Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
It was more about Clinton being lazy or stupid or both, not about some doubleday plot.
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And a side-effect of the cozying up to China which started back in Bush Senior's day; the US could never put real pressure on North Korea because China sees them as being in its sphere of influence, and the US-China relationship was seen as too important to jeopardize. Clinton should have told the Chinese that a necessary pre-condition of the increased trade and normalized relations was that N. Korea be reigned in and made to behave, but instead the administration chose to believe in diplomacy with all carrots and no stick. Bush Jr was no better with his pathetic need to keep all Taiwan/Korea issues quiet while he was spending a trillion dollars on killing Saddam Hussein.
Now the Chinese are probably just as afraid of North Korea as everyone else; the Chinese military is good at killing students but its record against other nations is unimpressive. North Korea is to China now as Israel is to the USA - a nation that expects military and economic support as its due, but feels little need to heed the wishes of its sponsor when they don't coincide with what they were already going to do. The Koreans no doubt see going nuclear as long-term insurance against China as much as the USA, and will have no compunction in blackmailing Beijing into keeping them afloat no matter what the UN decides to do as far as economic sanctions go.
So now there isn't really anything to be done short of hoping for revolution and regime overthrow, other than the vanishingly small hope of convincing the Chinese to invade and then rolling them up from both sides, which incidentally would probably kill or displace tens of millions of people before the war was over.