North Korea's collapse would have huge ramifications.
The death of Kim Jong-il brings to the fore the hopeful-yet-daunting possibility that North Korea's long nightmare might be coming to an end. It's hopeful for obvious reasons - among the world's nasty regimes, Kim Jong-il arguably ran the worst. But it's daunting too, for reasons Robert Kaplan laid out in a 2006 piece:
'For a harbinger of the kind of chaos that looms on the peninsula consider Albania, which was for some years the most anarchic country in post-Communist Eastern Europe, save for war-torn Yugoslavia. On a visit to Albania before the Stalinist regime there finally collapsed, I saw vicious gangs of boys as young as eight harassing people. North Korea is reportedly plagued by the same phenomenon outside of its showcase capital. That may be an indication of what lies ahead. In fact, what terrifies South Koreans more than North Korean missiles is North Korean refugees pouring south. The Chinese, for their part, have nightmare visions of millions of North Korean refugees heading north over the Yalu River into Manchuria.'
Kaplan goes on to note that a true, disorderly end to the regime in North Korea would result in the largest "stabilization" mission since World War II and possibly in history:
'On one day, a semi-starving population of 23 million people would be Kim Jong Ilâ??s responsibility; on the next, it would be the U.S. militaryâ??s, which would have to work out an arrangement with the Chinese Peopleâ??s Liberation Army (among others) about how to manage the crisis. '