There’s a fire and an inferno of capitalist swill burning outside with the outliers. So let’s all sit inside the cave and rejoice the clarion call of the commander, the Regulator and let’s celebrate and mourn collectively in a civilised mass like good and moral people do and never go out in see the blaze with the outliers.”
That is how the quintessential Communist plight amounts to as the collectivisation of the hoi polloi takes precedence over innovation, development and the cause célèbre of freedom of opinion and dissent.
Thus, the North Korean troubles too brew up in the same manner, where-in the entire nation led by the dictator par excellence in Pyongyang is being lambasted upon.
US President Donald Trump has declared that “a major, major conflict with North Korea is possible. We had loved to solve things diplomatically but it is very difficult” as reported in all national dailies in India. It has been reported in Reuters that, “He also said he wants South Korea to pay the cost of the US THAAD anti-missile defence system, which he estimated at $1 billion, and intends to renegotiate or terminate a US free trade pact with South Korea because of a deep trade deficit with Seoul. Trump said North Korea was his biggest global challenge. He lavished praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping for Beijing’s assistance in trying to rein in Pyongyang. The two leaders met in Florida earlier this month.”
The US is also attempting to outdo the histrionics of President Kim Jong-Un akin to his Father, “II” as Washington intends to slap sanctions on Pyongyang in order to tame the dragon with the support of the Chinese President. The entire scare scenario is akin to the era of Ping Pong Diplomacy, where-in the Americans led by then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger succeeded in making friends with Chinese leader Mao in a master stratagem to sequester the USSR in 1971 as part of the policy of containment of the Soviet.
That clandestine summit had far-reaching impact upon the entire balance of power game in the then au-currant international system.
The entire amalgam of the Cold War is getting a pride of place now. The nation of North Korea was built over the Korean War when the forces of Douglas McArthur faced the Chinese hordes near the vicinity of the 38th parallel all the way up to the precincts of the Yalu river.
The mass casualties nearly turned the Korean peninsula into a kind of hellish inferno for the Americans and the Chinese alike. These developments out of the history set-piece, remind us of the turbulent past and the vitriol of a war-torn Korean Peninsula, which led to the gruesome partition tale of the North and South Korea.
But with “Xi trying very hard,” in the Korean quagmire, as President Trump calls the entire Chinese diplomatic striving, there are still opportunities left for this explosive segment of the Asiatic space.
Since the North Korean entry into a treaty making exercise with the “rest” they have mercilessly flouted their international law understanding with nations such as Japan and South Korea. The deal in the 1990’s of accepting the global “norm setting” in lieu of the supplies of food grains from America too has not augured well for the “troubled region” of the world.
The nuclear tests and the ballistic missile tests undertaken by the North Korean autarch, Kim Jong-Un, has led to the idiom of growing and palpable diplomatic tensions in the Korean and the larger regional firmament.
Trump’s tweet says it all about the American opprobrium and anger, “North Korea disrespected the wishes of China and its highly respected President when it launched, though unsuccessfully, a missile today. Bad!” Thus, the ‘Good and the Bad’ paradigm is making the rounds in the regional firmament, where-in the question remains that do the Chinese fit in the appellation of being the “Ugly part of the paradigm”, though, they, are the designated interlocutors now in the regional fracas and according to Trump, the Regime has “disrespected China.”
The Cold War era tele serial MASH nicely portrayed the vicissitudes of war and conflict in any region of the larger international system. The mayhem caused by conflict with the attendant larger human misery gets a sardonic reflection in the crazy narrative of the war in Korea where-in MASH is a crack Medical Unit posted in Korea during the times of the gory Korean war.
A full blown out conflict is not what any statesman would hanker after, but when personages such as Kim Jong-Un militate against the international comprehension of pelf, piety and order, then cudgels of cleansing have to be taken up.
Also, the repeated stories of the closed socio-political set up in Pyongyang with the dull and drab brown robes and the smell of kettle and wood in a shack still stymies the North Korean bandwagon, which is miles in the backyard of its open South Korean brother.
There is an entire chronology of the nuclear and missile technology between North Korea and the US. The Arms Control Association Factsheet promptly informs us, “In 1994, faced with North Korea’s announced intent to withdraw from the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires non-nuclear weapon states to forswear the development and acquisition of nuclear weapons, the US and North Korea signed the Agreed Framework.
Under this agreement, Pyongyang committed to freezing its illicit plutonium weapons programme in exchange for aid. later on in the pantheon of the six-party talks carried on between North Korea and the Western nations, the North Korean ruling dispensation vowed to abandon developing nuclear weapons and the attendant nuclear programmes.
Since 2009 the North Koreans have emerged as the nuke wise, recalcitrant nation state which has not agreed to eschew its nuclear ambitions and designs in the larger vortex of global diplomacy. The US too has been asked this poser many a times that when Iraq and Saddam Hussein crossed the boundaries of civilisation then they earned a full-fledged coalition of the willing which was heaped upon them by the corrective Pentagon. But when, Pyongyang recalibrates its policy every three months and cocks a snook at the US every now and then, the threshold is taken to the next keel.
Thus, the pertinent poser in the larger regional context is: how long can the nuclear conflagration be avoided and how many more “unsuccessful tests” are in the waiting before Trump attempts “a regional rejig” or something more than that as the American Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, has defiantly declared in the lurking shadows of the USS Carl Vinson that the spate of “unsuccessful tests” in the Korean Peninsula will lead to “catastrophic consequences”.
The vulnerability of Tokyo, Seoul and the trans-Pacific American homeland calls for confronting the persistent nuclear blackmail by the North Korea’s rapacious dictator, which is more than an exercise in personal psychological study.
(The writer teaches International Relations at Indian Institute of Public Administration, Delhi)