NORTH KOREA
(…the ravings of loudmouthed lunatics?)

I left Korea 63 years ago…and have never been back since.

My memories of that brief war-torn experience, during the first three months of a so-called – police action- are not the most pleasant. They remain a dark, unhappy episode, filled with ghosts. Ghosts of bright young kids who never came home, whose bones still lie lost in its hills… somewhere.

So, hearing the recent North Korean threats to unleash another useless conflict there including, this time, an atomic missile strike on Washington, DC, can’t help but raise my hackles and to growl about taking care of “unfinished business,” yet, wondering if such bellicose pronouncements are simply those of a frantic regime facing the possibility of further economic strangulation and potential political and social collapse; or, just the ravings of loudmouthed lunatics?

But then, if they are indeed lunatics, how dicey will it be this time to come up with effective means to once and for all contain them in their own-created asylum, without the need to resort to the extremes of sending yet another generation of young Americans into harm’s way…and bombing them back to the stone age besides?

Personal reactions aside, I also can’t help but wonder if today’s Chinese and American leaderships have the smarts and willingness to put together a joint, coordinated, and carefully applied containment approach to this situation.  While I’m not very optimistic that might be done, it really boils down to the question of…who is more important to whom… than anything else. That is, is America more important to China than North Korea? Is China more important to America than North Korea? There are no simple answers to such questions.

For China, the problem is much more complex than for America, because it faces a growing economic and political uncertainty in its own situation. Thus, any North Korean aggressive action that might rock the status quo boat is not in its interest. In that eventuality, it would face a flood of refugees from North Korea endangering its own internal stability. On the other hand, it also isn’t ready to have a re-unified Korea, as a dynamic economic and western oriented entity right up against its northern Yalu river border, offering its own people a back door escape route from China’s one party rule. For now, it still needs a North Korean “buffer” between itself and South Korea, hence its dilemma.

For America, the problem is somewhat less complex. That is, if it has to apply military muscle besides economic pressures against North Korea, its military technology today, compared to what it was so many years ago, is such that it could probably almost surgically “decapitate” the entire North Korean hierarchy without the use of atomic means. The problem, here again, is that totalitarian regimes like North Korea don’t provide for such things. Without that matrix of hierarchy, the entire system would collapse because it is based solely on coercion and fear. Furthermore, any military counter moves on America’s part would require almost impossible “assurances” to China, to avoid a reaction to that, as it did when, after Inchon, MacArthur charged clear to the Yalu river border with China.

It’s a dicey situation leaving both China and America with very little wiggle room to avoid a major mutual confrontation between them. And all of that because a piss-ant regime, a pimple on the ass of the world, is trying to act like a mouse…that roars. It’s enough to make a grown person cry!

CENTURION