The Two Plus Four Treaty and Korean Unification.

While the importance and implications of the Two Plus Four Treaty from the German unification process have already been highlighted by extant literature on Korean unification, we claim that it needs to be revisited in light of the rapidly changing geopolitical landscape surrounding the Korean peninsula today. With the growing tension between the U.S. and China over regional leadership in East Asia, and the talk about an emerging new Cold War, international factors have become even more crucial than before when we think about possible Korean unification. Of course, this is not to downplay the domestic side of the equation. If there were any lessons we can draw from the German experience, however, they would be on international aspects rather than domestic ones. This paper's central claim is that Korean unification is becoming more challenging as it will be more internationally contested than Germany's experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]