RE: NBA's Rodman calls Un "Great Guy"
March 4, 2013 at 2:33 pm
(This post was last modified: March 4, 2013 at 2:56 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(March 4, 2013 at 12:25 pm)Brian37 Wrote: Agreed. The few diplomatic trips some groups have made have not included sucking up to him. The intent of venues like this is to undermine his dictatorship and interject a wider view of the world to North Koreans. It wasn't that the Globe Trotters played there, it was that Rodman is a fucking idiot.
No, the ultimate intent of any diplomatic venue should be to use the other guy to serve your own high level national interest, not to enlighten his subjects.
The high level national interest of the US is governed by the fact that China is the 800 lb gorilla, North Korea is the vicious little dachshund. The core of American strategy should be to steadily undermine Chinese power in West Pacific in order to retain our own allies and protect the benefits of our preeminant position, but do so in a way that is not so obnoxious to China that they would prioritize confrontation with the US above their own peace and economic growth.
Enlightening north korean nationals does not directly serve American strategy because it increases the chance of an outright military confrontation with China should kim regime collapse and China face the total loss of its influence in Korea.
On the other hand, presenting the US as a viable, if distant, alternative and counterweight to Chinese infleunce for Kim does serve American national interest because it would loosen Chinese influence over Korean penninsula but not threaten to end it, so it would weaken China without making China feel the need to retaliate.
BTW, during the opening moves to establish diplomatic and political relationships after a long period of hostility always involve a mixture of tentative and deniable feel good gestures, outright sucking up hidden from the press, barely disguised browbeating also hidden from the press, and boiler plate sloganeering in state banquets, in approximately that order, on both sides. The trick is often the people who actually do the slogans and the browbeating can't be suspected of doing the sucking up and tentative feel good. So you send different crews for each task.
When the US first tried to establish diplomatic relationships with China, we first sent a Ping pong team to do the feel good gesture, then Secretary of State Kissinger took a secret trip to China to suck personally up to Mao, then Former NATO supreme commander general Alexander Haige went to China to browbeat Mao's underlings, and finally Nixon himself went to China to toast mao in a state banquet while each of them reiterated him own respective ideologically correct slogans in front of assembled reporters, something like "long live Chairman Mao and may communism burn eternally in hell", followed by "best health to the President and may American imperialists die the death of a thousand cuts" etc. etc
From this flowed a defacto US China alliance that lasted to the end of the cold war and effectively froze Soviet Union out of East Asian affairs.
