The dream of Korean reunification is now over 80 years old. This year, the notion that the two halves of the Korean peninsula could be stitched back together has become so feeble that it entered hospice.
The children of this dream of reunification are responsible for putting it into the intensive care ward.
The northern child, now on its third generation of leadership, has decided that it’s not worth pretending that reunification is even real. It is in the process of writing reunification out of the DPRK’s constitution and now considers North Korea to be a “separate socialist state.” It tore up a military agreement with the South. It has destroyed the infrastructure of reunification, including the Arch of Reunification in downtown Pyongyang and train tracks near the border that could have relinked the two countries. It has even removed tongil, the Korean term for reunification, from the names of train stations. It has already written the epitaph for the dream of reunification.
The other child in the south has conflicted feelings. The former chief of staff in the liberal Moon Jae-in administration caused considerable controversy recently by proposing that the two Koreas “live separately.”
On the face of it, the current conservative government of Yoon Suk-yeol continues to promote reunification, most recently in a new doctrine articulated in mid-August’s Liberation Day commemoration. In reality, however, Yoon’s approach stresses not a joint effort to construct a single state but unilateral steps made by South Korea, which is an indirect acknowledgement of North Korea’s abandonment of its........