Lips, Teeth and Nuclear Weapons

Banyan talks about the Wikileaks cables that may show some evidence of China backing away from North Korea and accepting the idea of a unified Korean peninsula under the direction of Seoul.

The take? Don't count your Kims until they've cracked:

China’s leaders are not a sentimental lot, and if they cling to an alliance with the North Korean regime it must be because they believe it in China’s interests. Which leaves the suggestion that the officials Mr Chun was quoting were either out of line, telling their interlocutor what he wanted to hear or, perhaps, ahead of their time. Mr Chun himself described a generational shift in Chinese attitudes and noted that the Chinese envoy to the six-country talks on North Korea was, contrary to his hopes, not one of the enlightened sophisticates. Rather it was (and still is) Wu Dawei, an older man, whom he called China’s “most incompetent official”, and the American scribe summed up as “an arrogant, Marx-spouting former Red Guard”. The old guard in China still seems to be running Korea policy.

My feeling is that sooner or later, China is going to have to accept that North Korea is simply too unstable and too nuclear armed to be a viable buffer against the United States. Certainly, they don't want a situation where American soldiers could conceivably be camped out on their borders. At the same time though, they don't want a neighboring, nuclear armed regime that sooner or later, is bound to collapse under its own lunacy.

To me, it seems far wiser to make what attempts it can to lure Seoul towards neutrality. China is already South Korea's largest trading partner. Surely, some peaceful, economic incentives can help move them away from the American sphere of influence. Naturally, I wouldn't be terribly happy to see that. But given the options of a neutral, unified Korea without an American military presence vs. clearly insane people with nukes and a starving populace, I have to prefer the former.