RE: North Korea executed 5 security officials, South Korea says
March 1, 2017 at 9:54 am
(This post was last modified: March 1, 2017 at 11:32 am by Anomalocaris.)
(February 28, 2017 at 11:31 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:(February 28, 2017 at 6:41 pm)The Valkyrie Wrote: I'm just waiting until they do something to piss off China.
Hopefully then they'll do something about him
That won't happen. China is much more comfortable having that regime as a buffer than having to work at ameliorating a humanitarian crisis, which the regime's downfall will precipitate.
This is why China won't play ball in helping to control DPRK's nuclear program.
Actually, china Has no interest in protecting DpRK's nuclear program. A nuclear North Korea is a tremendous headache for china because it promotes regional nuclearization by American allies which is of no advantage to china. Worse and more immediately damaging to china is the fact that DPRK's nuclear program gives America political cover to further degrade the effectiveness and credibility of China's own nuclear arsenal by putting ballistic missile defense on China's door steps, and weakens china relative to the US.
However, china has an even stronger interest in protecting the existence of DPRK's, because that is both a useful buffer state, because collapse of North Korea will create vast risks in the regional alignments of ethnicities and countries, and because it gives china more leverage in dealing with South Korea.
The fact that china can't get the latter without conceding to DPRK's nuclear ambitions indicates china has very little ability to exert precision surgical influence inside North Korea. China may well have a crude sledge hammer, but if china judged swinging it on North Korea will cause North Korea to crack before North korea's nuclear program, then in effect china has no ability to control north korea's nuclear program.
