While a single Korea is the stated goal of both the communist North and the democratic South, it has seemed a faraway dream this year, which saw an alleged North Korean attack on a South Korean warship, an announcement by Pyongyang that it is expanding its nuclear programs and, most recently, the shelling of a South Korean island two weeks ago.
In the wake of the Nov. 23 artillery assault on the South's Yeonpyeong Island, both sides have raised the temperature on the peninsula by trading angry barbs and threats of retribution. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has not shied away from tough rhetoric, as he looked to deflect criticism that his military's response to the shelling was too weak.
But twice this week, during a trip to Malaysia, he has expressed optimism that reunification is not long off.
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"North Korea now remains one of the most belligerent nations in the world," Lee said in the interview published Friday in The Star, a Malaysian newspaper. But, he added, it's a "fact that the two Koreas will have to coexist peacefully and, in the end, realize reunification."
In a speech Thursday night, Lee made similar remarks, saying that North Koreans have become increasingly aware that the South is better off. He did not elaborate on how their knowledge has expanded, but he said it was "an important change that no one can stop."
"Reunification is drawing near," Lee said, according to the president's website.
He also called on China to urge ally Pyongyang to embrace the same economic openness that has led millions of Chinese out of poverty
-- and said that North Korean economic independence was the key to reunification.
Lee didn't give a specific timeframe for the reunification of Korea, which was divided after the end of Japanese rule and officially remains in a state of war because the Koreas' 1950-53 conflict ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
It wasn't clear why Lee was making a push for reunification now. South Korean leaders often call for a peaceful reunification with the North. There is in Seoul, however, a wariness of the huge social and economic costs associated with absorbing the impoverished North.
North Korea also has called repeatedly for reunification, but it imagines integration under its authoritarian political system. It has shown no sign that it would allow any reunification that results in its absorption by the richer South.
It was long assumed that China, the North's main ally, would also pose an obstacle to reunification under Seoul's rule. But a recently leaked U.S. diplomatic cable recounts a conversation between the U.S. ambassador in Seoul and a high-ranking South Korean official, who told the American that China has largely resigned itself to such an integration.
Beijing "would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the U.S. in a
'benign alliance' as long as Korea was not hostile toward China," the official is quoted as saying in the cabled published by WikiLeaks.
Economic opportunities in a reunified Korea could further induce Chinese acquiescence, but China would be unlikely to accept the presence of U.S. troops north of the demilitarized zone that currently forms the North-South border, the South Korean official said, according to the cable.