I see no way this could ever backfire!

[Anomalocaris]

Your forgetting a few things. First off is that the Korean tanks are home brewed, and have no real service record compared to a Abrams which can out manoeuvre and out shoot them. Another and more important is aerial superiority. Neither the Chinese nor the Koreans have anything that can touch a raptor or a f35. That not even thinking about what a arely Burke, or a los Angelo's class could do. The issue is insurgency warfare which I think would evaporate if you kept them well fed after the war.

Any war in North Korea probably won't happen today, but in the next decade or two. In general it is far harder for the leader in military technology to keep finding and breaking the right new ground in unexplored territory in order to maintain his margin of lead, than it is for a well funded, well organized, and determined power to observe the paths taken by the leader and catch up. During the course of the Cold War the Soviet Union made prodigious progress in closing the military technological gap the US over 40 years despite having an economy at no times larger than 30% of US economy. As far back as 1995, US department of defence assessed that it would take China 30 years (that is to 2025) to fully catch up with the US in military technology. Since then Chinese economy has grown at far faster rate than had been anticipated in 1995, consequently the amount of funding and resource the chinese have been able to devote to catching up in military technology has been much greater than that DOD assessment has foreseen. The Chinese have also achieve major military technological milestones, such as the first 5th generation stealth fighter, the first competitive 3rd generation MBT, the first experimental 4th generation MBT, mastery of active electronically scaled, low observability radar, etc, etc, much sooner than anticipated.

So based on this trend, it would appear any major technological and capability gaps between the US and China would largely disappear within the next 12 years at most.

In a little more than 10 years, a war in Korea could involve the US taking on a China that can essentially match all aspects of American military capability, but command far larger manpower reserve and much greater industrial production capacity, as well as a larger economy overall, right on China's own door steps. In 10 years, if the US were to choose to fight China over North Korea, the US would likely face much worse odds than was ever faced by the NATO on the plains of central Germany. China would also be much more capable of deterring the US from taking any active part in a conflict in Korea than she is today.

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China is buying up huge tracts of land in Africa along side the nile and using it to grow their crops/rice. If their economy faulters, they still need that food/land, and the water the nile provides. alot of the countries who depend on the nile for water are already mad at china for diverting so much of the water of the nile onto crops that do not benfit that region at all.

I would hate to see the Nile river at Cairo, then, because if the Chinese pollute the Nile like they've polluted their own rivers, it will be a mess.

The Chinese rationale for getting a foot in the door of Egyptian food supply is pure geopolitics, and has nothing to do with Chinese food supply. The truth is Egypt can't even feed itself and has relied on subsidized food imports to feed its own citizens since at least the 1960s. There is not even the slightest possibility of the farms along Nile being used to export food back to China.

The truth is the recent Egyptian political upheavel has its ultimate roots in China. China like Egypt, has also lost the ability to feed its own citizens and has had to resort to large scale food imports since the late 1990s. But China is now importing food on such a huge scale that the world prices for food has shot up. China has the ability to keep paying the higher prices, but Egypt doesn't. Egptian government under Mubarek basically bankrupted itself subsidizing food imports to keep domestic food prices low and lower classes contented. When Egyptian government finally ran out of money and stopped subsidizing the food, popular discontent rose and Mubarek is overthrown.

Egypt is in no better situation now. It still can't grow enough food to feed itself, it's government is still bankrupt, and it needs massive subsidies from Saudi-Arabia to keep paying for its own food import needs. So the Chinese undoubtedly calculating that by buying up any domestic food production capacity in Egypt, when the prices are cheap due to uncertainty surrounding political stability, it could in effect put a knife to the jugular of any future Egyptian government.