http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146950,00.html
Today North Korea formally announced that it possesses nuclear weapons, a claim yet to be borne out by publicly known fact, but a claim that requires scrutiny nonetheless. Yet, even with such a terrible claim, the truth of the North Korean claim requires consideration in the greater context of the politics of Eastern Asia.
And what exactly are those politics? On the surface, it appears that North Korea is a rouge Stalinist state bent on preserving that brutal doctrine at the cost of their people. They maintain a million man standing army, engage in advanced weapons research, and have apparently built nuclear weapons. But how does this apparent fact fit with the other reality of North Korea- a nation ravaged by poverty and famine for years, isolated from the rest of the world, including its communist neighbors, for decades, and essentially bankrupt?
The truth is that the facts do not match, and that is where the politics truly begin. The question becomes: how is it that North Korea, a nation isolated and with very few assets, came to possess nuclear weapons and an army capable of pinning down at least 38,000 American military personnel for over fifty years?
The answer is China. Few people seem to want to engage on this topic, but the truth is that North Korea is a Chinese proxy designed to balance US power in eastern Asia when the Chinese cannot do so themselves. Time will eventually prove that the North Korean crisis is a manufactured one; manufactured by the totalitarian Chinese regime as part of a greater strategy of competing with the US on the global stage.
What does that mean? North Korea is a force that the US must acknowledge, to be sure, but that reckoning should not come in the form of a direct confrontation between it and the US. Instead, the US should direct its diplomatic effort at the puppet master and not the puppet. The US must directly and forcefully engage China as a world power and establish, unequivocally, the nature of the relationship between the two countries. Until that day comes, expect more saber rattling from nations like North Korea in an attempt to distract the US from the real problems in Eastern Asia and around the world.
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