After Destroying North Korea’s Military: What Next? Winning the Peace

Winning the Korean Peace

By DannyLam – New Senior Contributor to Warrior Maven

Militarily defeating a nuclear armed North Korea with minimalrisks, low allied and DPRK casualties is possible. But that leads to the question of what sort of a post war Korea would emerge and how the peace can be won.

Winning the peace is a distinctly different task from fighting and winning the war. It requires different preparation, mindsets, training, expertise, and experience, much of which are not part of standard militaryrepertoire. Occupational armies more often than not, lose the peace after winning the war.

The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe brought them a sullen and oppressed “allies” called the “Warsaw Pact” who deserted them and defected to their arch enemies the moment USSR’s grip weakened.

Soviets facilitating the communist victory in China created for them an apparent ideological brethren that turned out to be a nuclear armed peer competitor barely two decades later. USSR diverted nuclear forces to deter PRC after 1969, and resources then had to be drained to support DPRK and Vietnam against the PRC up to USSR’s collapse in 1991.

Russia disappointed the G8 and ultimately was expelled after multiple incidents of rejecting the Liberal-democratic consensus that borders should not be changed by force. Russia in turn, is back as a non-communist, but great power peer competitor to Allies ruled by an autocrat. Allies won the cold war, dismembered USSR for the most part, but lost the peace with Russia.

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