Speculative fiction - A tool for rethinking U.S. policy on Korea?

Speculative fiction is more than storytelling. It’s strategic imagination in its sharpest form.

Read about Korea policy for more than ten minutes and you’re head explodes in a cloud of tedious talking points, over-technical documents, and dense strategy papers that have not changed for 30 years. If the goal is to craft better policy, then traditional methods are no longer enough. It is time to embrace a sharper tool: speculative fiction.

Speculative fiction is a broad literary genre that encompasses works that imagine worlds, scenarios, or outcomes that differ significantly from reality, often through elements of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, or the distant future. It explores “what if” questions by speculating on technological advancements, societal transformations, or metaphysical ideas, allowing authors to critique the present, explore philosophical concepts, or construct entirely new realities.

Rather than adhering strictly to realism, speculative fiction embraces the imaginative and the hypothetical to examine human nature, ethics, and the consequences of change.

Speculative fiction is not merely an artistic indulgence. It is a weapon against bureaucratic inertia. It forces policymakers to imagine alternative futures they otherwise might ignore.

In the Korean context, where history itself often takes on the quality of compressed drama — civil war, division, dictatorship, miraculous economic rise, constant military standoffs — the brevity and intensity of speculative fiction are uniquely suited to pierce stale assumptions and stagnant thinking.

Speculative fiction is not a mere theoretical exercise. NATO recently embraced short speculative fiction, in a competition to bring out imaginative perspectives on future security challenges.

In October 2023, the NATO Defense College invited writers from all NATO member countries to submit stories envisioning NATO in the year 2099, marking 75 years beyond its 75th anniversary in 2024. By early 2024, submissions had arrived from speculative fiction authors across NATO Allies and partner nations. Four common themes stood out among the stories: NATO’s expansion into space, the security implications of climate change, the integration of artificial intelligence in military operations, and the emergence of a female NATO Secretary General.

Three lead editors from the NATO Defense College then merged the contributions of 34 authors into a unified fictional narrative, working with artist Jaouen Salaün and his team to illustrate the story with hundreds of detailed panels. To celebrate NATO’s 75th anniversary on 4 April 2024, the College released NATO 2099 – The Science Fiction Anthology, which includes 15 selected stories as a teaser of the full work. The anthology showcases a range of imaginative futures, reflecting the perspectives of the authors rather than official NATO policy.

Such competitions show that even major strategic institutions see the value of brief but emotionally potent narratives to stretch strategic thinking and highlight emerging risks. Policy researchers working on Korea have every reason to adopt similar techniques — and every reason not to lag behind.

Policy toward Korea often struggles with the weight of its own history. Every move is second-guessed through the lens of the Korean War, the Cold War, or past betrayals. Speculative fiction does not deny history — it accelerates through it. It imagines Korea not as it was, but as it could be — including scenarios policymakers have learned to dismiss because they do not fit tidy narratives of deterrence, denuclearization, and alliance maintenance.

In short: speculative fiction allows policymakers to feel the future — not just diagram it. In Korea, where political earthquakes often begin as tiny, almost imperceptible tremors (a protest in Gwangju, a rumor inside Pyongyang, a tariff dispute spiraling into anti-Americanism), the ability to grasp emotional volatility is crucial. Speculative fiction compresses volatility into a few paragraphs — and in doing so, offers policymakers a way to practice cognitive flexibility before reality forces it upon them.

Speculative fiction is also uniquely positioned to bridge cultural gaps. The U.S. often misreads Korean public opinion, assuming stability when resentment is brewing or exaggerating threats when internal resilience holds firm. A story written from a Korean perspective — a mother watching her son prepare for mandatory military service, a corporate worker caught between loyalty to a chaebol and to a labor movement, a Seoul activist worried about another American gaffe — can capture nuances that briefing slides simply cannot.

If U.S. policymakers read speculative fiction imagining the collapse of South Korean trust in American leadership in the aftermath of the Trump Administration’s transactional bullying, perhaps they would have understood the dangers of arrogance more quickly.

If they had been exposed to speculative stories of South Korean citizens resenting Washington’s approach to North Korea talks — talks that bypassed Seoul’s interests in favor of grandstanding — they might have recalibrated their approach earlier.

For academics there is an added bonus. At the moment, academics writing on South Korea, North Korea or any number of strategic issues relating to the Korean Peninsula are effectively wasting their time.

Nobody reads academic papers. You need to write them for your next promotion or pay-rise, but they’re never read by anyone that matters. They sit behind academic paywalls rotting and waiting for some thinktank lackey to steal the idea. Speculative fiction is read. Widely read.

Speculative fiction can test the edges of possible futures without the diplomatic costs of actual policy action. An academic article or a thinktank policy paper in which South Korea and North Korea peacefully confederate — and the U.S. loses all leverage overnight — would be rapidly dismissed. But as a speculative fiction piece, it could circulate, and challenge minds without threatening official narratives. It could make policymakers ask: what is preventing such a process?

Historically, speculative storytelling has influenced strategic thinking. Science fiction shaped nuclear deterrence theory. Fables informed diplomatic maneuvers during the Cold War. Today, speculative fiction could similarly sharpen U.S. policy thinking about Korea. It offers an antidote to the deadening repetition of “pressure and dialogue,” and demands that policymakers engage with the emotional, messy, human realities that shape Korean politics far more than grand theories do.

Most importantly, speculative fiction democratizes foresight. It is fast to read, easy to distribute, and capable of reaching not just elites, but broader audiences — from Congressional staffers to embassy workers to young Korean students. In an age when narratives move faster than governments, the ability to inject vivid, emotionally resonant possibilities into the bloodstream of policy discourse is not an advantage. It is a necessity.

Korea changes quickly. The peninsula does not wait for long-winded analysis to catch up. If U.S. policymakers hope to shape, or even just adapt to, future developments in Korea, they must be willing to think differently — and faster.

Speculative fiction is not a gimmick. It is a discipline: forcing every word to matter, every moment to resonate. In the Korean context, where the stakes are often life and death, peace and war, unity and division, this discipline is long overdue.

Speculative fiction is not just storytelling. It is strategic imagination in its sharpest form.