On Tuesday, U of T professors William Hurst, Ron Pruessen and Ito Peng met at the Munk School to discuss the change in North Korean leadership and speculate about its consequences. Experts in separate fields of international relations, the panelists each brought a different perspective to the table. However, they arrived at a similar conclusion: one should continue to expect the unexpected from North Korea--perhaps even disaster.

Hurst, a specialist on China, and Peng, whose areas of expertise are South Korea and Japan, pointed out that these countries have vested interests in preserving the status quo in North Korea. None of its neighbours want the current regime in Pyongyang to collapse and produce a wide-scale humanitarian crisis that would drive throngs of refugees across the border.

For China, Hurst said, North Korea represents an important “buffer zone” against American intervention in the Asia-Pacific region. Although Chinese-Korean relations are strong relative to Pyongyang’s relations with the rest of the world, they are far from rosy. “China seems fundamentally unnerved by the continuing instability in the Korean Peninsula,” Hurst explained. “[China and North Korea] need each other still but they don’t necessarily always like each other very much,” he concluded.

South Korea and Japan are as committed as China “to ensuring a smooth transition of power” in North Korea, said Ito Peng. Neither country is likely to reorient its policy toward Pyongyang radically in the near future, although the succession of Kim Jong Un may be “a unique opportunity to change the relationship between North and South,” said Peng. Still reeling from last year’s tsunami and in the midst of political instability of its own, Japan is unprepared to handle a refugee crisis in its backyard.

As innocuous an event as it may seem in world-historical terms, the death of Kim Jong Il could have dire consequences, Ron Pruessen warned. “There are any number of historical counterparts,” he said, “to talking about the way in which matches are sometimes lit near tinderboxes. It is not impossible to imagine a North Korean match being lit in international relations at this moment.” Armed with nuclear weapons, North Korea is a particularly explosive tinderbox.

In Pruessen’s opinion, it is rather naïve to hope for any positive American responses to recent events in North Korea. “There are some truly nightmare scenarios easy to conjure up if we think about political discourse in the United States in 2011-2012,” he said. “Imagine a Rick Perry, or a Sarah Palin, or a Michele Bachmann in charge of American foreign policy and thinking through how to respond to events on the Korean Peninsula – whew!”

“North Korea and East Asia After Kim Jong Il: a Roundtable” was the first in a planned series of lectures on North Korea to be held at the Munk School of Global Affairs this semester.