Every few years, North Korea surfaces from the sludge of international relations to rattle its sabre and detonate half baked nukes and fire inaccurate missile tests. It's quite a joke really if it weren't for the fact that Kim Jong-Il seems pretty serious about his threats and nobody is willing to march in to North Korea to get themselves some regime-change-a-la-Iraq.
Thus it's always a bad time when North Korea decides to announce that it's detonated its second nuclear test, total contravention of anything discussed in the Six Nations talk. The Six Nations which include the 2 Koreas, China, Russia America and Japan have so far pleaded and begged and bribed with North Korea to stop its nuclear weapons program, but when they go and set off a 20kiloton nuke in a test, it's time for some diplomatic strife.
These fireworks follow the launch in April of a three-stage rocket over Japan and the Pacific. Until that point, it was still possible to argue that increasingly belligerent rhetoric from Mr Kim’s regime was just his way of catching the attention of President Barack Obama’s new administration. The pariah state had long said it wanted an accommodation with the United States that guaranteed its security. But engagement with the outside world now looks near the bottom of its priorities.
North Korea also says it has torn up the truce that ended the Korean war in 1953. This was provoked, it says, by South Korea’s decision to join the American-led Proliferation Security Initiative, a group that aims to block shipments of weapons of mass destruction and related contraband. South Korea was reacting to Mr Kim’s nuclear test; North Korea accused it of a “declaration of war”. With American and South Korean troops put on a higher alert, some kind of military clash looks possible.
North Korea has also said it is restarting its plutonium reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, closed since 2007 as part of a disarmament deal negotiated with America, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia. International nuclear inspectors have been kicked out of the country. There is also concern that North Korea will resume selling nuclear technology abroad.
Earlier this month North Korea told South Korean managers at the Kaesong industrial complex, not long ago seen as a symbol of warming ties on the peninsula, that they must sign new, costlier contracts for North Korean workers, or pack up and go. The chief North Korean negotiator of closer relations between North and South, once a confidant of Mr Kim, is rumoured to have been sent to a labour camp and even shot, possibly for taking bribes.
It's an ongoing joke. Like the warlords of Afghanistan, Kim Jong-Il makes his money dealing Heroin. They sell arms to dictators in Africa, they deal in black diamonds and whatever portable wealth while their population is starving. The regime is repressive to the point of cruelty, and the people are totally brain-washed in to supporting this system because dear leader allegedly makes it so good. It's like a whole nation that's been held captive by a cult of personality trying to build an on-going dynastic system like some medieval king. And the fact that the rest of the 21st Century world actually has to take this nation more seriously because of its serious nuclear ambition is truly pathetic.
But deal with them we must.
Nobody seems to have a plan on how to get North Korea to quit being North Korea as it were. Are they merely essentially fucked up? Or is it that they work hard to be so fucked up? Or is that they get immense help and encouragement to be so fucked up?
The Chinese are too invested in having the nation as a bulwark ally facing off the ...err... capitalist West at the 38th Parallel instead of on its own borders. It's not unlike the anxiety Russia has about the Ukraine wanting to join NATO. China doesn't ant North Korea to be absorbed into South Korea because suddenly the running dogs of the Capitalist West would be at their doorstep across the Yalu River.
Remember Douglas MacArthur's great plan to drop 8 nukes north of that river to create a no-mans land forever which would keep the Chinese out of the Korean peninsula? Yes, the plan that got him sacked by Truman. It sure looks prescient today, if only because dealing with the Kim Regime in both its generations has been like pulling teeth without anaesthetics - a medieval sort of problem. That's the Yalu River for you.
Perhaps we're lucky that Truman's notion of no further nuclear wars prevailed. China and Russia are still talking to the rest of the world, if with their own strategic concerns being their bug bears. That being said, most of these strategic concerns are a bit silly if it means in the case of Russia, the Ukraines cannot get energy supplies and in the case of North Korea, it continues the aggravation of this nuclear threat. And seeing that the Cold War is long over, you wonder why they let these Cold War Era politics continue locally to the detriment of their own reputations. I guess you can put this down to bloody-mindedness.
If it ever comes down to a military solution, it's going to have to be China that digs out the Kims from their bunkers, and not the USA or the West or their allies in the far east. If nukes ever get exchanged, then you'd have to say MacArthur had it right in 1951.
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