# A grand bargain for Korean neutrality In South Korea, there’s a peculiar custom: sweet pickles served with pizza or pasta. You can go to a top-notch restaurant and have a superb meal prepared by a chef who spent a decade training in an Emilia-Romagna restaurant, but you’ll still get sweet pickles on the side of your pasta alla puttanesca. Inevitably you’ll hear someone mumble and snicker from a nearby table: WTF are these sweet pickles here for? Funnily enough, there’s an international relations lesson to draw from this. The sweet pickle with pizza or pasta is the contemporary equivalent of the neutral state—an awkward outside addition to the natural state of things, an idea that may fit very peculiar circumstances elsewhere, something that falls in and out of popularity, and attracts both the greatest praise and the harshest criticism. In South Korea, the topic, neutrality—not sweet pickles, has attracted more attention as people come to terms with the changing regional order. Could the Korean Peninsula become a loosely federated neutral state? **The great power rationale?** Geography sits Korea between great powers and history shows the danger of that fate. Korea was always the stomping ground of great powers. Let’s just leave aside the more distant history of incursions and focus on modern history. Geography laid the bed for the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, Japanese annexation and colonial rule, the Soviet-American division of the peninsula in 1945, and finally the Korean War, which brought American, Chinese, Soviet, and other forces into the struggle. Geography was an asshole to Korea, making it both a prize and a battlefield whenever the regional balance of power shifted. Geography is such an asshole that, even today, as you sit and read this, it’s mockingly laughing at the Korean Peninsula, still essentially divided because of the strategic and political interests of outside great powers and their unwitting (and sometimes very witting) lackeys who benefit from continued division. Humans like to think they’ve mastered geography, and bridges, dams, tunnels, mountain passes, and seawalls suggest that with a solid grouping of minds, a lot of work, and bit of luck and sometimes pain, we can make a fair whack at it. Neutrality offers, at least in principle, a way out, of geography’s curse on the Korean Peninsula. Neutrality would reduce the utility of the Korean Peninsula in a U.S.–China contest in the region. For China, it would improve the current status quo by removing a threat to the Chinese heartland. From a Chinese perspective, the peninsula acts as a platform for U.S. military power on its northeastern flank. It supports North Korea ear strategic intention of creating a buffer. Neutralization of the Korean Peninsula would reduce the risk that American forces, bases, and surveillance assets in South Korea represent. For the U.S. it would represent a loss of an important anchor on the continent. In purely strategic terms, South Korea represents an incredibly important asset in the contest with China. Accepting that middle powers and junior partners that sit in strategic locations have extremely limited agency, for the U.S., South Korea is to China, what Ukraine is to Russia. To put it crudely and bluntly, without a skerrit of alliance or liberal-democratic fluff propaganda, it’s a U.S. pig dog sent out to bite and hold the boar’s ears, slow it down, and wait until the hunter comes in to clean up with the gun. Why then would the U.S. give this up? Why would the U.S. accept a neutralized Korean Peninsula? It’s simple, relatively speaking, China is rising, the U.S. is in decline. The war with Iran exposed both the limits of American power and the growing danger that Washington’s strategic direction poses to the very allies it claims to protect. The U.S. increasingly appears incapable of protecting allies and simultaneously exposes them to the consequences of its own poor strategic choices. Without serious attention, South Korea of its own accord could well decide to give up on the alliance. If the U.S. waits too long, it will lose even the opportunity to secure a neutralized Korean Peninsula. From that point, the Korean Peninsula is no longer a threat to the Chinese heartland, but a direct threat to Japan. With Korea, the U.S. has essentially laid out a munted version of Brzezinski’s geostrategic chessboard—one in in which it will have fewer and fewer choices as time goes on. When the dust settles on the f#ck ups Trump has made, Washington will be extremely lucky to secure a neutralized Korean Peninsula. This is the main incentive that _should_ drive U.S. interest in a neutralized Korean Peninsula. Unfortunately, mainstream think-tank analysis has for around 30 years sought to reshape, remake, restructure, reinvent, reconstitute, overhaul, transform, build-up, extend, modernize, regionalize, and even end the alliance (if we include Cato), but never ever imagined what would be possible in its place. **The domestic question?** Despite a long interest in the concept, dating back to the Korean enlightenment period, it is little known in South Korea today—more an interesting and creative but understandably hopeless ideal to be explored intermittently when a government grant lets it be so. Yet, with a highly educated and politically attentive population, public policy ideas grow and spread in South Korea faster than other similar sized countries. It just takes one charismatic leader to put it out there—and it could sprout. The concept is probably even less known in North Korea—but Chinese and Russian support and the promise of a bargain that just keeps giving for the elite could conceivably see it work. Neutralization would remove what Pyongyang portrays as its principal external security threat: the U.S.–ROK military alliance, American forces on the peninsula, and Korea’s integration into wider U.S.-led military structures. Pyongyang would have strong reasons to welcome neutralization, although on what terms and returns for the elite would be the question. Neutralization also reopens the possibility of a Korean federation: two systems, one nation, rather than immediate reunification under either Seoul or Pyongyang. North and South Korea would retain separate governments, political systems, militaries, and domestic institutions while recognizing a common Korean national framework and gradually constructing shared institutions for economic cooperation, movement, diplomacy, and security. Such an arrangement would postpone the existential question of which Korean state absorbs the other, while neutrality provides the external foundation for coexistence by ensuring that neither half of the peninsula became a strategic platform for an outside great power. **The likelihood?** Neutralization of the Korean Peninsula would require a grand bargain. Diplomatic history offers only a handful of bargains of comparable ambition—from the Congress of Vienna and the settlement of Belgian neutrality to the post-1945 order—moments when competing great powers accepted mutual restraint in exchange for a more durable strategic equilibrium. It would be a grand bargain of a scale the world has not seen since the settlements that constructed the postwar order itself: agreement among the great powers, accommodation between bitter adversaries, credible security guarantees, and a willingness to trade immediate strategic advantage for long-term regional stability.  Reflecting this, there’s an important question to be asked regarding the competency of modern leaders, the informed elite, and diplomatic services. Current U.S. malaise is representative of what exists across the west. Leaders who derive from small munted gene pools of elite families; pass through elite schools that long ago transformed into elaborate real estate and finance conglomerates and gave up on education and research; and moved into--and stayed in—leadership positions, to profit from schemes that sit poorly in pub test but are legal for those who can afford it. How can we expect any strategic foresight or capacity beyond insider stock trading from such cretins? The informed elite, meanwhile, are hanging on to the existing order, acutely aware that stepping outside the intellectual boundaries of society presents a risk of professional isolation, lost access, and exclusion from the institutions and networks on which their careers depend. Meanwhile, our diplomatic services are constrained and consistently displaced by appointed cretins, while corporate-style training and management systems strip away the tacit knowledge, judgement, and accumulated craft of diplomacy, replacing them with measurable KPIs, standardized competencies, and DEI criteria that are easier to audit than diplomatic skill is to cultivate. Grand bargains do not come easily. They emerge when states possess leaders capable of thinking beyond the next election, diplomats with the authority and accumulated craft to negotiate across seemingly irreconcilable interests, and intellectual communities willing to imagine arrangements outside the existing order. They require patience, compromise, risk, secrecy, trust, and, above all, strategic imagination. Neutralizing the Korean Peninsula is not beyond the capacity of diplomacy. The more troubling question is whether the institutions and people charged with conducting diplomacy today still possess the capacity to attempt something so grand. AND this brings us back to sweet pickles and pasta. Much like the sweet pickle served with your pasta, the idea of neutrality will never really go away. We could blame the Americans—for both the sweet pickles and the impossibility of Korea becoming a neutral state—but that would be just plain lazy. Couldn’t Korea pursue neutrality by itself? That’s a post for another bus trip--probably one not too far away. *** A Jameson and one or two Guinness is all I ask - [Buy Me a Coffee](https://buymeacoffee.com/junotane)! ## Related articles - [[2026-09-19 China will never invade Australia|China will never invade Australia]] - [[2026-09-14 Banana republic boomers ready to send you to war|Banana republic boomers ready to send you to war]] - [[2026-09-23 Coo-ee! Australia calls!|Coo-ee! Australia calls!]]