SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — For decades, the United States, China, Russia and Japan have seen the Korean Peninsula as a vital strategic interest, so few people were surprised when all four supported the inter-Korean summit and the hopes which it brings for a solution to the deadlock there.
But the powers in the Pacific region also appear wary of the unknown, including everything from what kind of influence they would have in a strong, reunited Korea to what kind of realignments would emerge.
Could the United States justify a continued military presence in Korea? Could a unified Korea overtake Japan as a major economic power? Would communist China really want to see a unified Korea under capitalist Seoul?
The reasons for such uncertainty reach back decades.
For 35 years, Japan ruled Korea as a colonial master, exploiting its natural resources, using its people as slave laborers and stationing soldiers there to control the Asian mainland. Korea only escaped its grip in 1945, when Japan was defeated at the end of World War II.
Soon, advancing U.S. and Soviet forces partitioned the peninsula into the communist North and the pro-Western South, and it became a front line of the Cold War.
On June 25, 1950, the North invaded the South in an effort to reunify it, and the fighting that followed — South Korea, the United States and its allies on one side, Soviet-backed North Korean and Chinese forces on the other — left up to 5 million people dead, injured or missing.
Ever since the Korean War ended in stalemate in 1953, tens of thousands of U.S. forces have remained stationed in South Korea and Japan as a counter to China, Russia and heavily armed North Korea.
"The Koreas can't help but have the four great Pacific powers in their backyard," said Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C. "Any sort of Korean solution will affect or presumably involve those four Pacific powers."
China and Russia, which used to have closer ties with North Korea, have refrained from publicly criticizing it. They have praised the North for recently seeking diplomatic ties with Western countries and reaching out for international recognition after years of isolation.
Beijing and Moscow also have improved their relations and trade ties with South Korea after transforming their state-run economies with capitalistic reforms, and they would support the North if it followed their lead in an effort to restore its crippled economy.
Last month, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il made a secret visit to Beijing for talks with Chinese leaders — his first known foreign trip in 17 years. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently announced plans to soon become the first Russian leader to visit the North.
Washington and Tokyo, meanwhile, have long considered the North a "rogue nation" that threatens regional security. So they see bilateral meetings and economic and cultural cooperation as a way of coaxing it out of poverty and totalitarianism.
For Japan, the summit is so important that it favors taking few risks during the talks, in the hope that more can be held later. North Korea alarmed Japan in 1998 when it test-fired a long-range ballistic missile that flew over Japan and landed in the Pacific Ocean.
"Japan openly favors the summit, and it has avoided asking South Korean President Kim Dae-jung to raise any delicate issues that could anger the North, such as its ballistic missiles," said Hideshi Takesada, a professor at the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo.
If the summit is successful and leads to greater cooperation between North and South Korea, Japan and the United States would probably want to see their eventual reunification discussed.
But China would likely be leery of a unified Korea under capitalist Seoul. The peninsula's current division suits Beijing's strategic interests: It has influence with both Koreas, but they are too absorbed with their own confrontation to pose a risk to China's rise as a regional force. Also, a weak, communist North Korea — but not so weak as to be unstable — is a buffer against a potentially resurgent South Korea and Japan.