I was thinking about this for a moment.
Put yourself in China’s shoes. You are a growing superpower. Your greatest competitor, and reigning champ, America, is acting like a drunken doofus, spending money on crap, and wrecking their economy. The only spending they’ve cut is military stuff (because remember, stimulas money is to create jobs, just not at Lockheed building F22s).
Meanwhile, since the reigning champ is currently being managed by a complete wimp, you’ve got another country in your neighborhood who is getting really lippy. North Korea is run by a lunatic, and is in such bad shape that its people are eating each other like something from Mad Max, and they’re trying to build a nuke program, just to be dicks. There is zero chance that the reigning champ will do anything about this, except for having its manager apologize to other random scumbags.
So, part of being the world’s superpower is holding the title of World Cop. You can argue the rightness or wrongness of this philosophy from a Libertarian point of view, but it has been this way since the Perry’s Black Ships sailed into Edo. You get a lot of perks by being the one with the Big Stick.
So since America won’t take care of North Korea. I’m making a prediction. I think that China will use North Korea as an excuse to flex their muscle, and show that they’re a superpower too. I can see China stepping in once North Korea does something really crazy, offing Elton John (sorry, Kim Jong Ill, get those two mixed up), overthrowing the government, and then spinning it as if they were just doing their duty to make the world a better place… Look, America has been doing it for a century, but now they’re weak, and we’re strong, so it is our turn to shape the world.
The North Korean people traditionally hate the Chinese. But when you’re starving, and the new scumbags in charge are feeding you better than the old scumbags in charge, I think China would be seen as a liberator.
China gains power, prestige, and gets to spin themselves as the goodguys for once on the world stage. (no argument that Kim’s got WMDs since he’s already detonated some) America looks weak. Normally when America takes action against another nation, the usual suspects will come out and condemn us. In this case, none of those usual suspects will condemn the Chinese, because China A. owns their debts. B. sells them all their military hardware. C. is the new rising star, and everyone likes to be on the winning team.
This might sound a little crazy now, but check back with me in a year.
I see nothing particularly improbable with this scenario.
Nor I. In fact, it so plausible that I find it frightening,
nothing about that seems like a stretch
You speak the truth before it happens.
You forgot D) The UN and most of the world are run by collectivists/tyrants, and we’re not down far enough on the totem pole for them to quit beating us. China’s more than happy to play in the UN, so everyone will be praising them for doing what they hate us for doing.
Russia had Afganistan, we had Vietnam, China hasn’t had to deal with something like that yet. If they’re careful with Korea, they might hold off their unwinnable war.
That’s an almost inevitable scenario except for one thing- China wants to be a superpower, but it doesn’t want to be the US.
Playing World Cop is a do-gooder English-speaking white boy game (the US is not the first, consider that the UK broke the world slave trade pretty much by itself) that only gets them anything if they buy into our assumptions. Which they don’t.
We need to be liked, and to be seen as the good guy. They don’t care.
I predict that they will, despite the disadvantages of sharing a border with Cannabalon (“the food was good, though”), string NK along as long as possible in order to make us look as bad as possible, as long as possible.
Then even odds they will make a play for Taiwan about 10 days after the starving but well supplied with incredibly well dug in within range of Seoul artillery NK hordes cross the border.
I even see a small chance of the US conceding what remains of the Korean peninsula as China’s rightful sphere of influence, in exchange for China to keep buying our debt.
China has a problem in that the US owes them lotsa money. We can’t really stiff them, but we can stop all payments if they invade Taiwan or NorK.
Why would they bother with NK? It is a free source of pain to the free world from China’s perspective. So what if all 50,000 artillery tubes start pounding South Korea? The Chinese have no problem with that happening, it helps remove an annoying outpost of rule of law near their border at zero cost to themselves. And if several million starving NorKs walk through the world’s best minefields to get some food, do you think the SoKs will not feed them?
The Chinese are in no hurry to destroy their largest market, the US. They don’t mind costing us a lot of money however.
I agree that the Chicoms have nothing tangible to gain by taking down the North Korean regime. The thing about the Chicoms, they play chess, not checkers. I have no doubt that they want to increase their hegemony, definitely take back Formosa, and maybe get some payback on Japan. I think that the Chinese will ignore North Korea as long as possible, while maneuvering themselves to take back Free China without a peep from the United States.
Interesting. Could happen eventually. For the time being, the NorKs are mainly our problem (well, South Korea’s and ours), and the Chinese seem happy to leave it that way. Why go to the expense and risk of a war to show up your rival by solving his problem for him?
Consider Islamic jihad. China has its own problems with Islamic terrorists and separatists, but on the evidence they seem to have decided its in their interest to deal with it as quietly as possible and let us and the jihadis bleed each other without getting drawn in to the global war.