Frankly, I'm a little tired of hearing about the Middle East (not that I'm understating its importance in any way). So for a change, I'd just like to invite a little discussion about the Far East, and more importantly, what we ought to do about it. (Shameless whore: If you're interested in Asia matters, especially Japan,
see my blog). I'd just like to lay out the possible issues I see ahead in Asia, from my rather limited perspective.
1. North Korea: Kind of a "no duh" point, of course. It's a paranoid dysfunctional regime, with nuclear weapons. Needs to be handled very delicately, and now that they have nuclear weapons, the problem is nearly insoluble. Heartbreaking as its treatment of its citizens is, the best solution may simply be to stay put and outlast the regime. In dealing with such an irrational leadership, anything might set it off, and the concept of "one-sided assured destruction" simply might not be a deterrent. They could make a lot of chaos before they went. Sorry to say, the issue isn't going anywhere for a while.
2. A re-armed Japan: No joke. Japan isn't really regarded as a major player on the international scene, but it has made the strongest bid to be a member of the Security Council, which would necessitate amending their constitution to allow them to have a real military. The prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, has also strongly aligned himself with the militarist faction of the LDP and pledged to amend the relevant article in the constitution. Especially considering Japan's recent habit of diplomatic...uhhh, "incidents" with its neighbors surrounding outbreaks of nationalism by the leadership, it has the possibility of leading to a vicious cycle. This could get ugly.
3. An Aggressive China: This also could get very ugly. Well, this is a list of possible challenges, so perhaps that's to be expected. Anyway, there a couple things that could cause China to start making mischief in the region. The first is the occurence of either 1 (North Korea conflict) or 2 (Japanese nationalism). While China's rulers are lightyears saner than North Korea's, they are still a pretty opaque government. The country is opening up, liberalizing, and that spells a threat to the Party. The second major one is energy. China has little natural energy resources (just coal, and some amount of oil in the South China Sea, although that's so disputed they may never see it), and if all the hoopla over Hubbert's Peak plays out as expected, they could be in fairly dire straits. And unlike the US, which has to rely on overseas force protection, the Chinese Army can walk there. If the oil situation ever got bad enough, they could (and no doubt would) transport it back on human backs. While this seems far-fetched at the moment, we haven't hit tough times with oil yet.
4. Creditor Smash! It's pretty hard to imagine just how much of our debt is held by banks in Japan, and by the Chinese government. It's a pretty big weapon that the Chinese could easily wield over us. If they ever actually called in our debts (and there's no way we could pay), it could surprisingly easily turn into a casus belli (although I've got to say outright military confrontation with China is unlikely, save in some pretty worst-case oil scenarios). Or, of course, they could simply stop extending us credit. Chances are we could find someone else to buy it up, but if we're a bad enough risk that they deny us...
These are a few possibilites, and not all of them likely. No matter what happens, I think the coming few years will be interesting times in East Asia. And ones with some possibly pretty adverse consequences for us, so I'm rather surprised that the only Asia-related news I see in US papers tends to be "China will own j00". What do y'all think?