You know, North Korea is a shining example of exactly what happens when you deal with a problem in the grand old US traditional political style, you kick the goddamn thing down the road. We kick everything else that might conceivably cost a politician a vote in the next election, why not North Korea? Well, actually, thissituation we’re in right now might be the answer to that.
Every talking head with a face you can recognize, has retired from the military with a rank above corporal, or with a bowl of alphabet soup letters after their name will tell you that there are no good options in dealing with North Korea at this point. And they’re right. The fact that Seoul is within a mere minutes long travel time from almost contless North Korean rockets, and those launchers and artillery guns are in positions very difficult to take out preemptively make any kind of conventional assault unpalatable to say the least. Attacking their nuclear facilities is futile since they simply respond by firing their missiles and artillery and turn Seoul into a practical expression of Dante’s Ingerno. Fortunately you can still reason with North Korea, but you can reason with a dairy cow too if you have the desire to.
North Korea’s two biggest trade and protection benefactors are of course Russia and China. You can forget about Russia, Putin may not be playing 3 level chess, but he knows what works, and he’s not going to be very equitable in helping out while we’re busy closing Russian facilities in the US and sanctioning the bejesus out of him. The Chinese have their own game to play, while their trade with orth Korea is checken feed compared to their overall economy, there are two things that keep them backing a hereditary progression of Freddie Kruger’s. First the last thing they want is a unified, democratik Korea on their southern border, in the orbit of the United States. And second, they definitely don’t want millions of displaced North Koreans streaming over their southern border in case of a general war on the peninsula.
But to my mind, it didn’t didn’t always have to ber this way, simply because it wasn’t always this way. Geopolitically we did what we usually seem more than willing to do, we stepped on our dick. Nixon opened detente between China and the west, he laid the groundwork for China to become a global economic power. At that time, North Korea was nothing more than a moderate pain in the ass, and the start of our losing streak in wars. That was the time to deal with North Korea. But even then, China would never risk a unified Korea to its south, and of course, a unified, diplomatic Korea was all we could see. A diplomatic guarantee of a communist, but minimally armed North Korea, with lear arms benchmarks could have let China support North Korea, but also supervise them better to ensure their compliance with the agreement so as to not jeopardize China with sanctions that could put the brakes on their ascendance in the global marketplace. This kind of supervision could have led to the Kim family never having risen to prominence in North Korea in the first place, and a stable, non impoverished North Korea would have less desire to make a pain in the ass out of themselves in the first pace.
It looks to me like China fornicated the canine in this situation as well. After the war, North Korea was almost totally dependent on China. That left China with a large measure of control over the actions of their wayward brethren. This has changed over time, especially since the rise of the Kim dynasty. Right now, North Korea is more of a cult than a country, and Kim Jong Un is the Charlile Manson in this family. Kim has never actually met the President of China, and is unlikely to do so. Trump has badly miscalculated here, China no longer has the control over North Korea that they once did. They painted themselves into a corner by continuing to tolerate the nonsense coming out of the south as long as they were an irritant to the west, and especially the United States. Now Kim has China over a barrel too. China imposing throttling sanctions on Kim will have minimal effect since he has already proven that he doesn’t care if his people starve. And the thought of being blamed for a conventional conflict on the Korean peninsula and the resulting flood of refugees over their southern border is a owerful threat to China, and Kim Jong Un damn well knows it. China has let their Frankenstein;s monster off of the operating table, and now they can’t get him back into the dungeon again.
But there are still a couple of glimmers of hope in this dark time. First, all of Korea’s missile launches have been exactly that, launches. They have yet to prove that they can effectively control the aim of a long range missile, and have yet to prove that it can survive reentry into the atmosphere is a viable condition. Second, they have yet to prove that they actually can get a miniaturized warhead to fit properly on the head of a missile, and that it can survive reentry in a viable condition. But most importantly, their launch track record is not very good. Last year, when North Korea accelerated their launch program, MSNBC showed a graph that in the last 5 years, North Korea had about a 52% success rate in their test launches. And their success rate has not appreciably improved. Their last 3 missile launch failed within minutes of launch. Launching a nuclear missile doesn’t do you much good if it comes right back down on your head scan t minutes later. There is still time to put a seriouos crimp in North Korea’s program by starving them of the material and technology they need to ensure miniaturization, as well as the technology and knowledge they need to make their actual delivery system, the missiles, more dependable and stable. But tome is running out.
The biggest problem is the leaders involved. An unstable maniac like Kim Jong Un by himself was bad enough, but stable leaders on the other side tended to minimize the threat. We are cursed with a “damn the torpedoes” moron just as full of bluff, bluster, and dangerous ego as Kim himself. The generals around Trump are about to earn their paychecks in trying to keep this petulant, bellicose little toddler on his leash.
So, North Korea is rapidly approaching the level of an existential threat. With a little more realism and foresight about 50 years ago it didn’t have to be this way, but it is what it is. But the sooner Trump and the rest of the chickenhawks reconcile themselves to the faqct that North Korea is going to become a valid nuclear power, and start [plannong their strategies realistically around that fact, the better off everybody is going to be.