Prisoners of Geography

by Tim Marshall

  The Soviets pulled their troops out of the north in 1948 and the Americans followed suit in the south in 1949. In June 1950, an emboldened North Korean military fatally underestimated America’s Cold War geopolitical strategy and crossed the 38th parallel, intent on reuniting the peninsula under one Communist government. The Northern forces raced down the country almost to the tip of the southern coast, sounding the alarm bells in Washington.

  The North Korean leadership, and its Chinese backers, had correctly worked out that, in a strictly military sense, Korea was not vital to the USA; but what they failed to understand was that the Americans knew that if they didn’t stand up for their South Korean ally, their other allies around the world would lose confidence in them. If America’s allies, at the height of the Cold War, began to hedge their bets or go over to the Communist side, then its entire global strategy would be in trouble. There are parallels here with the USA’s policy in modern East Asia and Eastern Europe. Countries such as Poland, the Baltic States, Japan and the Philippines need to be confident that America has their back when it comes to their relations with Russia and China.

  In September 1950 the USA, leading a United Nations force, surged into Korea, pushing the Northern troops back across the 38th parallel and then up almost to the Yalu River and the border with China.

  Now it was Beijing’s turn to make a decision. It was one thing to have US forces on the peninsula, quite another when they were north of the parallel – indeed north of the mountains above Hamhung – and within striking distance of China itself. Chinese troops poured across the Yalu and thirty-six months of fierce fighting ensued with massive casualties on all sides before they ground to a halt along the current border and agreed a truce, but not a treaty. There they were, stuck on the 38th parallel, and stuck they remain.

  The geography of the peninsula is fairly uncomplicated and a reminder of how artificial the division is between North and South. The real (broad-brush) split is west to east. The west of the peninsula is much flatter than the east and is where the majority of people live. The east has the Hamgyong mountain range in the north and lower ranges in the south. The demilitarised zone (DMZ), which cuts the peninsula in half, in parts follows the path of the Imjin-gang River, but this was never a natural barrier between two entities, just a river within a unified geographical space all too frequently entered by foreigners.

  The two Koreas are still technically at war, and given the hair-trigger tensions between them a major conflict is never more than a few artillery rounds away.

  Japan, the USA and South Korea all worry about North Korea’s nuclear weapons, but South Korea in particular has another threat hanging over it. North Korea’s ability to successfully miniaturise its nuclear technology and create warheads that could be launched is uncertain, but it is definitely capable, as it already showed in 1950, of a surprise, first-strike, conventional attack.

  South Korea’s capital, the mega-city of Seoul, lies just 35 miles south of the 38th parallel and the DMZ. Almost half of South Korea’s 50 million people live in the greater Seoul region, which is home to much of its industry and financial centres, and it is all within range of North Korean artillery.

  A major concern for South Korea is how close Seoul and the surrounding urban areas are to the border with North Korea. Seoul’s position makes it vulnerable to surprise attacks from its neighbour, whose capital is much further away and partially protected by mountainous terrain.

  In the hills above the 148-mile-long DMZ the North Korean military has an estimated 10,000 artillery pieces. They are well dug in, some in fortified bunkers and caves. Not all of them could reach the centre of Seoul, but some could, and all are able to reach the greater Seoul region. There’s little doubt that within two or three days the combined might of the South Korean and US air forces would have destroyed many of them, but by that time Seoul would be in flames. Imagine the effect of just one salvo of shells from 10,000 artillery weapons landing in urban and semi-urban areas, then multiply it dozens of times.

  Two experts on North Korea, Victor Cha and David Chang, writing for Foreign Policy magazine, estimated that the DPRK forces could fire up to 500,000 rounds towards the city in the first hour of a conflict. That seems a very high estimate, but even if you divide it by five the results would still be devastating. The South Korean government would find itself fighting a major war whilst simultaneously trying to manage the chaos of millions of people fleeing south even as it tried to reinforce the border with troops stationed below the capital.

  The hills above the DMZ are not high and there is a lot of flat ground between them and Seoul. In a surprise attack the North Korean army could push forward quite quickly, aided by Special Forces who would enter via underground tunnels which the South Koreans believe have already been built. North Korea’s battle plans are thought to include submarines landing shock troops south of Seoul, and the activation of sleeper cells placed in the South’s population. It is estimated to have 100,000 personnel it regards as Special Forces.

  The North has also already proved it can reach Tokyo with ballistic missiles by firing several of them over the Sea of Japan and into the Pacific, a route which takes them directly over Japanese territory. Its armed forces are more than a million strong, one of the biggest armies in the world, and even if large numbers of them are not highly trained they would be useful to Pyongyang as cannon fodder while it sought to widen the conflict.

  The Americans would be fighting alongside the South, the Chinese military would be on full alert and approaching the Yalu, and the Russians and Japanese would be looking on nervously.

  It is not in anyone’s interest for there to be another major war in Korea, as both sides would be devastated, but that has not prevented wars in the past. In 1950, when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel, it had not foreseen a three-year war with up to four million deaths, ending in stalemate. A full-scale conflict now might be even more catastrophic. The ROK’s economy is eighty times stronger than the North’s, its population is twice the size and the combined South Korean and US armed forces would almost certainly overwhelm North Korea eventually, assuming China did not decide to join in again.

  And then what? There has been limited serious planning for such an eventuality. The South is thought to have done some computer modelling on what might be required, but it is generally accepted that the situation would be chaotic. The problems that would be created by Korea imploding or exploding would be multiplied if it happened as a result of warfare. Many countries would be affected and they would have decisions to make. Even if China did not want to intervene during the fighting, it might decide it had to cross the border and secure the North to retain the buffer zone between it and the US forces. It might decide that a unified Korea, allied to the USA, which is allied to Japan, would be too much of a potential threat to allow.

  The USA would have to decide how far across the DMZ it would push and whether it should seek to secure all of North Korea’s sites containing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction material. China would have similar concerns, especially as some of the nuclear facilities are only 35 miles from its border.

  On the political front Japan would have to decide if it wanted a powerful, united Korea across the Sea of Japan. Given the brittle relations between Tokyo and Seoul, Japan has reasons to be nervous about such a thing, but as it has far greater concerns about China it would be likely to come down on the side of supporting reunification, despite the probable scenario that it would be asked to assist financially due to its long occupation of the peninsula in the last century. Besides, it knows what Seoul knows: most of the economic costs of reunification will be borne by South Korea, and they will dwarf those of German reunification. East Germany may have been lagging far behind West Germany, but it had a history of development, an industrial base and an educated population. Developing the north of Korea would be building from ground zero and the costs would hold back the economy of a united peninsula for a decade. After that the benefit
s of the rich natural resources of the north, such as coal, zinc, copper, iron and rare earth elements, and the modernisation programme would be expected to kick in, but there are mixed feelings about risking the prosperity of one of the world’s most advanced nations in the meantime.

  Those decisions are for the future. For now each side continues to prepare for a war; as with Pakistan and India, they are locked in a mutual embrace of fear and suspicion.

  South Korea is now a vibrant, integrated member of the nations of the world, with a foreign policy to match. With open water to its west, east and south, and with few natural resources, it has taken care to build a modern navy in the past three decades, one which is capable of getting out into the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea to safeguard the ROK’s interests. Like Japan it is dependent on foreign sources for its energy needs, and so keeps a close eye on the sea lanes of the whole region. It has spent time hedging its bets, investing diplomatic capital in closer relations with Russia and China, much to Pyongyang’s annoyance.

  A miscalculation by either side could lead to a war which, as well as having devastating effects on the people of the peninsula, could wreck the economies of the region, with massive knock-on effects for the US economy. What started with the USA defending its Cold War stance against Russia has developed into an issue of strategic importance to its economy and that of several other countries.

  South Korea still has issues with Tokyo relating back to the Japanese occupation, and even when it is at its best, which is rare, the relationship is only cordial. In early 2015 when the Americans, South Koreans and Japanese got down to the detail of an agreement to share military intelligence they had each gathered on North Korea, Seoul said it would pass only a limited amount of secret information to Tokyo via Washington. It will not deal directly with the Japanese.

  The two countries still have a territorial dispute over what South Korea calls the Dokdo (solitary) Islands and the Japanese know as the Takeshima (bamboo) islands. The South Koreans currently control the rocky outcrops, which are in good fishing grounds, and there may be gas reserves in the region. Despite this thorn in their sides, and the still-fresh memories of occupation, both have reasons to co-operate and leave behind their troubled past.

  Japan’s history is very different to that of Korea, and the reason for this is partly due to its geography.

  The Japanese are an island race, with the majority of the 127 million population living mostly on the four large islands that face Korea and Russia across the Sea of Japan, and a minority inhabiting some of the 6,848 smaller islands. The largest of the main islands is Honshu, which includes the biggest mega-city in the world, Tokyo, and its 39 million people.

  At its closest point Japan is 120 miles from the Eurasian land mass, which is among the reasons why it has never been successfully invaded. The Chinese are some 500 miles away across the East China Sea; and although there is Russian territory much nearer, the Russian forces are usually far away because of the extremely inhospitable climate and sparse population located across the Sea of Okhotsk.

  In the 1300s the Mongols tried to invade Japan after sweeping through China, Manchuria and down through Korea. On the first occasion they were beaten back and on the second a storm wrecked their fleet. The seas in the Korean Strait were whipped up by what the Japanese said was a ‘Divine Wind’ which they called a ‘kamikaze’.

  So the threat from the west and north-west was limited, and to the south-east and east there was nothing but the Pacific. This last perspective is why the Japanese gave themselves the name ‘Nippon’ or ‘sun origin’: looking east there was nothing between them and the horizon, and each morning, rising on that horizon, was the sun. Apart from sporadic invasions of Korea they mostly kept themselves to themselves until the modern world arrived, and when it did, after first pushing it away, they went out to meet it.

  Opinions differ about when the islands became Japan, but there is a famous letter sent from what we know as Japan to the Emperor of China in 617 CE in which a Japanese leading nobleman writes: ‘Here I the emperor of the country where the sun rises send a letter to the emperor of the country where the sun sets. Are you healthy?’ History records that the Chinese Emperor took a dim view of such perceived impertinence. His empire was vast, while the main Japanese islands were still only loosely united, a situation which would not change until approximately the sixteenth century.

  The territory of the Japanese islands makes up a country which is bigger than the two Koreas combined, or in European terms bigger than Germany. However, three-quarters of the land is not conducive to human habitation, especially in the mountainous regions, and only 13 per cent is suitable for intensive cultivation. This leaves the Japanese living in close proximity to each other along the coastal plains and in restricted inland areas, where some stepped rice fields can exist in the hills. Its mountains mean that Japan has plenty of water, but the lack of flatland also means that its rivers are unsuited to navigation and therefore trade, a problem exacerbated by the fact that few of the rivers join each other.

  So the Japanese became a maritime people, connecting and trading along the coasts of their myriad islands, making forays into Korea, and then after centuries of isolation pushing out to dominate the whole region.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century Japan was an industrial power with the third-largest navy in the world, and in 1905 it defeated the Russians in a war fought on land and at sea. However, the very same island-nation geography that had allowed it to remain isolated was now giving it no choice but to engage with the world. The problem was that it chose to engage militarily.

  Both the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War were fought to thwart Chinese and Russian influence in Korea. Japan considered Korea to be, in the words of its Prussian military advisor, Major Klemens Meckel, ‘A dagger pointed at the heart of Japan’. Controlling the peninsula removed the threat, and controlling Manchuria made sure the hand of China, and to a lesser extent Russia, could not get near the dagger’s handle. Korea’s coal and iron ore would also come in handy.

  Japan had few of the natural resources required to become an industrialised nation. It had limited and poor-quality supplies of coal, very little oil, scant quantities of natural gas, limited supplies of rubber and a shortage of many metals. This is as true now as it was 100 years ago, although offshore gas fields are being explored along with undersea deposits of precious metals. Nevertheless it remains the world’s largest importer of natural gas, and third-largest importer of oil.

  It was the thirst for these products that caused Japan to rampage across China in the 1930s and then South-East Asia in the early 1940s. It had already occupied Taiwan in 1895 and followed this up with the annexation of Korea in 1910. Japan occupied Manchuria in 1932, then conducted a full-scale invasion of China in 1937. As each domino fell, the expanding empire and the growing Japanese population required more oil, more coal, more metal, more rubber and more food.

  With the European powers preoccupied with war in Europe, Japan went on to invade northern Indo-China. Eventually the Americans, who by then were supplying most of Japan’s oil needs, gave them an ultimatum – withdrawal or an oil embargo. The Japanese responded with the attack on Pearl Harbor and then swept on across South-East Asia, taking Burma, Singapore and the Philippines, among other territories.

  This was a massive overstretch, not just taking on the USA, but grabbing the very resources, rubber for example, which the USA required for its own industry. The giant of the twentieth century mobilised for total war. Japan’s geography then played a role in its greatest catastrophe – Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  The Americans had fought their way across the Pacific, island to island, at great cost. By the time they took Okinawa, which sits in the Ryukyu Island chain between Taiwan and Japan, they were faced with a still-fanatical enemy prepared to defend the approaches and four main islands from amphibious invasion. Massive US losses were predicted. If the terrain had been easier the American cho
ice may have been different – they might have fought their way to Tokyo – but they chose the nuclear option, unleashing upon Japan, and the collective conscience of the world, the terror of a new age.

  After the radioactive dust had settled on a complete Japanese surrender, the Americans helped them rebuild, partially as a hedge against Communist China. The new Japan showed its old inventiveness and within three decades became a global economic powerhouse.

  However, its previous belligerence and militarism were not entirely gone: they had just been buried beneath the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a shattered national psyche. Japan’s post-war constitution did not allow for it to have an army, air force or navy, only ‘Self-Defence Forces’ which for decades were a pale shadow of the pre-war military. The post-war agreement imposed by the USA limited Japan’s defence spend to 1 per cent of GDP and left tens of thousands of American forces on Japanese territory, 32,000 of whom are still there.

  But by the early 1980s the faint stirrings of nationalism could again be detected. There were sections of the older generation who had never accepted the enormity of Japan’s war crimes, and sections of the younger who were not prepared to accept guilt for the sins of their fathers. Many of the children of the Land of the Rising Sun wanted their ‘natural’ place under the sun of the post-war world.

  A flexible view of the constitution became the norm, and slowly the Japanese Self-Defence Forces were turned into a modern fighting unit. This happened as the rise of China was becoming increasingly apparent and so the Americans, realising they were going to need military allies in the Pacific region, were prepared to accept a re-militarised Japan.