The Korean Peninsula’s Pivotal Role in the Interregnum Between Two Cold Wars

This essay starts with four assumptions: (1) the period from 1989-2024 stands as a distinct era in world history, an interregnum sandwiched between the Cold War and an era begun in 2025, which I call, for the time being, the New Cold War; (2) whether one focuses on geopolitics, regionalism, soft power, or national identities, Northeast Asia was the prime testing ground for attempts to forge a new order; (3) centering Northeast Asia, the Korean Peninsula had a pivotal role in how this period unfolded; and (4) there was little that Washington, Tokyo, or Seoul could have done to bring about a positive outcome, as each of the above tests failed. The interregnum has failed, a new era has dawned in which geopolitics are ominous while national identity gaps are aggravated, and the peninsula’s role, if still critical, has changed.

Here, I concentrate on the third point — how South and North Korea figured into the thinking that determined the outcome of the interregnum. As Chinese, Russian, U.S., and Japanese outlooks evolved over 35 years, viewpoints galvanized, by the time of the Six-Party Talks, into hardened arguments unaltered by subsequent events. If many were distracted by short-term phenomena or by developments outside Northeast Asia, consequential issues largely concentrated around this region. As in the early 1950s, the Korean Peninsula played a critical role in dashing the hopes that had been enunciated for international cooperation. In the new era, there is little hope for South Korea to bridge differences or exert soft power, but the peninsula still stands at the crossroads of global geopolitics and identity clashes. It cannot escape deepening polarization by seeking China or Russia’s help with North Korea.

Geopolitics: The Grand Strategic Triangle and the Korean Peninsula

The Grand Strategic Triangle of Washington-Moscow-Beijing played an outsized role in the ending of the Cold War. If Beijing had not been consequential at the outset of the Cold War, its swing toward Washington and toward economic openness raised its international profile in the 1980s when the two superpowers were vying fiercely for an edge, particularly in Asia. The dynamism manifest in Asia foreshadowed a rising China, further sidelining Moscow. If Seoul reasoned that the end of the Cold War doomed Pyongyang, Beijing saw it differently.

Recognizing not only its inability to compete in advanced technology with Washington, the Soviet leadership also became aware of its deepening marginalization in maritime Asia. It had been outmaneuvered by Washington and struggled to find a foothold in the region. In the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, boosting ties with Beijing was the priority. Outreach to Tokyo and Seoul proceeded as well, but they failed to satisfy geopolitical aims. The shock of exclusion from the 1994 Agreed Framework on North Korea refocused leaders on the peninsula’s critical security position. When Vladimir Putin in 2000 visited Pyongyang, it put other countries on notice that Russia would play the “North Korea card” to reassert its indispensability for regional security. The peninsula regained a spot in strategic thinking. China may have seemed aloof in the 1990s, but it claimed a central role by the early 2000s.

The Six-Party Talks tested the readiness of five countries to press denuclearization on North Korea. China and Russia demonstrated that they had other priorities. Over the interregnum, this maneuvering as well as the responses to the US-DPRK summits of 2018-19 were prime tests of security cooperation and of the Grand Strategic Triangle. Diplomacy in both cases brought China and Russia closer, transforming triangular dynamics. While not endorsing North Korea’s nuclear program, each clarified its desired regional security framework and the importance of 2 vs. 1 in the Grand Strategic Triangle, as they drew substantially closer.

The Sino-Russian rapprochement and their alienation from the United States transformed the Grand Strategic Triangle, undermining a fundamental source of optimism for the period after the Cold War. Both recognized that a positive assessment of North Korea’s role in the Korean War and their support for it was the required geopolitical judgment. They agreed in 2004 on leaning to the North in the Six-Party Talks, in 2010 on not blaming it for sinking the Cheonan, and in 2016 in condemning South Korea’s decision to allow THAAD deployment. In 2019, they joined in faulting Washington, not Pyongyang, for the Hanoi Summit’s failure.

Was there a way to persuade either Beijing or Moscow to agree on denuclearization as the priority and thus stabilize Northeast Asia while transforming the Grand Strategic Triangle? Seoul kept attempting to do so, and Washington at key moments earnestly tried as well. If Sino-centric and Russo-centric conceptions of spheres of influence could not be undercut, no path forward was conceivable. Beijing and Moscow differed on their desired outcome, but they stood in solidarity on the unacceptability of any U.S. or ROK approved outcome. In the new era, Moscow is asserting itself more, but Beijing holds the most decisive levers. 

Regionalism: The Korean Peninsula’s Unrealized Promise

The elements of a regional community appeared to many to be on the horizon through the early interregnum. The regional core of China, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula shared the Confucian cultural heritage. The economies of the region were rapidly becoming joined to each other through trade and investment. Calls resounded for peace and stability to serve further economic integration and build trust. On all sides, countries called for reaching out to North Korea to end its isolation and bring it into the regional fold peacefully.

At the center of region-building efforts, the Korean Peninsula seemed to have a key role.

North Korea posed a common challenge. South Korea stood at the crossroads, ready to serve as a bridge, including between China and Japan, and at times, China and the United States. Leaders in Seoul eagerly embraced a prospective role in establishing regionalism. That prospect is gone. Beijing and Washington are now diametrically opposed in the Indo-Pacific arena, and Moscow, Pyongyang, and Tokyo have no hopes for idealistic regionalism.

The failure of regionalism may be traced by some to insufficient trust in Seoul from other capitals or to overoptimism in Seoul without realistic approaches, but the key reason is that there was no interest in regionalist outreach that they do not fully control in Beijing, Moscow, or Pyongyang. They have all rejected the U.S. presence, U.S. alliances, and South Korea’s notion of reunification. In turning to ASEAN to host the East Asian Summit, there was recognition that an outside force was necessary, but that did not narrow differences. Instead, Beijing advanced Sino-centric designs without Seoul and Tokyo, while agreeing with Moscow for some joint steps toward Eurasian regionalism. In response, Washington joined Tokyo in pursuing the Indo-Pacific framework with Seoul joining as well. Neither of these approaches met the interregnum test of regionalism that is both maritime and continental. 

A lack of consensus on North Korea and general disinterest in Seoul’s proposal to realize the Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative were signs of discord regarding regionalism. No other approach stood much chance. Without a regional approach to the peninsula, broad regionalism would fail. Globalization without regionalism was an illusion.

Soft Power: South Korea’s Futility Finally Proved Soft Power’s Limitations

As hard power appeared to recede in salience from the late 1980s, many anticipated a surge in soft power as a glue sticking countries closer together. U.S. confidence in what were called “universal values,” as well as democratization and civil societies, first peaked in the 1990s and then revived under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Japanese hopes for “Asian values” soared in the late 1980s, leading to talk of “Confucian capitalism” for an “East Asian community” and Japan as a Sino-US bridge in dealing with human rights. Yet increasingly the “Korean Wave” captured attention as the cultural force to build trust. It fascinated the Japanese in the early 2000s and was gaining traction across China thereafter. If great power rivalry marred the U.S. approach, and historical memory doomed Japan’s efforts, then South Korea appeared ideally positioned to establish the necessary cultural nexus.

Seoul undercut its own cultural appeal, but this was not the main reason for its limitations. Not anchoring cultural appeal in “universal values” restricted its generality, while refueling historical animus toward Japan raised a barrier to cultural receptivity there. Even so, its wave proved to have staying power in these two countries. What mattered more for building trust were the responses in Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang. All three feared the spiritual contamination of Korean cultural appeal. The late 2000s Sino-ROK “cultural war” followed by the 2016 ban on many Korean cultural products reduced the cultural “threat,” while the ruthless attacks against the spread of South Korean culture to the North left little access.

Soft power is stymied by tightening of censorship, invocation of disparaging memories, and the greater weight of hard power in national consciousness. The legacies of communism in Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang rendered all these methods readily accessible. Decade after decade, soft power lost impact, leaving only the ups and downs in US-Japanese, US-ROK, and Japanese-ROK relations to influence soft power between friendly countries. As national identity gaps were aggravated over multiple dimensions, soft power was left aside.

National Identities: Turning Historical Memory Against Futurist Identity

The promise of geopolitical, regionalist, and soft power expectations was to focus attention on a futurist identity, leaving behind negative memories. Within each county’s arsenal of identities, however, were means to turn the conversation away from the future. Historical memories opened a Pandora’s box for negativity at odds with optimism about cooperation.

South Korean identity envisioned a future leading to reunification. Underestimating the futility of this pursuit in the circumstances existing during the interregnum, leaders of South Korea let an identity obsession drive wishful thinking diplomacy. Not mindful of the importance of Japan in pressuring and deterring North Korea and its supporters, they made historical justice versus Japan a priority. This delayed US-Japan-ROK trilateralism, a critical futurist step. Yet this was a secondary factor in the invocation of national identity criticism.

More serious challenges to the premises of the interregnum came from China and Russia. If communist dogma no longer drove ideological challenges, ideals tied to Sino-centrism and Russo-centrism carried an ideological overtone. Civilizational claims repelling outside forces added to the national identity arsenal, as did state-centric legacies intolerant of a civil society. There was no room for a global or regional identity at odds with Sino-centrism or Russo-centrism. Leaders widened the identity gaps with the West, as with U.S. Asian allies.

Whereas some criticisms were briefly aired in Beijing and Moscow toward North Korean human rights abuses, these were stifled to clarify national identity steeped in history and opposed to talk of “universal values.” Fascination with South Korea as a model or even a partner proved intolerable too, given the desired national identity narrative, During the Six-Party Talks, the pursuit of denuclearization was divorced in Chinese and Russian rhetoric from any national identity themes that could have aroused their populace against the North or its leadership. Especially historical memory was invoked to favor the North Korean side,

After suffering a “crisis of belief” from the 1980s into the 1990s, China and Russia affirmed national identities steeped in their communist legacies that militated against joining the US-led international community or a regional community they could not dominate. Refusal to vilify or isolate North Korea or endorse South Korea was a natural extension of this logic. In this vital test of the major requirements of the interregnum, they doomed its prospects.

Conclusion

In three decisive periods of international transformation (1895-1910, 1945-54, and 1990-2024), the Korean Peninsula became a test of spheres of influence among aspiring powers. Recalling the failure to gain agency in the first two periods, South Koreans became hopeful that diplomatic diversification, economic regionalization, the Korea Wave, and a futuristic identity shared by all would make Seoul a leader or at least a catalyst for Northeast Asian peace and cooperation. The interregnum proved to be a time of soaring aspirations and dashed hopes, when the Grand Strategic Triangle reasserted its dominance, spheres of influence overwhelmed cross-cutting regionalism, soft power deferred to hard power, and identities rooted in historical memories forced any futuristic aspirations to the sidelines.

Given the unbridgeable Sino-US rift, the durability of the Sino-Russian partnership, and Russia’s embrace of North Korea, South Korea has no choice but to face the new era in close partnership with both the United States and Japan. This does not mean it foregoes all agency. It has the economic, technological, military, and cultural power to play a major role in steering trilateralism and the attendant bilateral relations. When Trump’s unilateralism is past, U.S. policy will likely reemphasize multilateralism, including South Korea’s key role. By putting the interregnum in the rear-view mirror, Seoul can prepare for this transformation.