North Korea: what to do?
It's time to focus (go on, just for a couple of minutes) on something called the Proliferation Security Initiative.
Why? Because it might lead to a nasty outbreak of hostilities in east Asia. And with nuclear North Korea in its current mood, that's not a pleasant thought.
This is how it goes: last Monday, North Korea carried out an underground nuclear weapons test. It was far more powerful - and, it seems, rather more successful - than the only previous one it had carried out in 2006.
South Korea, understandably enough, got another attack of the jitters, and announced that it intends to sign up to the Proliferation Security Initiative, which was launched in 2003 by President Bush to give states the right to stop ships and planes which are suspected of illicitly transporting nuclear or other weapons.
North Korea didn't much like that - the obvious implied threat was that South Korea might start trying to interdict North Korean vessels on the high seas - and it responded by announcing that it will no longer abide by the terms of the armistice agreement that ended the Korean war in 1953.
So far, you may think, little more than the usual Korean bellicose rhetoric. But when I asked one proliferation analyst last week if he thinks there is now a heightened risk of a new east Asian arms race, he responded: "No, the risk now is of a war."
Wars, as we know, sometimes start by mistake. Sometimes, one small miscalculation can lead to much bigger ones - and with the current state of the North Korean leadership in flux (Kim Jong Il is said to have suffered a serious stroke last year and did not look well in recent TV pictures), there are real fears about what decisions might be made in Pyongyang.
So, as the UN Security Council tries to find the right words for a condemnatory resolution that won't be vetoed by China, what are the options? Frankly, judging by the people I've been talking to over the past few days, not a lot.
Tougher sanctions seem to be a non-starter, both because China won't agree to them and because all the evidence suggests that sanctions don't influence the North Korean leadership. President Obama wants to engage - but it takes two to play that game, and for now, Pyongyang says it's not interested.
China has some influence, but can't dictate terms. It does not approve of Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions, and its main priority seems to be to keep North Korea from total melt-down, because the last thing they want in Beijing is millions of desperate North Koreans flooding across their border.
All of which suggests that the next few months will be tense, to say the least. Much will depend on what North Korea's dysfunctional leadership hope to gain from their latest nuclear test. If they wanted to gain the world's attention, well, they've done that. If they wanted to show their own people that they are still "strong", well, who knows? The truth is that North Korea remains one of the most isolated and enigmatic places on earth.
I'll be in Poland next week preparing for a special edition of The World Tonight on Thursday, live from Gdansk, on the 20th anniversary of the elections in which the Communist party was defeated, spelling the beginning of the end of Communist rule in eastern and central Europe, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. We'll also be remembering the massacre in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, that same June day in 1989, and discussing the lasting significance of those events with a leading Chinese writer who was there. I do hope you'll be able to join us.
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