things to be uncertain about

Korean edition

"This is particularly true because not only could a war do a lot of damage to South Korea, but any kind of conflict would always come with the risk that the South would win and find itself responsible for taking over the North Korean basketcase."

-More or less my take on the provocations of the DPRK is that they would lose a war but that the other countries involved (Japan, US and the ROK, plus probably China) don't want one. They all know this. So every few months to a couple years, Kim Jung-Il fires up the annoyance machine and extracts some money to prop up his tottering dictatorship since it is cheaper to simply pay the blackmail than to actually execute the war and put the clamps down on this guy's regime. The reason is not so much the expense of a shooting war on the Korean peninsula, but the cost of rebuilding a country and economy that is in ruins from 50-60 years of communist rule. Germany could manage because it was one of the largest economies in the world at the time and Europe, as it always does, still mattered whether Germany was unified or not (plus East Germany wasn't in nearly as bad of shape. Its people were not starving racist dwarfs for example). South Korea, while it has a booming and productive economy, is no West Germany circa 1990.

I suspect that removing the threat of North Korean aggressions would reduce the relative importance of East Asian politics to American concerns. This is something "we" don't want and possibly (though not certainly) that the Koreans don't seem to mind either (on either side of the border). Long term, it makes far more sense for China and Japan and Korea to get along than it does for the US to have incredible amounts of influence over the policies of East Asian countries with whom we have tremendous, and increasingly mutually beneficial, international trade flows. But we're not there yet because the status quo of buying off the regional gangster continues to be the cheaper game in town than reform.

Of course, it's also possible that, as with re-unified post-Cold War Germany, the US will simply keep numbers of troops forward deployed in bases in Japan and Korea. For no apparent reason.