Yesterday’s North Korean attack on South Korea has evidently frightened many people. That’s natural, for there is some incalculable but not trivial prospect that the fighting could escalate into a huge bloody mess. The attack, and the South Korean response, seems to have led to an emergency National Security Council meeting from which the President “emerged”—that word is always used in these situations—to call his South Korean counterpart with words of steadfast reassurance and so forth. (What was really said, of practical import, the public thankfully does not know.) Whether it was wise to let existence of this meeting be known is questionable: The North Koreans love attention, and there is nothing to be gained by showing them that they have succeeded, yet again, in yanking our chain.
Were the President and his counselors frightened, too? Of course they would not say so, in so many words, but all the papers emphasized that no good choices for how to deal with the crisis were to be had. That suggests worry, or at the very least gives it a license to drive the emotions of the moment.
My reaction to North Korean thuggery was altogether different: I was really quite pleased. This is not because my day job as a magazine editor means I have no line responsibilities to commute, so that I can therefore indulge without fear of retribution in a bout of I-told-you-so graveyard laughter. The North Koreans sink a South Korean naval vessel, killing more than 40 soldiers, and suffer not so much as a hangnail in response—and some are nevertheless surprised that they use violence again when it suits them. Light bends around such people.
No, not at all: I’m happy because every North Korean outrage of this sort advances the day when the Chinese government, the only human agency on the planet that can deal decisively with the dangers emanating from North Korea short of war, will realize that it needs to join with the United States, Japan and Russia to plot a modulated, controlled euthanasia for the North Korean regime. If it doesn’t, Beijing will be left essentially alone to deal with a war crisis and socio-economic collapse of much greater proportions.
Chinese attitudes have been changing slowly since 2002, the year that blatant North Korean cheating on the 1994 Agreed Framework came out into the open. The subsequent Six-Party Talks helped move them further along. What Pyongyang let loose yesterday, however, possibly in conjunction with some obscure inflection in North Korea’s mostly opaque political succession process, ought to quicken the pace a good bit.
Assuming it might, what should we do now? I laid it all out more than eight years ago in The New Republic, and nothing that has happened since has changed my mind.
What I proposed then, and still stand by now, would take serious multilateral diplomacy, real determination, requisite skill and indomitable patience to pull off. The George W. Bush Administration did not have the right stuff for Korea. Does the Obama Administration? No sign of that stuff yet.