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This article examines the question of how the emerging security dilemma on the Korean Peninsula can be moderated in order to lower the risk of conflict between North Korea and the US-South Korea alliance as they enter into a long-term nuclear deterrence relationship. To address this, the paper proceeds in the following way. The following section II explains why North Korea is extremely unlikely to denuclearize and thus the security dilemma between North Korea and the US-South Korea alliance is likely to continue and become more acute within the context of a long-term deterrence relationship. Section III discusses a range of possibilities that might be employed to attempt to check the security dilemma and reduce the chance of the intentional or inadvertent breakout of conflict (and reduce the danger of escalation if conflict breakout does occur). Section IV concludes with reflections on how the empirical situation of the Korean Peninsula security dilemma—which is asymmetric, insofar as the US-South Korea alliance is far more powerful than North Korea—might affect its dynamics differently than would be expected in a more orthodox security dilemma featuring a conflict dyad of more symmetric power relations.

South Korea has often been described as a ‘shrimp among whales,’ whereby a small weak state finds itself surrounded by regional and global behemoths, dramatically limiting the country’s strategic options. Within these narrow geostrategic constraints, different administrations in Seoul have tried to leverage Seoul’s competitive advantages through policy platforms which also consider the relative weakness of the Republic of Korea (ROK), especially when faced with the additional challenge of the hostile Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) regime to the North. These range from traditional balancing, band-wagoning, and hedging, through conceptualizations of South Korea as a ‘pivot’, ‘hub’, or ‘bridging’ state, to assorted incarnations of ‘middlepowerhood.’ This paper looks, however, on the one hand to expand geostrategic considerations to wider ‘geopolynomic’ ones, embracing the intersection of geostrategy, geopolitics, geoeconomics, geohistory, and geoculture; and on the other to reconceptualize South Korea as a second-tier power with far more resources than would generally be the case for a middle power, let alone a shrimp among whales. Instead of dwelling on the geostrategic challenges and limitations of the ROK, it highlights opportunities for South Korea, either acting unilaterally, or in conjunction with others, to get the most diplomatic bang for its buck.

The global ecological crisis, on the one hand, and responses by nation states, on the other, are in complete disconnect. At the heart of this systemic failure is a broken human-nature relationship. This relationship needs to be restored. In taking an ecological perspective, the article shows how the law and institutions of governance can become more effective. We can, for example, advance traditional interpretations of human rights, legal procedures and democratic processes to include ecological relationships. To this end, we need to ask who speaks for the beyondhuman world and indeed for the Earth as a whole. Most legal systems include trusteeship functions of individuals or institutions act on behalf and in the interest of those who cannot speak or act for themselves. They can be advanced for the effective protection of non-human beings and the Earth. Guidance for Earth Trusteeship exist in the form of two agreements created by global civil society, the 2000 Earth Charter and the 2018 Hague Principles. Current opportunities include the draft Global Pact for the Environment, the UN Secretary General’s call for “repurposing the Trusteeship Council” and developments in a number of countries towards implementing ecological integrity and rights of nature into their legal systems.

The Jeju April 3 Incident should be situated in the long history of US imperialist expansion into the Pacific and Asia, a history that began, in part, with the Wilkes Naval Expedition in 1838, intensified during the 1890s as the US colonized the Philippines, Hawai‘i, the Philippines, and Sāmoa, and that exploded during the Cold War when the US conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. The Truman Doctrine and Cold War strategy of containment were used to justify both the Korean War and the invasion of Southeast Asia – Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos – the latter an act of imperialist aggression that led Martin Luther King Jr. to declare that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” The path to greatness began on Jeju Island at the dawn of the Cold War. Ever since the publication of Richard Drinnon’s groundbreaking work in American Studies, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (1980), American Studies scholars have been approaching the intersection of culture and imperialism through the formation of an American empire in the Pacific. And yet the April 3 Incident is absent from transnational, postcolonial American Studies. As the 75th anniversary of the Jeju uprising and massacre approaches, scholars, artists, activists, students, community leaders, religious groups, and peace-loving citizens around the world should come together to learn about and discuss this ongoing history and reflect on how it relates to their own local struggles for peace and justice. Increased international awareness about the April 3 Incident will hopefully condense into a broad movement calling for the United States to apologize to the people of Jeju Island for its role in the bloodshed that devastated the island at the inception of the Cold War.