NK is just the point the PRC is the rest of the stick...
It depends on how one interprets that...
There's very little we can be certain of in this situation, but one thing I think we
can be reasonably sure of, is that the North Koreans are not behaving the way they are at the behest of the PRC, as part of some cunning plan hatched in Beijing to provoke a military confrontation with the West....
Aside from the fact that this would make no rational sense from their own self-interest, (for reasons I've laid out in earlier posts...the thugs who run the Thugocracy of the PRC, like the thugs who ran the Thugocracy of the USSR may be thugs, but they're not irrational) if this is what they had in mind, they'd be rallying to North Korea's side, and trying to blame the US and it's allies for provoking the crisis...and making military counter-moves of their own...
None of this is happening....
Point by Thomas Sowell on this today (I think): The Obama Administration has announced that it will respond "proportionately" to any NK aggression.
I read about this in yesterday's NYT, and it seems to me that is
precisely the posture we should be taking....
One should put this in an historical context...
The doctrine of "Proportional Response" represents a
far more robust policy of response than the previous policy that was pursued for decades by both ourselves and the South Koreans, (going back to at least the seizure of the USS Pueblo in the late 1960's) where North Korean provocations (no matter how outrageous) were met with, "
no response"....
They have violated the DMZ on numerous occasions with provocative forays, once tried to shoot down a plane with the South Korean president on board, kidnapped South Korean nationals, shelled South Korean Islands, and sank a South Korean ship, killing 46...(that last led directly to the election of the current SK government that has made clear it will not allow that sort of thing to go unanswered)
All without having payed any price
whatsoever....(at least in terms of military strikes; yes they're dealing with some economic sanctions, but when you couldn't care less about the well being of your people, and when your people are in no position to rise up against you, that doesn't count for much)
So, "proportional response" represents a definite improvement...that alone might teach them a lesson...(remember; neither we nor the South Koreans have any more desire or interest in seeing NK completely unravel than the Chinese do..
nobody in this equation wants to take ownership of that basket case.)
And if we were to go to a
completely "disproportional response", depending on the nature of the provocation, we could unnecessary invite a wider conflict, where the PRC might feel compelled to weigh in...and neither they nor we want that....
A lot also depends on the scenario, and the nature and extent of the provocation...
Say they fire a medium range missile, and we know by tracking its trajectory that its going to land harmlessly in the ocean...
Then probably no military response is required...
If it looks like that missile might make landfall in Japan, or Guam, or any US territory or that of any US ally, then we should shoot it down, and also take out their launching facilities....
If they open fire in a limited way on some South Korean target, then we (or the South Koreans backed up with US support) should bomb the source of the fire and take it out....(and maybe any other military capability in the immediate vicinity)
On the other hand, if this guy is
really nuts enough, (and his military commanders, who would be tasked with following out his orders, are nuts enough) to launch a full out artillery and rocket strike against Seoul as part of some sort of Götterdämmerung type attack against the South, then NK
will get a "disproportionate response" which will include the termination of the regime in Pyongyang...
And the Chinese would accept it, because they'd realize that under that scenario, we had
no other option, and they wouldn't go to war over it...
