RE: North Korea Aiming Nuclear Test Towards US
January 25, 2013 at 8:52 pm
(This post was last modified: January 25, 2013 at 9:05 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(January 25, 2013 at 8:19 pm)Insanity x Wrote: . Why would you want to support your leaders if you, your family and your friends are starving?
Same reason why people of many countries who believe they face invasion and conquest would willingly undergo incredible privations and still rally around their leaders.
As to China, Kim knows China would not let kim fall. The west say it's because the China wouldn't want several million starving North Korean refugees flooding over the border if Kim falls. But I don't believe that is really the case. The Chinese can largely prevent the flood of refugees by engineering an orderly transition of power in North Korea. The refugee story is just a fig leaf concocted by both China and the west to deflect attention away from a rather machivelliian mutural understanding.
The mutural understanding is the Sino-American relationship is very important and there can't be allowed an open rupture.
If Kim falls the sheer wealth and economic might of South Korea will garrantee North Korea will soon be absorbed by the South unless the Chinese do something drastic to prevent it. But China can never permit South Korea to absorb North Korea because China will never allow any country that hosts American troops to extend its influence to the Chinese border. So if Kim falls, sooner or later China will invade and occupy North Korea to forstall the formation of a united Korea with strong west leaning tendencies.
If China invades North Korea no South Korean government could survive unless it were to resist with armed force a Chinese invasion of what most South Koreans regard as half of their own country. So if China invades North Korea there will be war between China and South Korea.
If there is open war between South Korea and China, American is bound by her mutural defence treaty with Korea and the need to protect her own credibility and prestige to come in on the side of South Korea, hence open rupture, quite probably open war, between the US and China.
I think by agreement, US and China decided this can't be allowed to happen, so US continues to squeeze North Korea enough for Kim to maintain a siege mentality amongst his people. The Chinese continues to prop up Kim using the charade of wanting maintain order in North Korea and keeping Koreans from flooding into China as refugees. Every now and then, the Chinese go through the charade of expressing displeasure with temporary reduction in aid if Kim throws too much of a tantrum. But China will never really squeeze kim to the point where the latter can't breath. Kim knows this.
