Decisive Point Podcast – Ep 5-33 – Justin Malzac – Korea: The Enduring Policy Blindspot

The threat posed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a neglected and under-prioritized problem across the US government, requiring a dramatic change of approach. Most proposals for Goldwater-Nichols reform focus on geography, either increasing or decreasing the number of geographic commands. Based on our personal experience as Joint military planners at strategic-level headquarters, we argue that the change needs to go further, focusing on global national security problems instead of geography. This article’s analysis and conclusions will provoke conversation across the national security enterprise about how the United States competes with multiple global threats.

Keywords: North Korea, South Korea, Goldwater-Nichols reform, National Defense Strategy, force structure

Disclaimer: This podcast was recorded March 28, 2025, prior to the election of South Korea’s current president, Lee Jae Myung, in June of 2025.

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You are listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I’m talking remotely today with Justin Malzac, coauthor with Rene A. Mahomed of “Korea: The Enduring [Policy] Blindspot,” which you can find in the Winter 2024–25 issue of Parameters. Malzac is a senior information planner and policy adviser for the Department of Defense in Korea. He’s also a historian with a focus on East Asia. His history work on Korea has been published in the International Journal of Korean Studies and other venues. Welcome to Decisive Point, Justin.

Justin Malzac

Thanks for having me, Stephanie. Unfortunately, my coauthor, Rene, could not be here today due to scheduling issues, but I’m going to try to make sure that I bring up some of the points that he wanted to mention here.

Host

Set the stage for our listeners, please, and give us a brief overview of the article.

Malzac

So, our article looked at Korea—North Korea, in particular—as a policy problem, and argued that it is a under-prioritized issue. We did a comparison of North Korea and the issues and the threats emanating from North Korea and also Russia and the degradation of Russia in Ukraine, making an argument that strategic prioritization needs to be shifted and that North Korea needs to be elevated as a more severe threat. We also provided one recommendation on how you might do that through restructuring the combatant commands. For today, I wanted to really focus on the problem-framing piece of it—understanding the North Korea problem and understanding how we got here.

Host

Let’s start with the impeachment issue. Can you put the current South Korean impeachment issue into context for us?

Malzac

Yes. So, obviously one of the biggest news events coming out of South Korea recently is the impeachment of President Yoon [Suk-Yeol]. It’s hard to talk about South Korea as an ally or the Korean Peninsula as a strategic battle space without addressing that elephant in the room. There’s a lot that has been published on the impeachment issue in a variety of media with a lot of very, I don’t want to say inflammatory, but headlines that are there to draw attention. So, for example, in January an article was released in Foreign Affairs entitled “Can South Korea’s Democracy Survive?”—very provocative title. But if you actually open up the article, the author says [that] South Korean democracies—the institutions—are healthy and sound. And the author actually goes into showing that South Korea faces a lot of the same problems that most modern democracies are facing today, things like polarization, extremism, misinformation, and those types of problems. So, the problems faced by South Korea’s democracy are not exactly unique to it.

However, to understand the impeachment issue, you really have to jump back in time and you kind of need a little bit of a historical framework. South Korea is a very young democracy. The current system, where popular elections that have been legitimate, really only goes back about 30 years. You go back to the end of the Korean War [and] the first South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, was really forced upon South Korea. He was, you know, the one that the United States side had chosen to lead. He survives as president until around 1960–1961, and then, there are scandals, corruption, and vote-rigging scandals; and protests—large protests—[and] public pressure. He’s removed from office. There’s a power struggle, and then in 1961, General Park Chung-Hee launches a coup and initiates a military junta at the end of 1961. And that’s actually what I wrote about in my historical article. Park Chung-Hee rules for about 20 years. In 1979, he is assassinated in another period of turmoil and another coup d’etat, and General Chun Doo-Hwan comes into power. Particularly in the ’70s and the ’80s, South Korea is really an authoritarian police state. Protests are brutally suppressed, student protesters are disappeared, the intelligence services are watching everybody. It’s a very rough time. And then, towards the end of the ’80s, South Korea starts to come out of it. And, after Chun Doo-Hwan (he’s replaced by the election of Roh Tae-Woo in 1987), it was a transition period—you really weren’t at democracy yet.

Then in 1992, with the election of Kim Young-Sam, that’s the first civilian elected to the ROK (Republic of Korea) presidency. So that’s the period where the modern South Korean democracy really takes off is 1992. From then, it’s been relatively stable. And you wouldn’t know by watching on TV because you see things like ROK lawmakers in the parliament building setting off tear gas grenades and things like that—really flashy politics. But the systems and the institutions have been very stable. The first Korean president [impeached was] in 2016. That was Park Guen-Hye, and it was a significant vote—234 out of 300 lawmakers voted to impeach, and then they went to the Constitutional Court and [the vote] was upheld. So, it’s only ever happened one time before. She was removed from power. There was another election. There was a transfer of power. The system was working.

I think, really, when you look at South Korea today, the signs that democracy is healthy is the reaction to President Yoon’s martial law declaration. The reaction was immediate. The public came out in droves to the streets to protect the parliament building and to protect the lawmakers. Senior level—not the top generals who were initiating the military activities, but people right under them—were refusing orders to arrest lawmakers and do other things. So, Koreans have seen this movie before. They know what martial law means, and they weren’t going to take it. And across the layers of society, they resisted it. And then the institutions took over, and the Parliament voted to impeach. It got referred to the Constitutional Court.

[An] interesting nuance about impeachment in South Korea is that extra layer of the court review, the judicial review, that we don’t actually have in the United States. So, really, in the United States, there isn’t something that can prevent, you know, a political party who has a super majority in both houses of Congress from just wielding impeachment as a political weapon and just impeaching and impeaching and impeaching. There’s no check on that. In South Korea, all the impeachments have to go to the court and get validated. And we saw that working out with, most recently, the vice president’s impeachment, Vice President Han Duck-Soo. His impeachment was overruled. The Constitutional Court said it wasn’t valid. Yoon was impeached, removed from power, Han took over as the interim president, and the opposition party in the legislature wanted him to do very specific things. And, when he didn’t do those things, the court said that’s not valid. That was a political move.

All in all, the country is in a period of transition because they don’t have an elected president. But soon the court is going to very likely rule that the Yoon impeachment is valid, which is going to trigger a new election which is going to trigger a transfer of power and all the systems are gonna come back into balance, I highly suspect. There’s gonna be some protests, probably, but I highly suspect anything that’d be disruptive. So, our ally is here. Our ally is still engaging with US whole-of-government agencies that are here.

Host

In your article you suggest deterrence has failed. Why?

Malzac

In the article, this is actually Rene, my coauthor’s, major part of the paper. So, I’m going to do my best to respond for him here. I’m going to start very quickly with a quote from the US Northern Commander’s recent posture statement to Congress where he said, “Regime rhetoric surrounding the new ICBM suggests Kim [Jong Un] is eager to transition his strategic weapons programs from research and development to serial production and fielding, a process that could rapidly expand North Korea’s inventory and narrow my confidence in NORTHCOM’s existing ballistic missile defense capacity in the coming years.”

So NORTHCOM is basically saying, “This problem is getting out of hand, and we can’t handle it anymore.” How has that come about? Well, North Korea has not been a strategic priority for a very long time. The DoD [Department of Defense] official media announcement of the 2022 National Security Strategy did...