Kahn is really good on China. Key bit here:ARTICLE: “Angry China Likely to Toughen Korea Stand Somewhat: Disappointed by its ally, Beijing strongly condemns the test,” New York Times, 10 October 2006, p. A10.
ARTICLE: “Security Council Approves South Korean as U.N. Chief: One last vote before Ban Ki-moon becomes secretary general,” by Warren Hoge and Choe Sang-hun, New York Times, 10 October 2006, p. A10.
ARTICLE: “Pentagon Assesses Responses, Including a Possible Blockade,” by Thom Shanker, New York Times, 10 October 2006, p. A8.
OP-ED: “Mutually Assured Disruption: Enough talk. Let’s make North Korea, and China, pay,” by David Frum, New York Times, 10 October 2006, p. A27.
The reason there is unlikely to be a major policy change, Mr. Jin [Canrong, a foreign policy expert at People’s University in Beijing] and other experts here said, is that North Korea has sharply increased tensions without fundamentally changing China’s calculations of its national interests.Hell, I just realized! We don’t really need Western China scholars much any more, not when you can get that sort of dead-on analysis from homegrown experts.Its priorities remain, first and foremost, promoting internal economic development, the key to longevity for the ruling Communist Party. China’s cautious authoritarian leaders concluded long ago that generating high growth in its gross domestic product required a benign relationship with the world’s major powers, secure borders, and open markets--in a word, stability.
China would like to achieve a denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula but has shown few signs of accepting war or a forced change of government as an acceptable way to achieve that goal.
“The core of the issue is not nuclear weapons, said Shen Dingli, a leading security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai. “The core of the issue is peace and stability. That is still strongly in China’s interest.”
I’m glad I didn’t read this piece before I went on Kudlow, because I basically made a similar one on my own, and it feels better to have it validated than to crib it.
So a low-key China plus a low-key new Korean UNSECGEN and a Japan just trying to get back in China’s good graces and a George Bush promising diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy (which I described last night as code for “China! Help me!”) and I’d say Kim is looking pretty (or as pretty as someone with that hair can; I mean, I can’t exactly say “standing tall,” can I?).
Yes, we can blockade, and we probably should. But as I said last night, Kim has shown himself impervious to disconnecting strategies, which only play into his hand, as Ian Bremmer of “J-curve” fame would argue (and did recently in a WAPO op-ed shilling his book nicely). If he can let 2 million die rather than risk too much foreign relief connectivity, he can certainly hold out for the long haul.
As I said yesterday in the blog: we should just start the East Asian NATO talks now, over this issue, rather than keep such progress hostage to that little rat bastard. Let’s build the alliance pre-emptively, in anticipation of the victory, rather than wait. I know of no other better subverting pressure on Kim--namely, we seduce his patron in front of him.
As for a goofy, exact opposite approach, check out former Bush speechwriter David Frum’s op-ed. If you think journalists as grand strategists are dangerous, then imagine how scary speechwriters are. But what can you expect from Mr. Axis of Evil (and to think he and the Missus used to brag him up on that grand accomplishment, which of course doesn’t seem to have been the great move since it telegraphed our punches so well, leading to our current situations with both Iran and North Korea).