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■"U.S. Has Put Food Aid for North Korea on Hold: Officials Point to Problems In Monitoring, Deny Link To Rising Nuclear Tensions," by Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 20 May 2005, p. A1.
■"Zimbabwe, Long Desititute, Teeeters Toward Ruin: Food and Gasoline Are Scarce, Inflation Up and Industry Off," by Michael Wines, New York Times, 21 May 2005, p. A1.
North Korea is exhibit 1 in our failure to deal with China in a strategic fashion: we think we can keep China as a quasi-enemy in reserve while asking for their security help in the short run on Pyongyang, and we wonder why that doesn't seem to work.
What we don't seem to understand is that it's all endgame to the Chinese, as in "what happens after?" All we see is the "what happens before" if we don't act.
So we'll cut food shipments as China ratchets up its own, giving us less leverage and them more while accomplishing nothing of value in the meantime. Sanctions of this sort are good for one thing and one thing only: killing the disempowered. We killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq in the 1990s this way. Maybe we're looking to outdo ourselves in North Korea in the 2000s.
This is such a bizarrely counter-intuitive approach, in my opinion, destined to get us nothing. Applying pain to a regime that loves passing it on directly to its masses is stupid, especially when the key player in the game is a third nation whose pleasure we can go a long way toward delivering. But rather than dealing with China strategically we non-deal with Pyongyang tactically, letting ourselves be manipulated far more than we manipulate Kim, and it's embarrassing.
And it costs.
Because we can't finish off the Cold War in Asia, Africa is left wanting on security and the never-ending plague of certain very bad leaders, like Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
But trust me, the Pentagon is, by and large, very happy with this stalemate. So long as North Korea AND China are out there looming, the Big War crowd prevails more often than not. What does America get as a result? A military that remains far too irrevelant to the real strategic task at hand: shrinking the Gap.
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