North Korea Pushes All The (non nuclear) Buttons

Sometime ago, another blog site requested that I submit an article on any subject I wished, for consideration of publication by them - the only condition was that I didn't publish it myself.

I duly sent them a topical and some what prescient article on the North Korean situation, but it appears not to have been deemed acceptable, and I can find no evidence of it being used. The weeks have gone by and the North Korean situation has if anything worsened so I feel free to use my article in an updated format.

North Korea Pushes All The (non nuclear) Buttons

The "Dear Leader" Kim Jong il (Not to be confused with the "Great leader" Kim Il Sung) has recently been rattling its sabres again. These displays of brinkmanship with the South Koreans, Japan and the United States of America have been a feature of his leadership ever since the ‘end of the cold war’ in the 1990’s.

Indeed the rhetoric has often been quite threatening, but most analysts have assumed that its been under control at the highest level and finely judged to achieve the maximum amount of political leverage (invariably accompanied by demands for money, food and fuel aid), often to surprisingly great effect, given the poverty of the regime, but an actual breakout of ‘war’ seemed unlikely.

Now however, the rattles have gotten increasingly louder, and the North Koreans are using the sort of language, and excuses, that in other eras have often preceded attacks on other countries.

The latest of these provocative actions was to accuse the South Koreans of moving a border marker, although how this was done, in the most intensely scrutinised and heavily armed border in the world, they have not explained.

They have also informed the South Koreans that should they join in an initiative to stop deadly weapons being transported at sea, then this, would be considered an act of war.

Now when I was young man, this was considered “fighting talk”, and indeed I remember being taught at school, that when Hitler invaded Poland, he invented an alleged ‘border incident’, to give himself a fig leaf of cover, for the invasion. Had he have gone on to win the resultant world war, then no doubt this ‘deception’ would have become ‘official’ history, and the Poles would have stood accused of the initiation of the Second World War.

It seems to me that, following the recent launch of long range missiles over Japanese airspace, the probable fact that North Korea has some sort of nuclear weapon, and the increasing desperation that the regime has fallen into economically (it's rumored that there have been at least two large scale famines in the last decade or so), that we may be reaching the tipping point.

That in fact a small miscalculation can easily be made, that will start the weapons firing, with the almost inevitable involvement of US troops, and that could easily precipitate a full blown war in the region by dragging in China, Russia and Japan. Even now, it seems more likely than not, that the North Koreans will be reined in by China and Russia, but what if events take control of themselves, and political considerations lose ground to be replaced with “national honour’, or ‘saving face’?

In Europe, in the lead up to the first world war, a series of misunderstandings and tragic ‘facts’, forced a continent that was largely not expecting or wanting it, into a tragic war. The British thought the Germans would want to talk first and so the cabinet went on holiday in August, the French thought that a show of strength via a 'call up of troops' would show the Germans that they would fight in the last resort, the Belgians and Dutch thought it was nothing to do with them, and the Germans had the ‘fact’ of a railway timetable and a ‘plan’, that meant once troops started moving they couldn’t be stopped.

Could we be on the verge of a series of ‘tragic facts’ that make war inevitable in the Korean peninsular?

North Korea is almost certainly suffering badly from the impact of the world recession, but can’t admit to its people that the last 50 yrs have been a lie. Its only strength is its armed forces, which suck up most of the states resources, and the regime needs to keep the armed forces self-esteem bolstered to ensure its support for the latest heredity succession.

The South Koreans are increasingly sick of being bullied and insulted by the North, and can’t or won’t, continue to bail out its wild sibling. Japan is furious at being threatened by North Korea without being able to fight back. China is unwilling to topple the regime of its only ‘client state’, for fear of millions of starving refugees pouring across a large border, and Russia is being very bullish in relations to the US and the West …… a tinderbox waiting for the gunpowder to fall under its sparks.

It would be somewhat ironic, if one of the last state run economies (Cuba being the other); run by the last ‘nearly’ communist state, in a period when the ‘Cold War’ is supposed to have ended, was able to start the very nuclear conflagration that we thought we had all avoided after communism collapsed in Russia.