a government of their own to hold a grasp. They will go down and they will be absorbed by their neighbors. At least for now.

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South Korea should be worried about the cost of such a reunification. East Germany was in much better shape than North Korea and the Germany reunification still took a lot of money and time to do. Building up North Korea will be very hard.

Not to mention that East Germany still suffers from economic stigmas that still haven’t gone away 30 years after reunification. It doesn’t get the same kind of investment or attention that West Germany does today.

One fairly high-profile (yet topical) example of this is the top flight of German Football. East German teams rarely even make the German Bundesliga[0], and my understanding is that there’s currently only one Eastern German team in the 20-team league.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/oct/17/west-g...

I sort of agree with you on the idea but top flight soccer teams are a bad example. That requires fans / high population density and then investment from a group into paying and attracting players. West German is much more dense. You’d also have to look at the distribution of top flight teams when Germany was separated, which was probably still population density skewed.

It's a bit different this time, South Korea is keenly aware of the cost and already has allocated a lot of money towards the possibility. Last I've heard a tax and much larger fund has been proposed by various politicians though I'm not sure what the state of that is today. Furthermore, it seems to be greatly beneficial for Korea in the long term due to the abundance of natural resources in North Korea. Goldman Sachs for example predicted in 2009 that a unified Korea would be the largest economy in the G7 after the US in 30 years.

Why is cost even an issue? The cost is nothing compared to all the suffering.

Building up North Korea isn't hard, living in North Korea is hard.

If cost wasn't an issue, rich countries could already take in millions of refugees from countries where life is very hard. Or they could pump trillions into the countries. They don't because cost is an issue. I am not sure if South Koreans are very happy about the prospect of paying for a reunification. A lot of West Germans would have been perfectly OK with East Germany staying its own democratic state.

Look, I get that you mean that it's worth paying a high cost to stop all that suffering, but the cost not nothing.

The reason it's important to me to say so is that at some point, some actual people with actual (limited) resources, will have to devise a plan to make it all better, and then actually do the plan. That is a huge challenge that involves trade offs and hard decisions. And if you start with magical thinking, instead of extremely realistic reasoning, you're going to end up hurting a lot of people.

Tell that to the South Koreans who don't want to reunify due to the amount of money it will cost the South Korean economy. https://intpolicydigest.org/2018/03/11/why-young-south-korea...

Tell that to literally every rich country.

They can probably learn from the German reunion. A lot of mistakes could have been avoided, like letting western companies buy and close east German companies that were previously owned by the state, or closing eastern youth organizations.

If anything, South Korean politicians are terrified by the perspective of North Korean regime falling.

For political reasons, reunification would be inevitable. It has been the stated goal of politicians for decades.

For economical reasons, reunification would be devastating. South Korea is not exactly poor, but the amount it would take to lift North Korea to a living standard which is not outrageously low (let alone comparable to the South) would be immense, and the living standards of South would plummet very significantly. This is a totally different kind of deal than reunification of Germany.

For cultural reasons, reunification would be a tough cookie. Nearly 70 years apart, in strict isolation, and under a constant inescapable brainwashing made North Korean culture drastically different from Southern Korean. Even the language evolved differently (and totalitarian regimes are keen to control and bend the everyday language to match their narrative). Now North and South are not separated brothers but more like distant cousins who grew separated by an ocean.

So South Korea will try to keep North Korea going as much as possible without losing face.

Source: a few lectures by experts in the question.

If the history of the world teaches anything, it's that "don't worry, the effects of this will be small and contained" is always false. (Insert inevitable Godwinism here.)

Or become the front of the US China cold war...

so after aplitting korea into north and south (as they are know all around the world), the US will again split north korea into west/east. will it be east korea? or north east korea?

I figured it already is. China could make N Korea stop their shenanigans any time, but they don't. I figure they like having them there most the time stiring things up. And if they wanted to actually start trouble having them start it would provide a layer of deniability.

NK's nukes are just as much pointed at China as they are pointed at the US/SK. If China decides to choke off their oil NK will be sure to remind China that if their regime falls, they'll be sure to lob some missiles in China's direction first. Thinking of NK is purely a Chinese puppet instead of an independent actor with their own wants and freedom of action really limits the geopolitical cards the US could play here. Imagine if the US could flip NK like how Nixon flipped China against the USSR.

That's cute. China would not allow NK to become a friend of the US. There are so many ways to shut that down.

Many ways that would cost China and NK much more than the US. That's how you play the game, make it hurt more for your opponents than yourself. Right now, even the possibility that NK could flip to the US makes China treat NK with baby gloves, and as a result they have a nuclear capable country right on their border. You think China's leaders are happy about that? It's another potential hotspot they have to worry about that could spill into China in addition to all the other hotspots they have to deal with thanks to the fact that China borders more countries than any other in the world. More stress on the Chinese government = more ways they can screw up. +1 for America.

Nitpick: s/baby gloves/kid gloves/g.

The "kid" in the phrase "kid gloves" doesn't refer to children. It refers instead to leather made from kid goats. Kidskin leather is thinner and softer than other kinds of leather, and doesn't leave smudges on delicate articles. Hence the phrase "kid glove treatment", implying handling something with delicacy and tact.

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