Korea: The Enduring Policy Blindspot

Justin Malzac

 

The threat posed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a neglected and under-prioritized problem across the US government, requiring a dramatic change of approach. Most proposals for Goldwater-Nichols reform focus on geography, either increasing or decreasing the number of geographic commands. Based on our personal experience as Joint military planners at strategic-level headquarters, we argue that the change needs to go further, focusing on global national security problems instead of geography. This article’s analysis and conclusions will provoke conversation across the national security enterprise about how the United States competes with multiple global threats.

Keywords: North Korea, South Korea, Goldwater-Nichols reform, National Defense Strategy, force structure
 

Disclaimer: This podcast was recorded March 28, 2025, prior to the election of South Korea’s current president, Lee Jae Myung, in June of 2025.

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Stephanie Crider (Host)
You are listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.
I’m talking remotely today with Justin Malzac, coauthor with Rene A. Mahomed of “Korea: The Enduring [Policy] Blindspot,” which you can find in the Winter 2024–25 issue of Parameters. Malzac is a senior information planner and policy adviser for the Department of Defense in Korea. He’s also a historian with a focus on East Asia. His history work on Korea has been published in the International Journal of Korean Studies and other venues. Welcome to Decisive Point, Justin.

Justin Malzac
Thanks for having me, Stephanie. Unfortunately, my coauthor, Rene, could not be here today due to scheduling issues, but I’m going to try to make sure that I bring up some of the points that he wanted to mention here.

Host
Set the stage for our listeners, please, and give us a brief overview of the article.

Malzac
So, our article looked at Korea—North Korea, in particular—as a policy problem, and argued that it is a under-prioritized issue. We did a comparison of North Korea and the issues and the threats emanating from North Korea and also Russia and the degradation of Russia in Ukraine, making an argument that strategic prioritization needs to be shifted and that North Korea needs to be elevated as a more severe threat. We also provided one recommendation on how you might do that through restructuring the combatant commands. For today, I wanted to really focus on the problem-framing piece of it—understanding the North Korea problem and understanding how we got here.

Host
Let’s start with the impeachment issue. Can you put the current South Korean impeachment issue into context for us?

Malzac
Yes. So, obviously one of the biggest news events coming out of South Korea recently is the impeachment of President Yoon [Suk-Yeol]. It’s hard to talk about South Korea as an ally or the Korean Peninsula as a strategic battle space without addressing that elephant in the room. There’s a lot that has been published on the impeachment issue in a variety of media with a lot of very, I don’t want to say inflammatory, but headlines that are there to draw attention. So, for example, in January an article was released in Foreign Affairs entitled “Can South Korea’s Democracy Survive?”—very provocative title. But if you actually open up the article, the author says [that] South Korean democracies—the institutions—are healthy and sound. And the author actually goes into showing that South Korea faces a lot of the same problems that most modern democracies are facing today, things like polarization, extremism, misinformation, and those types of problems. So, the problems faced by South Korea’s democracy are not exactly unique to it.
However, to understand the impeachment issue, you really have to jump back in time and you kind of need a little bit of a historical framework. South Korea is a very young democracy. The current system, where popular elections that have been legitimate, really only goes back about 30 years. You go back to the end of the Korean War [and] the first South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, was really forced upon South Korea. He was, you know, the one that the United States side had chosen to lead. He survives as president until around 1960–1961, and then, there are scandals, corruption, and vote-rigging scandals; and protests—large protests—[and] public pressure. He’s removed from office. There’s a power struggle, and then in 1961, General Park Chung-Hee launches a coup and initiates a military junta at the end of 1961. And that’s actually what I wrote about in my historical article. Park Chung-Hee rules for about 20 years. In 1979, he is assassinated in another period of turmoil and another coup d’etat, and General Chun Doo-Hwan comes into power. Particularly in the ’70s and the ’80s, South Korea is really an authoritarian police state. Protests are brutally suppressed, student protesters are disappeared, the intelligence services are watching everybody. It’s a very rough time. And then, towards the end of the ’80s, South Korea starts to come out of it. And, after Chun Doo-Hwan (he’s replaced by the election of Roh Tae-Woo in 1987), it was a transition period—you really weren’t at democracy yet.
Then in 1992, with the election of Kim Young-Sam, that’s the first civilian elected to the ROK (Republic of Korea) presidency. So that’s the period where the modern South Korean democracy really takes off is 1992. From then, it’s been relatively stable. And you wouldn’t know by watching on TV because you see things like ROK lawmakers in the parliament building setting off tear gas grenades and things like that—really flashy politics. But the systems and the institutions have been very stable. The first Korean president [impeached was] in 2016. That was Park Guen-Hye, and it was a significant vote—234 out of 300 lawmakers voted to impeach, and then they went to the Constitutional Court and [the vote] was upheld. So, it’s only ever happened one time before. She was removed from power. There was another election. There was a transfer of power. The system was working.
I think, really, when you look at South Korea today, the signs that democracy is healthy is the reaction to President Yoon’s martial law declaration. The reaction was immediate. The public came out in droves to the streets to protect the parliament building and to protect the lawmakers. Senior level—not the top generals who were initiating the military activities, but people right under them—were refusing orders to arrest lawmakers and do other things. So, Koreans have seen this movie before. They know what martial law means, and they weren’t going to take it. And across the layers of society, they resisted it. And then the institutions took over, and the Parliament voted to impeach. It got referred to the Constitutional Court.
[An] interesting nuance about impeachment in South Korea is that extra layer of the court review, the judicial review, that we don’t actually have in the United States. So, really, in the United States, there isn’t something that can prevent, you know, a political party who has a super majority in both houses of Congress from just wielding impeachment as a political weapon and just impeaching and impeaching and impeaching. There’s no check on that. In South Korea, all the impeachments have to go to the court and get validated. And we saw that working out with, most recently, the vice president’s impeachment, Vice President Han Duck-Soo. His impeachment was overruled. The Constitutional Court said it wasn’t valid. Yoon was impeached, removed from power, Han took over as the interim president, and the opposition party in the legislature wanted him to do very specific things. And, when he didn’t do those things, the court said that’s not valid. That was a political move.
All in all, the country is in a period of transition because they don’t have an elected president. But soon the court is going to very likely rule that the Yoon impeachment is valid, which is going to trigger a new election which is going to trigger a transfer of power and all the systems are gonna come back into balance, I highly suspect. There’s gonna be some protests, probably, but I highly suspect anything that’d be disruptive. So, our ally is here. Our ally is still engaging with US whole-of-government agencies that are here.

Host
In your article you suggest deterrence has failed. Why?

Malzac
In the article, this is actually Rene, my coauthor’s, major part of the paper. So, I’m going to do my best to respond for him here. I’m going to start very quickly with a quote from the US Northern Commander’s recent posture statement to Congress where he said, “Regime rhetoric surrounding the new ICBM suggests Kim [Jong Un] is eager to transition his strategic weapons programs from research and development to serial production and fielding, a process that could rapidly expand North Korea’s inventory and narrow my confidence in NORTHCOM’s existing ballistic missile defense capacity in the coming years.”
So NORTHCOM is basically saying, “This problem is getting out of hand, and we can’t handle it anymore.” How has that come about? Well, North Korea has not been a strategic priority for a very long time. The DoD [Department of Defense] official media announcement of the 2022 National Security Strategy didn’t even mention Korea. It’s been something that we have, for a long time, kind of neglected and ignored. Meanwhile, North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons [and] ICBMs [and] continues to engage in other gray-zone activities.
Really, the core of the problem, in my opinion, is that the US policy towards North Korea is a requirement for complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization, or CVID, and this has been a long-held precondition that the United States imposes on North Korea to even enter in negotiations. Denuclearization has to be on the table for the United States even to approach that level of negotiations. Of course, those nuclear weapons are what guarantee Kim Jong-Un his regime survival, so he’s not going to give them up. And we’ve seen that a lot of writers and pundits have agreed that that is not a valid starting point that’s going to get you into negotiations. Writing in Foreign Policy in 2024, Stephen Walt called it a neurotic fixation of the US Defense and policy enterprise to think that he’s ever going to give up those weapons.
We can look back in history and we can see examples, such as South Africa. I think South Africa only had five or six weapons, and they were safe. They had alliances and they had no, you know, existential threats. So, it was very easy for South Africa to give up their nuclear weapons. North Korea sees the United States as an existential threat. They truly believe that the United States may, given the chance, launch a preemptive strike to remove the regime as they have seen happen across the world throughout many decades of history.
So, understanding what the right starting point is for negotiations is the important thing, and then, understanding that those nuclear weapons that North Korea has now can reach anywhere in the continental United States. So those ICBMs can reach Washington, DC, and they’re just getting more of them as time goes by. And then, North Korea is also engaged in a variety of other gray-zone activities such as cyber, hacking, cyber crime, crypto theft, providing arms to a lot of regimes that we don’t like, such as Iran and, I believe, Sudan and other places in Africa—and then, of course, support to Russia. You know, [it] started as logistical support and weapons, and now there are North Korean soldiers in Ukraine. Our paper was written before the current relationship really manifested, and we were making an argument that Russia was effectively degraded and had lost too many troops and equipment. And now there’s this influx of troops and equipment, and Russia is taking back the Kursk region that Ukraine had occupied. So, all in all, a very significant problem on the deterrence side.
It’s an equal problem on the assurance side. The South Korean public now strongly supports a domestic nuclear weapons program. A June 2024 poll showed around 70 percent public support for a South Korean nuclear weapons program, and that support has only grown due to a variety of changing strategic circumstances. If that happens, it puts the United States in a very untenable political position because the United States is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and is obligated not to support the development of nuclear weapons in other nuclear-weapon states. Israel has nuclear weapons, and we still engaged with Israel, but South Korea is different because we have troops here in South Korea that engage with the South Korean military day-to-day. We have a combined bilateral command and combined forces command—all that comes at risk if the South Koreans get a nuclear weapon because of NPT requirements for the United States.
And then lastly, really the ultimate risk is not nuclear weapons being used, it is the outbreak of another conventional conflict on the Korean Peninsula, and nuclear weapons give Kim Jong-Un the security he needs to be more provocative and aggressive than he normally would be. And then, also, we see, potentially, the lack of assurance, but also the risk calculus on the South Korean side also leading to escalation. So, in 2010, the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong was shelled by North Korea, killing ROK marines and civilians, and the ROK government was planning to send fighter aircraft into North Korea to attack the artillery that had fired on them. And they were, luckily, talked down by the US side, but that tit-for-tat escalation, really, a lot of folks see that as the immediate risk in the region. And then those conflicts—a conflict on the Korean Peninsula—could easily spiral into a regional conflict or could trigger a sympathetic conflict such as Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Host
So, what’s the answer then? How can the United States and its partners increase deterrence?

Malzac
Well, Rene had a good point he would have made here, and that is that deterrence begins with the coalition. Deterrence is a team effort. It’s not something that the US can do on their own. In particular, one of North Korea’s strategic goals is to break the ROK-US alliance or to fracture the US coalition in Korea. And one way that they try to do this is [that] they advocate for one-on-one talks with the US—so, between North Korea and [the] US having one-on-one diplomatic talks—and they want to do this because if they can get the United States to commit to something that the ROK cannot commit to, then you immediately have a structural break in the alliance.
So, it is important that any negotiations with North Korea be multilateral, such as the Six Party Talks or some other framework and that it incorporates other allies: Japan, potentially; or United Nations command elements; or other elements such as that. It’s also important to bolster the legitimacy of those institutions. North Korea will often attack the legitimacy and the legality of United Nations Command (UNC) and Combined Forces Command. [For] Combined Forces Command, that is a prerogative of the United States and South Korea as sovereign states that want to work together and have a multinational command. United Nations Command was established by the United Nations has a valid mandate. The United Nations has taken up the vote to deactivate UNC, or at least some have tried to inject the vote into the UN to deactivate UNC, and it has never held up.
So, the UN continues to maintain the validity of the United Nations Command, and recently it actually grew. So, Germany just—I think it was last year—Germany joined United Nations Command. So, it continues to grow, and it continues to be seen outside of North Korea as a legitimate entity. And then, of course, we need to, you know, apply pressure to those core supporters that support North Korea: China and Russia. Right? Obviously, Russia provides direct support. They are giving fuel and supplies and weapons and technology directly to North Korea now, and China has been a player that just refuses to enforce sanctions, casts a blind eye on things, you know, sanctioned materials that transit through their territory, engages in sanctioned coal transfers in the waters of the Yellow Sea. So, China is the core enabler of that behavior as well.
And then lastly, we need to impose costs on North Korea and [its] strategic interests globally—that includes the hacking, the revenue-generation activities such as crypto theft, the procurement activities to get materials for the nuclear program that North Korea cannot generate domestically [and] those alliances with Africa, Iran, and other areas that give them safe haven and support. This is really the hardest piece of the problem because 1) North Korea is not a US national priority, so [there are] not a lot of resources placed to what is a global problem. They are all over the world. They have these connections, and they have these activities going on all over the world. And those US interagency and DoD elements that are going after the problem really are going after the problem in isolation. So, the [US Department of the] Treasury might sanction a specific company that’s doing dual-use stuff, or the FBI might indict some North Korean hackers. It’s all really kind of ad hoc and in isolation, and none of it’s really being synchronized because there isn’t the prioritization that creates a broader strategy on how to approach the global problem.

Host
What is South Korea’s security role in the region—and also globally?

Malzac
Yeah, so I think one thing that we alluded to in our paper but that we didn’t really have a lot of space to examine was the increasing global security role that South Korea is trying to take on. In 2022, they published their first Indo-Pacific Strategy where they referred to themselves as a “global pivotal state.” They want to be a global pivotal state that actively defends the international rules-based order. In recent years, South Korea has not only expanded its own defense, its own funding across the board, it’s developed a strategic command; a cyber command; drone and counter-drone activities [and] capabilities; long-range fire capabilities. But they’ve also increased their partnerships across the world. A primary focus for the US strategic decisionmakers is the ROK and Japan relationship. It’s actually been very surprising to see how well South Korea and Japan have been cooperating on the military side in recent years because they’ve always, kind of, had this political tension amongst themselves. If you look back at history, you’ll know why. But the ROK also has expanding strategic partnerships with a variety of other countries in the region, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Australia, [and] Taiwan. Australia is very interesting because Australia is facing a lot of increased pressure from China right now, who’s actually doing military exercises in their backyard. Making sure that the ROK continues all those relationships is very important.
And then, the other piece of it, too, is that the ROK ranks among the top 10 in global arms suppliers. They provide a large supply of weapons and, really, platforms like artillery, tanks, [and] aircraft to a lot of important US allies, including NATO. The ROK just recently completed a brand new missile frigate for the Philippines. They’re providing K-9 artillery to Estonia. They previously provided it to Poland, which allowed Poland to provide weapons to Ukraine. They’re providing FA-50 fighter aircraft to Egypt. So, they’re all over the place as [an] arms provider to folks that we traditionally try to help stabilize and see as our core partners.
In deterrence, not only of DPRK, regionally, but PRC, globally, it’s important that our allies and partners have enough strengths—obvious strengths—to push back on coercion, and the ROK is really filling in that gap to make sure that a lot of those partners—particularly the Philippines, who historically has not really had a robust navy—[are] now getting ships from the ROK that they now can use to defend their waters against PRC incursions. So, I think that’s a really important way that South Korea supports global deterrence in support of our interests—the United States’ interests.

Host
I would like to end with the hypothetical here. What if North Korea is honestly signaling? What if it is no longer an aggressive threat? What would that circumstance mean for US strategy and force presence in the region?

Malzac
Yeah, so I think a lot of folks who don’t pay a lot of attention to the region might not understand that there are a lot of things that North Korea is doing and saying that suggest they are trying to close off their borders and really just be left alone. In my opinion, I think Kim Jong-Un is likely telling the truth. He has taken many very clear actions, such as destroying roads and transportation nodes between the north and the south, installing obstacles along the border that just make no sense for anyone who has any intention of launching a ground invasion. He’s putting things in his own way. He is making it much harder for him to attack, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. And then, North Korea recently changed their official policy that confirms the two-state solution. They have recognized South Korea as a separate state. They call South Korea “the primary enemy.” The problem really is on the other side, it’s on the South Korean, it’s on the ROK side, because the South Korean constitution lays claim to the entire peninsula. It makes it very difficult for the ROK to politically or legally engage in any sort of discussion of recognizing North Korea as a separate, sovereign state.
And you see this tension playing out, at least, I think I see this tension playing out. So, for example, in October 2024, the North Koreans blew up a major road and bridgeway that connected the North and South, and it was all on the North Korean side, but the South Koreans fired warning shots they said they were in self-defense. I think that was really the ROK side kind of acting out in desperation because there’s nothing legally they can do to stop North Korea from crawling back into its borders and fortifying its borders and just saying, “I want to be left alone, and I want to be a sovereign state.” And if North Korea wants to live on Russian handouts and just be left alone, obviously, they’ve got to stop being provocative, and they’ve got to stop, you know, launching missiles over Japan and doing other things and doing illegal cybercrime activities. But if they do all that, if they stop doing all that and they just say, “leave me alone,” there really isn’t much you can do about that. I mean, that’s their sovereign right.
So, what happens to the US forces in Korea if that happens? If there’s no longer an actual threat that you need those forces in South Korea to handle, that you need Combined Forces Command to prepare defense plans against, I think it could be likely that those forces get pulled out of South Korea. Japan’s a little bit of a different animal because Japan really is more aligned against China and Russia and not really shy about picking those fights. South Korea really wants to stay out of the China-US fight in that rivalry because China’s their number one trading partner, but Japan is not afraid to poke China or Russia. So, those troops remaining in Japan or some troops remaining in Japan or having a US command in Japan, makes a lot of sense. But if the North Korean threat goes away because North Korea says, “I don’t want to play anymore. I’m just going to stay in my house,” then the justification for troops on South Korea becomes much less tenable.

Host
Listeners, you can read the genesis article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 54, issue 4. There will also be a link to the article in the show notes.
For more Army War College podcasts, check out Conversations on Strategy, SSI Live, CLSC Dialogues, and A Better Peace.
Justin, thank you for making time to speak with me today.

Malzac
No, thank you for the opportunity.