Adam Prime said:
Can someone post the article? Can't see it at work.
Is Homefront Possible?
The controversial plot is more plausible than you think.
Predicting the future can be a precarious ordeal. Just ask the developers at Kaos Studios, the minds behind the upcoming first-person shooter Homefront. In Homefront, gamers are exposed to a dark, dreary world set in the late 2020s where a unified Korea has overtaken the United States.
In this fictional future, the United States has declined, its power and prestige completely disintegrated. The world's economy has spiraled out of control, largely due to a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia that sends gas prices sky-high. Meanwhile, the most unlikely of foils rises to the fore in the form of a unified Korea under the leadership of the North Korean cult of personality. After taking over much of East Asia, Korea sets its sights on the United States. And by detonating a space-borne EMP, obliterating the United States' electronic infrastructure, Korea is easily able to land troops in Hawaii, along the western seaboard and in the midwest.
North Korean Power
But could North Korea really pull off an invasion of the United States? Even in fifteen years when the events of Homefront take place, it seems at best to be an extremely unlikely scenario. Yet, there's a level of plausibility here that can't be ignored. After all, no one could have expected that Nazi Germany would take over much of Europe only 10 years after suffering from crippling inflation the likes of which the world had never even remotely seen before. If history has proven one thing, it's that the unlikely and implausible can quickly turn into something all too real.
North Korea has been an officially-recognized sovereign nation ever since the 1953 armistice cooled the Korean War and split the peninsula in two. After losing its only steady trading partner upon the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991, however, North Korea's situation went from somewhat steady to outright horrific. Twenty years later, North Korea is unable to feed its own population without huge amounts of foreign aid, create industry for any sort of cohesive economy, or prove to the international community that it can be trusted. The country contains a rogue nuclear program and, worse yet, prison camps that purportedly hold hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. How can a country as impoverished, despised and friendless as North Korea possibly rise to the level of a successful imperial force?
Tae Kim, an ex-CIA intelligence officer who worked closely with Kaos Studios in developing the game's fictional future history, explained to me that it's not quite as unlikely as you'd think. It all starts with reunifying the Korean peninsula. "Some may argue that peaceful unification would be impossible," Kim said, "but it was only 11 years ago that Koreans thought the two countries were just a few steps from peaceful unification." Kim is referring to the Inter-Korean Summit that occurred in 2000, when "Kim Jong-Il enjoyed a higher approval rating in South Korea than the South Korean president." In Homefront, unification happens peacefully, premised on the what-if that nearly happened back in 2000. "In the future history of Homefront, a unified Korea elects Kim Jong-un. By the time people realize that he is a worse dictator than his father, it's too late."
Rapid Annexation
With the idea of reunifying the fractured Korean peninsula out of the way, Korea begins to annex weaker countries all around it. As Tae Kim explained to me, the Korean model is based off of Japan's imperial activities in East Asia during World War II. But there's a difference between the Japanese experience and North Korea's hypothetical conquest.
Kim cleared this up. "In Homefront's fiction... countries join not out of fear, but due to a necessity brought on by an ongoing global crisis. Major economic downturn and an oil crisis caused by the war between Iran and Saudi Arabia leaves the Asian countries with no one to turn to." That's where a unified Korea comes into play, offering a degree of stability in an ever-decaying world. Korea's power is derived from newfound strength in numbers, and they use it to collectively make themselves a player on the world stage.
The Ultimate Oil Crisis
The interrelated oil crisis and economic downturn play key parts in the fiction leading up to the events of Homefront. The trailer released some time ago talks about heinously expensive gas that foreshadows armed conflict between Korea and the United States, but David Votypka, the general manager of Kaos Studios, explained that it was during the creation of their first game that oil's affect on foreign policy was fully realized by the development team. "When we worked on Frontlines, we studied peak oil a lot," Votypka told me, "and we came to understand how deeply that would affect the world." Once America has been victimized by a tangible economic interruption due to difficulties in obtaining affordable oil, it's likely that everything would unravel from there. And that's precisely what happens in Homefront.
Homefront imagines a domino effect that could destroy America's economy and make it susceptible to outside forces in a way it would have never been possible otherwise. Expensive fuel would be the catalyst. "There would be a breaking point in the economies of scale," Kim explained, "where it no longer makes sense to produce various good or provide services. It would trigger a massive inflation followed by a massive devaluation of currency." Kim admits that the outlook for a society dependent on oil would be bleak in the situation Homefront describes. "If we took out both Iran and Saudi Arabia's oil production in the world," Kim admits, "$20 for gas may actually turn out to be a bargain."
Clearly, Kaos' fictional timeline is far more likely than some might expect. Failing economies, worthless currency and a bona fide oil crisis are more threatening than any foreign army. And in a situation where all three are occurring at full-steam and at the same time, the U.S. would be at its weakest.
Where's China?
But what about the only country truly friendly with North Korea today? When I asked Tae Kim about China's notable absence from Homefront's story, he answered in ways that I didn't expect.
"As America suffers the fate of economic downturn and global oil crisis, it was rational to assume that China would be in worse shape after losing its biggest customer" in the United States. What gives China leverage over the United States today -- its massive monetary loans -- would actually be their downfall in the future history Kaos created, according to Kim. "China is currently holding over two trillion in US dollars... that would lose a lot of their value. [China] would be too busy dealing with its internal situations to deal with the outside world," an identical place the United States finds itself in when Korea began to annex countries in the Pacific.
So far, I'm satisfied with the explanation given to me about the plausibility of Homefront's story. Korea peacefully reunifies. Oil becomes too expensive. Economies of scale collapse and financial institutions and monetary policy suffer as a result. Big countries look inward to protect their self-interest, leaving a vacuum for smaller countries to unify for financial, economic and military stability. This all makes sense. But what's North Korea's motivation for invading the U.S.?
Why U.S.?
An obvious motivator would be vehement feelings stemming from the Korean War. North Korea today raises their children to loathe Americans, and the future history reality likely wouldn't stray too far from that. But the motivation is economic, too. David Votypka told me more. "Because of the energy crisis in the world, and because of rising oil prices, things like oil shale become economically viable. And the US is like the Saudi Arabia of oil shale."
So the North Koreans are after some crude oil to fuel their expansion. Makes sense. But what about the resistance North Korean soldiers could expect to meet in the United States, even with a disabled and scattered American military? In Homefront, an EMP blast prefaces the Korean invasion of the United States, destroying virtually anything powered with electricity. While you could imagine what your life would be like without computers, cell phones or even lights, imagine what the American military would do without all of the technological gadgets they rely on every day.
But then there's the easily-overlooked fact that the American population is the most well-armed group of people in the history of humankind. Taking America even under such dire circumstances would be a feat for any modern military.
Kim said that even with the extra manpower from their occupied territories, and the clear technological superiority that comes from your enemy having no access to power, North Korea would have to pick and choose what they did and where they went. "The invasion force lands and secures key areas and locations for both strategic military and natural resource assets. The Koreans are actively trying to locate and eliminate threats it discovers, but are aware they cannot completely overtake the country." This is perhaps the most important point yet about explaining Homefront's plausibility. The Koreans know they can't take the US, and they don't even want to. All they want are the natural resources, and perhaps the slave labor necessary to extract those resources with little trouble.
Fictional Context
So is Homefront possible? It's as possible as many other situations in history. Just as Rome ultimately fell to hordes of barbarians, so too could the United States fall to the most unlikely of foes. This is especially true if the economic climate is just right, as it was in the events leading up to Homefront. But Kim and Votypka alike wanted to press that Kaos isn't trying to tell you what's going to happen. Homefront's a piece of entertainment.
"We're not trying to predict the future," Votypka told me. "So this is just saying we've sort of branched off from the present day, and we've created our own timeline from there."
Tae Kim elaborated. "The amount of research into the timeline and backstory was not an attempt to prove such events can really happen, but rather to create a unique, immersive and ultimately entertaining fictional setting for gamers. The speculative part of the storyline is not based on what we think 'could' happen, but rather what 'must' happen to bring the 'what if' scenario of a North Korean occupied United States to fruition."