The Bully and His Larger Victim

[jordan179]

North Korea has begun openly bombarding a South Korean island. The motive is a demand for tribute: the implicit threat is that if the tribute is not paid that this and similar attacks will continue and escalate, and that if South Korea tries to fight back North Korea will use nuclear weapons upon them.

Comments

[americanstd]

...and you did it without blaming Obama! Congrats!

In any case, I tend to think that this is not so much about tribute, rather than showing that Kim Jong Un, the heir apparent to the throne of North Korea, is showing that he can deal with the South just like daddy.

Gee, where have we seen a son try to show up his father before by using warfare...hmm....

+1

[zornhau]

I tend to agree with you, with the caveat that I'd want to be very sure that extreme retaliation wouldn't strengthen rather than weaken the North Korean regime.

[aadler]

> … and you did it without blaming Obama! Congrats!

Blaming Obama isn’t the automatic court of first resort. He is to be blamed only for those things wherein he deserves blame. Unfortunately, there are so many of them, it can indeed appear that blaming him is a reflexive habit, rather than an earned response.

[kishiriadgr]

So far I've seen Obama blamed here twice for abandoning Iraq (based on policies signed by the Bush administration) and for being the reason why Libyans attacked Italian fishing vessels. Oh, and for the release of the Pan Am bomber when the Obama administration asked that he NOT be freed. So yes, I'm very happy that Obama didn't get dragged into this too. The world does not revolve around the United States.

[shockwave77598]

The north Koreans are doing the same thing they've been doing for decades -- trying to prod the south into attacking so they can cry out to Big brother China to open up a can of whoop ass for them. Then they'll conquer the entire penninsula. But they can't do it while appearing to be the aggressor or China won't bail them out, and they'll get a very professional clock cleaning. So the north pokes and tweaks, trying to get the south to take a swing at them so they can play the victim card

[kishiriadgr]

This. China wouldn't have very much, if anything, to gain by empowering NK to go after the south. It'd be funny if NK attacked, looked to China for help and China said, "Hey, we didn't encourage you to do this. You and your starving country are on your own."

"Eat their own uranium." I like that line too.

[jordan179]

China wouldn't have very much, if anything, to gain by empowering NK to go after the south.

Precisely. In fact they'd have much to lose -- in particular their assets in America, their merchant marine at sea, and much of their international trade. Attacking South Korea would be folly for China.

Which doesn't mean that they definitely won't do it. Great Powers have done foolish things before. But it does mean that it's not such an obviously brilliant strategy for the Chinese.

[marycatelli]

If China officially supports North Korea, and the United States officially supports South Korea, the United States can seize all the Treasury notes that China owns as enemy assets.

[melvin_udall]

Let's offer to sell Japan and South Korea nukes.

[banner]

I'm sure Japan already has them. Not so sure about South Korea.

[blackhawk101]

I believe Japan is loathe to have them re: that whole Hiroshima/Nagasaki thing. They are squeamish that our ships dock in Japan with nukes on them. Also there is no evidence that Japan has even started a scintilla of a nuke program- they are a fairly free society and such an endeavor would leak out PDQ

[jordan179]

That's my point -- the Japanese are restrained from building nuclear weaposn by primarily superstitious rather than technological factors. Give them a good reason to abandon such superstitions -- such as the Chinese launching a naval war against their commerce -- and the Japanese could deploy a credible nuclear arsenal with considerable rapidity.

I would not at all be surprised to discover that the Japanese have already built but not completed the assembly of at least a few nuclear weapons: unlike the North Korean ones, these would be cutting-edge designs and ready to mate to missiles.

[the_hat]

[lima_pcp]

In the immediate aftermath, I was hoping for a harsh military response by the ROK. On further reflection, though, it isn't going to happen, because the basic cost/benefit analysis still holds.

A limited strike against nork artillery and missiles, even if it manages to take out thousands of pieces and tens of thousands of soldiers, does nothing to mitigate the threat. They'll still have tens of thousands more artillery pieces and missiles, and millions of troops. It would be a domestic propaganda coup for the Kim regime, and may actually be what the north is attempting to trigger...

A more wide-ranging series of strikes risks giving the norks a 'use it or lose it' mentality that will trigger a general war which the south will win, but the short and long-term costs of winning that war (lives lost, property destroyed, trade disrupted, investor confidence shattered and financial markets in chaos, opportunity costs, occupying and socially/economically rehabilitating the north for decades to come, strained relations with China, etc)

[jordan179]

I'm a little bit surprised that you said

"In the immediate aftermath, I was hoping for a harsh military response by the ROK."

because you've consistently argued that I was naive and bloodthirsty to hope that we (or South Korea) would punish North Korea for her earlier acts of war and other provocations. But then you showed yourself still predictably mired in the short-term when you added

"On further reflection, though, it isn't going to happen, because the basic cost/benefit analysis still holds."

That "basic cost/benefit analysis" is short-term. If you look at the larger historical context, what is happening is that the North is managing to maintain an essentially non-sustainable level of military strength, which, in terms of its short-term capability has been ever-growing, by using this military to exact tribute from South Korea and other nations. At each step of the process, the North Koreans make it cheaper at that moment to yield than to fight, which is a strategy that only works if South Korea treats each confrontation as

[lima_pcp]

That "basic cost/benefit analysis" is short-term.

Fighting and winning a war against the north would be vastly more expensive, by orders of magnitude, in blood and treasure, than maintaining the status quo. There is no way around that. Do the math. The ROK sure did.

what is happening is that the North is managing to maintain an essentially non-sustainable level of military strength, which, in terms of its short-term capability has been ever-growing, by using this military to exact tribute from South Korea and other nations

The north is not getting stronger with time. Loss of aid from the south is a pain for them. Loss of aid from China would finish them. The south, meanwhile, grows ever stronger and more capable with each passing year, while the north continues to fall behind in both relative and absolute terms. Time overwhelmingly favors the south. Do the math.

Had South Korea chosen to stop all tribute ten years ago, North Korea could at the worst only have inflicted conventional damage on the South. Now, North Korea