It's China, Stupid!

So the title's not so civil, oh well. Do you know why North Korea has been out of the headlines lately? The answer is that Pyongyang has not been present in negotiations since November of last year. In fact, it has no intention of returning until the United States retract its recent sanctions and the allegations implicating North Korea of counterfeiting and money-laundering, which is presumably being used to fund its nuclear weapons programs. In other words, talks are at a standstill.

North Korea has been on the US watch list since 1982 when US satellites detected the construction of a small nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. Since then, Pyongyang has been using its ability to build nuclear weapons as leverage against the international community to get support and aid. This led to the 1994 “nuclear freeze” negotiated by former President Jimmy Carter and former North Korean president Kim Il Sung, in which the United States, Japan and South Korea agreed to supply North Korea fuel oil and two large nuclear-power plants incapable of manufacturing weapons-grade materials in return for North Korea dismantling its nuclear weapons project (note that China was not part of this agreement).

The agreement lasted five years until 1999, when US intelligence reported that North Korea had enriched enough weapons grade plutonium to build a purported 50 bombs. The question is where and how they got it? This was the reason why President Bush in his State of the Union address in 2002 included North Korea as one of the countries included in the “axis of evil”. Around the same time the United States made preparations to invade Iraq, North Korea in April 2003, admitted in talks with China and the United States that it had in its possession a nuclear bomb and wanted to detonate it. Why would North Korea publicly disclose that it had weapons? Wouldn't that strike the reader odd and irrational? I believe that this public show by Pyongyang was a political ploy conceived by Beijing to convince Kim Jong Il to enter into China’s proposed six-nation multilateral talks in an attempt to protect North Korea from the United States, who at the time invaded Iraq. I believe that arranegment between Beijing and Pyongyang took place behind the scenes.

I recently took a political management class in which our professor taught us that in order to understand what’s truly happening in current events, one has to critically examine multiple sources and to do one’s own investigation to connect the dots. While journalists relay the news, (it’s important to remember Herbert Simon’s theory of satisficing: that one cannot know everything), individual journalists only write on the information they know best thereby limiting the context, unable to present the bigger picture. That’s why I find Google News fascinating. The ability to access information from the left and right and other news media sites around the world gives us the opportunity to examine for ourselves multiple perspectives. What makes the North Korea multilateral talks interesting is that there are six countries involved, all with varying self-interests and agendas.

The major players in these discussions are the United States and China. While there are only two players, we can delineate in fact three general coalitions.

The first coalition is made up of the United States and Japan who genuinely want to see North Korea disarm its weapons. The United States are pushing North Korea to disarm because of the Bush Doctrine, which calls for the elimination of WMD and Japan, because of its close proximity to North Korea, fears attack from the rogue nation. Not to mention that there still exist much dislike between the Koreans and the Japanese that stems back to World War II.

The second coalition is what I call the indifferent countries. These include South Korea and Russia. While South Korea would prefer a disarmed northern neighbor, it remains sympathetic to its northern brothers and sisters, never hesitating to appease it by sending aid, whether food or energy, when the North threatens force. That's not a surprise since both share an ethnic bond both. As a result, South Korea has never had enough courage to impose sanctions on North Korea and probably never will.

Russia is another player in the discussions who in reality is uninterested in the matter. While in face, Putin wants the United States to achieve its goal in disarming North Korea (he would rather have a neighbor without nuclear capabilities), Russia may in fact have a secret desire to see the United States fail in these multilateral talks, primarily because of Russia's falling out of the world stage after the fall of communism. There is basis for this assertion. Currently, Russia continues to sell arms to Iran, fueling the WMD crisis in that region, which also involves the United States, and recently, Putin signed and the Duma passed a federal act last December that solidified the relationship with North Korea by boosting common protection on investments. Russia really has no reason to help the United States and in all likelihood will remain neutral in the process.

The major player in this discussion whom I believe is really in control, but didn’t want to find themselves there is the first place, are China and North Korea. While China claims to have severed military ties with Pyongyang, that’s more a red herring than an affirmation. Their ties that stem back to the Korean War, where 300,000 Chinese soldiers sacrificed their lives cannot just be pushed aside. I believe that it was China, North Korea’s closest ally, who from the very beginning supplied the North with weapons and continues to do so for the purposes of increasing its sphere of influence (communism) and intimidating Taiwan. The problem was that North Korea got caught with the weapons; in 1982 by US surveillance satellites and in 1999 by US intelligence.

Is it pure coincidence that China proposed multilateral talks at the same time the US military was taking out Saddam’s regime? It’s no coincidence. China had to take action because it did not want its ally to suffer the same fate as Iraq. Fortunately for China, the US was not in a favorable position to open another front in the War on Terror.

Similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis when Khrushchev attempted to supply Castro’s regime with weapons, I believe Beijing wanted to do the same for North Korea. Unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, in which I believe Khrushchev all along wanted the weapons to be discovered to use as leverage to compel JFK to remove our nuclear weapons in Turkey, China does not have a bargaining chip. At the time when the US flexed its military power against Iraq in 2003, China, acted like a big brother trying to defend its little brother, stepped in North Korea’s defense by proposing multilateral talks, which was perhaps the best alternative the Chinese could think of, short of going to war.

Presently, we find the situation at a stalemate. I believe China holds the key to North Korea’s fate. Let’s examine China’s interests for the North: China wants North Korea to have stability. It doesn’t want the United States to get involved militarily against North Korea since a war will force millions of North Korea’s refugees into China. Yet, China wants to retain its ally in the Korean peninsula. That means that in face, China wants North Korea to disarm, but in reality, wants its ally to have nuclear capabilites.

Presently, the US alleges North Korea in money laundering and counterfeit, but isn’t it odd that the press is reluctant to reveal who North Korea’s partners are in this alleged dealings? The culprit is China, and because of our current economic ties with that country, it behooves the Bush Administration to not publicly accuse them, or at least not directly.

So, in reality, China is in control of the matter in the Korean peninsula. Big brother (China) helped little brother (North Korea) out, before the bully (the United States) stepped in and hadv its way. If China doesn’t come up with a starightforward policy that fully aims to disarm North Korea, they'll probably find the U.S. Seventh Fleet knocking on their doorstep.