Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
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.
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The problem for China is that they're going through what the Russian's went through with North Korea. The Russian's thought that they had NK solidly in their sphere of influence and NK basically told the Russians that they were more interested in working with China.
China gave NK the majority of their weapons designs including the missile technology that we're seeing now and the bomb plans that we're now seeing used. The North Korea's will use their nuclear strategy to try to shake free of China's influence. Remember that the Kim's right back to old papa Kim envisioned a completely isolated and independant Korea that would dictate terms to its neighbour, they also still dream of a unified Korea under the dynastic government and time is running short for Kim Jung Il. If this was the late 70's and they still had Russia and China as power parent states I wouldn't have been surprised if the North went after the South again.
But China and Russia are completely responsible for the NK nuclear program
