I think that the editors of the Wall Street Journal have dealing with the challenges presented by North Korea almost 180° wrong. Here’s their prescription:
China isn’t likely to squeeze its client unless it sees the U.S. and its allies doing more to isolate the North on their own. Such a policy would seek to end the regime through sweeping financial sanctions that prevent the Kim family from financing the tools of their tyranny, from weapons to whiskeys, and that impose stiff penalties on their enablers abroad. The strategy of begging China has been a failure.
What they’re ignoring is that China actually has interests of its own. China isn’t refraining from “squeezing” (as they put it) the North Koreans out of any great love for the Kim family. It’s because doing so would not further their interests.
Here are China’s interests:
- the Chinese don’t want a mass stampede of refugees from North Korea coming into China
- the Chinese don’t want a reunified Korean Peninsula allied with the United States
which I think are perfectly understandable.
Here’s my alternate plan. Start negotiating to pull U. S. forces out of South Korea. If the Chinese were more confident of a friendly unified Korea or at least a neutral one, I suspect that their support for the Kims would evaporate.
Sometimes the most truculent policy isn’t the one that accomplishes your strategic objectives. Americans don’t seem to understand that.
I think you’ve stated it accurately. We need US-China-SK diplomacy on this, not belligerence. A re-united Korea can no longer be a US base, that is a deal-killer for China. We need cast-iron assurances from the PRC that a re-united Korea will be independent, sovereign, non-aligned nation, with a military force sufficient to offer significant resistance to China, but configured as a defensive force. (No long-range bombers or missiles.) And if China wants to avoid the NK population streaming north they need to enable SK to be the primary on the case. SK is a relatively wealthy country, but they may need significant financial and logistical support.
I’m not sure why any part of that should be difficult to negotiate. I would imagine the Chinese are even less thrilled than we are to see Kim the Latest in possession of nuclear weapons that could reach Shanghai or Beijing. I wonder what’s going through the heads of the SK’s though, I don’t know enough to guess whether they genuinely want to see reunification, or whether they might see it as a political threat.
One thing about the Chinese concerns about the consequences of the collapse of the Kim regime that has always puzzled me is why everyone seems to assume that a unified Korea allied to the United States would be an immediate concern.
Unlike Germany 20-odd year ago, it seems apparent that the differences between North and South Korea are far more extreme than those between East and West Germany were in the early 1990s. Not only are the two nations vastly far apart economically and technologically, but it also seem as though there are also likely to be cultural and other issues that would need to be dealt with before formal reunification would be possible. We have no idea, for example, how the North Korean people are going to react to the sudden collapse of the world they have lived in for the past 70 years.
Keeping all that in mind, perhaps the answer would be to make North Korea a temporary United Nations protectorate with the Chinese and South Koreans taking responsibility for the matter. In the meantime, with the immediate Pyongyang threat eliminated, the U.S, could gradually begin withdrawing its forces while the parties negotiate a future in which Korea is allowed to exist on its own rather than becoming a Chinese stooge as opposed to an American ally.
At the very least, it seems as though this is something that the interested parties — China, South Korea, the U.S., and Japan — should be talking about because the possibility of a sudden crisis in North Korea can’t be dismissed and having at least some kind of plan would hopefully avoid the possibility of confrontation in the wake of a collapse in the north. Unfortunately, I don’t get the impression that any such discussions have really ever taken place.
Because the Chinese are paranoid, Doug. All great powers are. We are. Why did we think that a Cuba allied with the Soviet Union was a threat to us?
and yet the reunification of the Korean Peninsula is as evergreen a political issue in South Korea as German reunification was in Germany. Many South Koreans continue to have family members in North Korea. As bizarre as reunification looks to us, the South Koreans still want it.
My key point is that the U. S. getting tough will solve nothing with respect to North Korea.
Most people who want to “talk tough” actually mean “bluff.” Because they never seem to want to launch invasions of Syria or North Korea or wherever, and they don’t really have the ruthlessness to do the worst things, so they just want a bunch of impotent yelling and empty threats because that will satisfy their emotional needs. And hey, it works so well for movie action heroes.
I already have such a low opinion of people’s intelligence, it’s distressing to have to keep lowering it.
The ones who talk tough in the movies are usually the villains. The movie cliché is that the villain always launches into a long rant about his plans for world domination just before defeat. The hero usually doesn’t say much at all.
You can relax, Dennis Rodman has it covered.
I suspect the CIA and all manner of other agencies have worked assiduously squashing all the reunification movements and impulses in both Koreas and exacerbating mistrust so as to justify continued waste of US taxpayers monies funding continued occupation.
Hmmm. That’s right, mostly, although there’s, “I know what you’re thinking. “Did he fire six shots or only five?” Well to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you’ve gotta ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?”
Not to mention Moses going on and on about plagues. That was an action movie, right?
Oh, and this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkWS9PiXekE
This is Sparta! And we kinda don’t get the whole diplomacy thing!
We used to be Athens.
Used to be. Now we (some of us) expect our leaders to rant about how tough and great we are like just like anyone else you would see on WWE.
Steve