The crisis in the Korean peninsula does not only put the relationship between the North and South at risk. More important is the relationship between the US and China. Former US National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski touches on this in today’s Financial Times.
He points to the to counter posing trends taking place in the region, the rise of China as a dominant regional power, a power that the Chinese see as growing at the expense of the other dominant power, the US, which is clearly declining.
It is not easy to tell exactly what the situation is in North Korea itself. The regime has a new leader and recently allowed a prominent US physicist access to one of its nuclear facilities. Was the shelling of the South that killed two Marines a sign of confidence and strength or is the regime in crisis, divided and in the process of collapse? A dying match always shines bright the moment before it eclipses.
In response, Barak Obama has confirmed that the US will defend its southern ally in the event of war. From US imperialism’s point of view this has to be done but it is not a viable option. The US is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and its military is stretched thin. It is as hard for us to tell the level of demoralization and despair in the US military as it is to grasp exactly what the situation is in North Korea.
I am thinking how the average worker must feel about the situation. The Chinese have a 900-mile border with North Korea and all the major centers in the South are well within reach of North Koreas missiles. The situation must be extremely tense and people must be scared, I remember as a kid how scared I was that the Cuban missile crisis would start a nuclear war, especially as I lived next door to a strategic US air base.
The Chinese have taken a much more passive approach than the US not wanting to provoke things further and Brzezinski attributes some of this to the historical juncture as China “perceives tectonic shifts in the distribution of global power as ultimately favorable to its prospects. It sees its power growing and this leads to a posture of great self-restraint, even passivity and reluctance to rock the boat.”
While Brzezinski’s position appears to make sense on the surface, being a retired backhoe operator for a water district rather than a former US National Security advisor tends to lead me to a different view. Perhaps the Chinese are much more cautious about provoking what is clearly a totalitarian and unpredictable family-run business with nuclear weapons. Brzezinski points out that if the attacks are deliberate, “the North Korean regime has reached a point of insanity.” The US, on the other hand, tends to response to crisis with military power, a field in which it dominates. Iraq, Panama, Grenada. This approach is common domestically in response to social problems, crime, incarceration etc.
I do not know enough about the North South Korean issues but I seem to recall that prior to the shelling, the South was having some sort of military maneuver that involved shelling or activity of sorts on an island, very near the North Korean coast that is disputed territory. The North Koreans asked them not to do so but they went ahead anyway. I do not know enough about this and would welcome some clarification. But if I am correct I think it would have been better to have responded favorable, no?
Also, the US and China have taken different positions on joint talks with the North. The Chinese favor talking but the US refuses to return to the six-country talks unless the North dismantles its nuclear program. It is similar to the Iranian situation. But why would they do this? Iran, North Korea and Iraq were the US’s “axis of evil” and North Korea, regime of insanity or not, must surely have drawn the conclusion after the US’s unprovoked invasion and destruction of Iraq that their best defense is a to go nuclear. As Robert Kaplan points out in today’s Times, “The North Koreans know that if Saddam Hussein had nuclear capabilities in 2003, he and his sons would be in power today.”
It would be folly to deny that this is a major crisis but it is a global crisis and not a regional one as a prior blog explained. The main editorial in the Financial Times, along with Brzezinski sees the crisis as one that puts the US/Sino relationship to its toughest test yet and urges cooperation. I can’t help commenting though on the biased nature of the capitalist journals. “No state can be allowed to get away with shelling its neighbor and killing their soldiers” the Financial Times comments. Israel is armed to the teeth, has illegally occupied Palestinian land, bombed Lebanon and civilians in Gaza. The US routinely bombs Pakistani and Afghan territory with unmanned drones against the wishes of the governments and people of these countries. Why would the Times editorial have any credibility with the North Koreans?
The other aspect of this is that if a conventional war does break out it will drag China and US in to it for one, as well drive millions of refugees into China or possibly South Korea as well. The previous blog points out the distances involved and cities could be totally demolished. Even if the North Korean regime is on the verge of collapsing due to its own internal contradictions, this presents further complications.
What is missing from all of this is an independent working class position. Throughout all these intra regime affairs, the working classes of either country have no voice. The Afghani government that the US, the Bin Laded helped to overthrew, installing the Taliban, was a regime that workers should have supported. It was overthrown because it was pro-Soviet. As workers leaders have no independent position from the capitalist class, we were denied a role. We can support s regime critically depending on how it advances the interests of the working class nationally and internationally. Instead, we got the Taliban and now permanent war. If the crisis in East Asia worsens, it would be of much greater concern than the Afghan theater of operations.
As Robert Kaplan points out:
“The only thing worse than a totalitarian government is no government at all, a lesson we all should have learnt from Iraq”
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