Mario Loyola over at NRO's The Corner quotes from an upcoming Atlantic Monthly article:

To Kim's sure dismay, the American response to his recent missile tests was a shrug. President George W. Bush dispatched Christopher Hill, his assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, to the region rather than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. I was in South Korea during the missile firings, and there were few signs of alert on any of the U.S. bases in Korea. Pilots in several fighter squadrons were told not to drink too much on their days off, in case they had to be called in, but that was about the extent of it.

What should concentrate the minds of American strategists is not Kim's missiles per se but rather what his decision to launch them says about the stability of his regime. Middle- and upper-middle-level U.S. officers based in South Korea and Japan are planning for a meltdown of North Korea that, within days or even hours of its occurrence, could present the world—meaning, really, the American military—with the greatest stabilization operation since the end of World War II.

There isn't much there, you see? North Korea is a den of horrors with a Stalinist facade in the capitol city. There is nothing to hold it together other than fear of the secret police - and the secret police know how things are, and it is a question of how long they'll man the barricades...eventually, they may decide that its time to get out, and that will spell the rapid end of the regime.

The joker in the pack is China - China likes having a lunatic nation on a leash, able to bedevil the United States at a moment's notice. On the other hand, free and easy trade with the United States and Japan is worth far more to China than whatever geo-strategic worth North Korea has. The last thing China needs is an east Asian economic meltdown caused by a mad dog attack by North Korea on South Korea and/or Japan.

Time will tell - but we should all keep in mind how rapidly the Soviet bloc collapsed - one month, it was there, the next it was gone.

Posted by Mark Noonan at September 13, 2006 01:18 AM

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