NORTH KOREA…A BLACK HOLE OF POTENTIAL DISASTER…
(…whose paranoia could suck everyone around it into useless conflict)

North Korea’s continued atomic saber rattling, especially with its open display of developing high end missile technology, is becoming a black hole of potential disaster…whose paranoia could suck everyone around it into useless conflict. While South Korea and Japan are its immediate neighbors at risk, both China and the USA also have much more to lose from such an eventuality.

Kim Jong Un has clearly shown by his record he is bent on pursuing his objective to become another atomic power, with the capability of long range missile strikes. There is very little in the way of “negotiation” that will dissuade him from that purpose. Neither China nor the USA have much leverage to negotiate with…other than the threat of blunt force trauma…but if such threats are made, given his intransigent behavior, sooner or later these would have to become a reality to be believable. And if such force were applied…everyone would inevitably be sucked into mutually destructive conflict…starting with North Korea itself.

This is a rather bleak perspective for everyone.

The only fail-safe option that might nullify the situation is if both China and the USA clearly indicate to Kim Jung Un that they are prepared to jointly apply surgical military strikes against his missile facilities and resources. Without these, his atomic resources will be of little concern so long as they are not weaponized in some form or another.

The problem however is that all three key players here have almost insurmountable concerns. North Korea is mainly concerned with its retention of power, along with a manic focus of achieving total control over the entire peninsula by force. While the first of those concerns can be defused, the second will never be allowed without another very destructive conflict against such an objective by North Korea.

China’s concerns are about not having any kind of regime change, especially if the consequences of that were to release a flood of refugees from North Korea into its territory, and even more acutely, if such a regime change were to end up with a unified Korea as a free and open society right up against its Yalu River borderlands…because that would create a back-door escape hatch for those of its citizens seeking safe-haven from China’s single party authoritarian rule, so China will never accept that model for unification.

For its part, the US’s main concerns are about the dismantling of North Korea’s missile capabilities, and, for the peninsula to remain in its present status quo split between the two sides, but with some form of peaceful co-existence arrangement to keep it in place. Regime change, while perhaps desirable for something less aggressive and less hostile, is not a major issue for it.

It’s obvious therefor that all three parties here have only one thing they can all agree on…no regime change. For both China and the US, allowing North Korea to remain as a buffer state, while establishing some kind of peaceful co-existence treaty between it and South Korea (perhaps underwritten by both the US and China), would be an acceptable resolution to the situation since that would finally officially formalize the end the Korean War of 1950-1954.

While no actual reunification would occur from such a treaty, both North and South Korea could then operate in a mutually beneficial economic and diplomatic matrix, with a minimum of mutual antagonisms.

Perhaps such a joint kind of pressure from China and the USA might have the desired outcome of getting North Korea to abandon its missile pursuits, and aim its atomic activities solely for peaceful applications…instead of weaponry.

But without such well-coordinated and combined joint pressure from China and the US there is little hope that the situation won’t end in a conflict that will damage everyone.

CENTURION