Kim Jong-un is not worried about the United States. It has been pretty quiet since the Korean War ended in 1953. What scares the hell out of Kim is the powerful, aggressive neighbor across the Yalu River, The Center of Everything (“China”. Don’t ask.)
Kim knows that The Center has occupied the Korean peninsula many times over the last twenty-one centuries. It crossed the Yalu in living memory and would have no problem doing it again if Kim gets out of hand.
Time is not on his side.
Kim is going one way— Enver Hoxha’s lock ‘em up and seal the place tight state management system—while the Center is going another—Mussolini’s guns and butter state management system. As we learned decades ago, neither works and they are diametrically opposed.
What freaks Kim out is that the newly powerful Center of Everything is now demanding that most of the Asia Pacific region, indeed most of the world, relearn its proper place in the order of things. The Center is the center and we are not. It’s that simple. Lowly feudatories like Kim must learn their place. And show that they know it every minute of every day. The once-mighty Vladimir Putin has dutifully performed his obeisance. Kim must do the same but, given the history of Korea-Center relations, with a much, much deeper bow.
Since the death of Mao and the liquidation of the Gang of Four, The Center has become the world’s second largest economy. It is a nuclear power. To show its new rank it has initiated a series of Agadir Incidents in the South China Sea. It has throw weight and is not afraid to use it. Until recently, North Korea had almost no throw weight. This made Kim very, very nervous.
He needs a powerful counter balance. There is only one place to turn. Us. But how to get the U.S. to do his bidding? Especially since we have been on the other side for generations already. And we are armed to the teeth.
Half a century ago, Mao and Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, allies since the Korean War, agreed on one thing. Enver Hoxha’s system was ideal. They formed an alliance against the United States and just about everyone else to keep their countries hermetically sealed Enver-style.
Then Mao ruined everything by changing sides in the middle of the Vietnam War and positioning his successors to grab huge amounts of global market share. The rest you know. Everything says Made in China. Nothing says Made in North Korea.
To keep the increasingly obstreperous Center at bay, Kim is doing two things. One, using the rule that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, he is provoking us just enough to keep, even grow, our military presence in the Pacific. But not provoking us enough to do something stupid. He knows he can count on U.S. forbearance even in extreme cases like his sinking of the Cheonan or testing nuclear warheads and ICBMs.
As Kim planned, his “inoculations” are ending U.S. thoughts of withdrawing from the Korean Peninsula or anywhere else, especially Okinawa to the fury of many of the people there. He may even get us to increase our presence in the region. But not too much lest he over shoot his mark and drive the U.S. and The Center to a Bismarck-style solution which would be the end of him.
Two, Kim is lying outright, claiming loudly that he is The Center’s longest and truest ally and that all his actions are designed to support The Center’s proper role as the leader of all peoples. It is, after all, The Center.
The longer he can keep The Center behind him and the U.S. against The Center, the more time he has to create the nuclear weapons and missiles that he expects to make him untouchable by anyone so that he can maintain the Enver Hoxha system. Which is one reason why Don Trump wants to give Japan and South Korea The Bomb.
If this sounds like high wire lunacy, it is.
For starters, Kim is embarrassing The Center big time. Every bomb or missile test he initiates shows how little influence it has. Nothing infuriates the center of The Center, the Communist Party, more. To keep a semblance of control, it allows an easy flow of goods across The Center's border with North Korea. With Kim tied to The Center’s lifeline—he has no other trading partners—The Center hopes to influence outcomes. Kim uses this desire for control to play The Center for a sucker. No matter how many U.N. sanctions to which The Center agrees, it cannot afford to enforce them without eliminating its position entirely. Then what?
This, in turn, makes The Center a victim of one of Obama’s utterly ruthless foreign policy calculations. With every move Kim makes, Obama reminds The Center to live up to its image of itself as the central player on the world stage and keep Kim in line. Because, as Kim says himself, North Korea is the Center's closest ally and therefore must be the easiest to control. This, of course, is the one thing Xi Jinping is incapable of doing and it drives him mad. Obama daily, and not so subtly, shows Xi how absolutely impotent he is on his own border. Simply by telling Xi how powerful he is and that as the center of The Center he must show that he knows how to use his power.
Obama’s genius is to turn Kim’s strategy on its head. He points out to The Center that North Korea’s missiles can hit anything in The Center but not much here. That makes The Center Kim’s top target, not us. This is designed to get The Center to put ever more pressure on Kim to do what the U.S. wants him to do, but at no cost to us. All while forcing The Center to demonstrate publicly how little it can do.
Sure enough, The Center got the message. It’s putting ever more pressure on Kim. But this is tough. Kim has demonstrated that he can get Xi to do his bidding, not the other way around. How long Xi will tolerate Kim's impudence is anybody's guess.
The big risk for all of us is that Kim will go too far. He infuriated The Center by executing its long time fixer in North Korea, Kim’s uncle Jang Song-thaek. Kim’s continued armaments testing said to keep out the Americans who are clearly not coming will almost certainly provoke some kind of pre-emptive action by The Center. The Center cannot possibly tolerate a nuclear armed North Korea capable of holding it hostage at will. Which in turn may drive Kim to do something really nuts like nuke The Center, Japan and South Korea in retaliation.
The problem, as Publius sees it, is that Kim is flakey enough to do anything. He may even be suicidal: one of those nuts who, like an ISIS bomber, wants to go out in a blaze, literally, of glory taking lots and lots of people with him.
The next President better be real good. Real, real good.
May 19, 2016 Follow Up
An extremely insightful story by Jamil Anderlini on this in the Financial Times today. Anderlini was in North Korea last week and his comments are striking. His story is worth careful tracking.
February 24, 2017 Follow Up
Publius' assessment of North Korea is right on the money. Kim is doing exactly what Publius said he would, and Xi is beginning to show the depth of his displeasure. He cut off coal imports from North Korea, striking at the heart of North Korea's economy in response to the North's brazen missile test on February 11. As Jane Perlez reports in the New York Times today, Kim has reacted with the level of fury that Publius predicted, accusing the Center of "dancing to the tune of the U.S."
What is amazing is that The Center of Everything was, by all accounts, surprised by Kim's vehemence. This makes no sense. If The Center could not think through what Publius did several years before publishing this April 16, 2016 analysis, heaven help it when it tries to match Dumb Don Trump in the Nine Dash Line.
July 30, 2017 Follow Up
Xi's failure to control North Korea is now screaming at us. On July 28, Kim Jong Un fired a missile capable of hitting as far into the U.S. as Denver. Xi clearly didn't know about this missile, telling us that his intelligence in North Korea is non existent. Kim has made it absolutely clear to everyone, especially President Zero, that Xi has no leverage whatever in North Korea.
Kim's message to Dumb Don: You are weaker than Xi next door and in the words of your new top advisor, Anthony Scaramucci, I am going to use an unnatural sex act to "block" both of you.
Xi's next miscalculation is that President Zero knows that the ONLY thing that can save his presidency now is another Korean War. Dumb Don Trump is desperate for something, anything, that tells him how great he is. A total failure at home, all out war with North Korea is it. Xi seems completely unaware of this. Kim too. Which makes them both pretty stupid.
To avert this war, and the appalling outcome it will mean for the Center, Xi must take control of the North. But, the last time his military did anything at all was a disastrous border conflict with Vietnam in 1979, nearly forty years ago. This war lasted only 27 days yet the Center lost more soldiers than the U.S. in the entire 20-year Vietnam War. And won nothing. Ineptitude on a spectacular scale. Before that, you have to go back to the first Korean War (1950-53), before most in the People's Liberation Army were born.
No one in the People's Liberation Army has any experience of combat let alone of invasion, occupation and regime transition and management.
So the panic in the PLA--an organization devoted to mainly civilian functions today--must be amazing to see.
Nonetheless, Xi moved his ill-prepared PLA forces to the border with the North in an effort to induce some restraint. Kim's response to this empty gesture was yet another, more powerful missile.
For some months now we have been only days from the Second Korean War. As Don Trump's stupefying list of failures grows here at home, he will do what everyone else before him has done, look abroad for something to polish up what he sees in the mirror.
Forget health care or tax reform. We are talking blood and a lot of it. Maybe nuclear war. Time for everyone to get serious. Especially the U.S. media which has been asleep for years.