North Korea

Growing up in the Cold War 1980s, my generation was steeped in the notion of Mutually Assured Destruction: the balance between world powers was that each side could obliterate the other thus it was the continual avoidance of suicide that motivated nations. When I went to bed at night the street light outside my window created a mushroom cloud shaped shaft of light in my otherwise dark room. Yes, I was properly terrified as a boy.

As I've gotten older and read up more on the subject, full-on nuclear war (imagined to be the Americans and the Russians flinging all of their missiles at each other all at once) was never really gonna happen. When you realize how long it takes to fuel the missiles, make the reactions to satellite input, make all the necessary notifications within the gov't, get the air force and navy readied for response, and just how many bombs and missiles were in play, etc., it would've taken several hours for this all to take place and one assumes that during that time someone would've had the sense to find a non-suicide solution (thank god, Ozzy Osbourne was never in charge!). Indeed, upon reflection all-out nuclear war doesn't really even seem possible--even by accident!

However, as I get older and more well-read, the concept of Limited Nuclear War seems very possible. Perhaps even likely. It only takes one bomb properly placed and then a measured response. And it could happen in the blink of an eye by actors with nothing to gain but chaos.

So as my terror of Mutually Assured Destruction has waned, my fear of Limited Nuclear War has stepped into the anxiety void. In the days of missile defense, we hope that this threat has been neutralized if not eliminated. But even if missile defense works perfectly (which I suspect it will not) you still end up with this nightmare scenario: a nuclear missile gets launched, the missile gets shot down, crisis is averted, nobody dies...but a whole planet wakes up the next day and says, 'Wait....What the fuck just happened?' The world would be a changed place, no?

Over the last month or so that scenario creeps ever closer. North Korea has tested numerous missiles in the last 30 days and exploded their largest nuclear weapon yet. Kim Jong Un (AKA 'North Korea') has threatened to test his next long range missile by tipping it with a nuclear warhead and flinging it at Guam. Theoretically, the Americans will be able to shoot it down before it threatens lives or infrastructure....right? So far the Americans (and the Japanese) have declined to show off any of their anti-missile capabilities, perhaps we don't have any, perhaps we simply don't want to show what we can do.

Obviously the Americans make everything about themselves, so we fear an attack on Los Angeles or Honolulu. But the real target is Tokyo. Us Americans are young, we're new at all this foreign policy stuff but the rest of the world is ancient, they've been doing it for centuries. And the animosity between Japan and....well, virtually all Asian nations...cannot be minimized. In the first half of the 20th century, Japan dominated the Asian Pacific from Australia to the Bering Strait, brutally attacking the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and even marched through the Korean peninsula into China (the Rape of Nanjing in 1937 is marked by some historians as the true start of WWII). Animosity toward historical Japan and the modern-day economic powerhouse (eh, sorta) is at play just as much as pissing off the Americans (though at bottom pissing off USA and pissing off Japan are pretty much the same thing).

What's the next move? President Trump has chided the South Koreans for 'appeasement', but what does that mean? What would it mean to appease the Un regime? Da fuck does that dude want?

Invading through the Korean peninsula is the traditional manner of attacking China, so creating a buffer state on the east side of the Yalu River has been China's defense against the rest of the world for decades. In the years after Mao's ascendancy North Korea was bred to be a cat's paw to scare away potential interlopers. Many say China has the power to shut North Korea down but I would suggest that's not as easy as it looks at this point. I suspect the Chinese are truly irritated by Kim at this point but don't really know how to pull them back.

China's failing here is ignoring the Kim regime. Clearly they have let the danger rise, perhaps even encouraged it. But to what end? China wants the buffer, they don't really want much more. China likes the Korean situation just the way it is: a rubber stopper firmly placed in China's one weakness. The fact that the North Koreans are frustrated in their aims to control the entire Korean peninsula is actually probably a delight to the Chinese: the rubber stopper itself has another rubber stopper on the opposite side to keep it firmly in place. The Americans/Japanese/South Koreans frustrated on one side, the North Koreans frustrated on the other, the Chinese happy that its enemies are played off against each other. The Chinese mistake is they have forgotten about evolution: by letting the North Korean nuclear program steadily advance, the Chinese are stuck with a well-armed madman right next door. How is that a good thing? (*)

There's a detail in the reportage on North Korea that I think has been not been well considered: if the Kim regime can hit Tokyo with a nuclear tipped missile then it can hit Beijing with a nuclear tipped missile. The danger for China is not that North Korea sucks them into a war they don't really want to fight, it is that they are held hostage by their own attack dog. They bred the dog to attack the west but the dog can just as easily turn on its master. And rather than ransom USA, the 20th century superpower, why not ransom China, the 21st century super power (and the center of the universe in much of Asian mysticism)? China has way more power over Kim Jong Un than USA does, wouldn't the weaponry be better pointed West than East? To my mind, this is the one opening USA and its allies have. I kinda thought that Donald Trump was (strangely enough) the one guy that might have success dealing with North Korea.

But the Trump presidency has led only back to the aforementioned scenario of shooting down the threatening missile. It appears it is on its way...

China would have to recognize that Kim has gone too far. China has no interest in war so close to its border, no interest in the North Korean refugees that would flood in, no interest in completely losing the Korean peninsula to infidels. China likes the status quo of a divided Korean peninsula (much like USA likes the status quo of independent Taiwan). But if this Guam business goes down, USA would have to step up and flatten the Kim regime. China should be as eager to avoid all of this as much USA. And yet Xi Jinping seems more interested in purging his military than getting it ready for Americans on the doorstep.

So where is all this coming from? Well, Kim Jong Un has been bred to be bellicose since birth and he's got the keys of the kingdom (much earlier than anyone anticipated), this is what he was built to do by father and grandfather. But China should be able to mitigate that, if forces within North Korea itself could not.

I think its Vladimir Putin. I think Putin is in pure chaos mode: Trump in the White House, Islamic Jihad at a fever pitch, Saudi and Iran are talking about banging, India and China are talking about banging, the Israelis are itching for a fight and the internet is bringing it all together. North Korea is the perfect cherry on top for the forces of weirdness. I think Putin has a bug in Kim's ear, I think he's telling the kid to keep firing because the Japanese will wet themselves, the Americans will bluster around like idiots and the Chinese won't do anything to stop it.

Yeah, all this stuff is real. But don't mistake North Korea for the main course, its just the hordoerve (god, why invent such a hard word to spell?). War with North Korea would just be the first step of much longer war. From the Sinai to the Korean Peninsula, Asia is shedding its skin. The prospects of a very big, civilization-size war is looming. There's no mutually assured anything at the moment. If USA is lucky we'll be able to sit this one out (but how likely is that?).


(*) Another ill-considered detail in all of this is South Korea's position vis-a-vis nuclear powered North Korea. The long range goal of the South Koreans is to reunite the Korean peninsula under their rule. Perhaps they might like having nuclear weapons. Perhaps they like the idea of absorbing the North's nuclear arsenal and being able to threaten China and Japan. So have the South Koreans ever really tried to stop the ongoing weapons development of the North? Or the Americans? It doesn't look like it to me.