A North Korean collapse before or during the Olympics would be an absolute disaster for the Chinese and they will be eager to prevent in anyway possible. However, who knows what will happen? North Korea is a very difficult country to make predictions with and thus the US should be prepared for all possible collapse scenarios which currently we are not.

Will China take food out of its own mouth (creating some unrest in China) to feed a traditional enemy?

A regime like China has to consider public opinion. They may be able to withstand a 30 – 70 split. They can’t deal with a 10 – 90 split.

Even totalitarian regimes have to deal with public opinion.

Pyongyang has shown in the past a willingness to piss off China when the regime felt it need to nudge the world community along. I can easily picture Kim using the opportunity of the Olympics to stir the pot. It is like Kim to seek to snatch global attention when the opportunity arises in the region.

Border clashes, ICBM and nuke tests, sea battles, and so on, are all things Pyongyang routinely does at times like the Olympics being in China.

The problem for Kim is that he can’t always depend on the global community caving in after a NK stunt — even though he has watched us enough to gain confidence in the tactic.

But at some point of regime instability, the usual bag of tricks can spiral out of control.

They could lead to medium to long term cut backs in aid — which could strangle the regime.

Depending on how close to collapse the regime might be, provocations could push discontent regime loyalists to move against the regime. The more provocative the regime gets near collapse, the less likely top regime people will get golden parachutes by the US and world community.

Because, many of those elites know North Korea can’t win a war, but some of them will think like me — that Kim Jong Il’s personality is such that he’d rather run the risk of falling into a war or inviting nation-killing sanctions and then go down with a fight rather than going in the other direction of temporarily appeasing the US and Japan and others.

Part of my thinking on this is also that the North Korean people could become bolder in the situations mentioned above. I would bet that one reason revolts have not occurred in North Korea is due in large measure to a lack of confidence that some nation will step in to finish off the regime if the people were to act.

But, if Kim Jong Il reaches a certain desperation point, and pulls out his usual bag of tricks, and it fails to gain concessions but does produce tougher sanctions, and things start getting worse, not just the elites might figure that the time is ripe to act and invite deeper outside interference from China and/or the US by means of open rebellion.

I think it is a good bet that the increase of North Korean refugees in Thailand as reported recently is directly tied to the election of Lee and the GNP into the Blue House in South Korea.

In short, I think the closer the regime gets to collapse, the more Kim Jong Il will try provocations to save himself.

But, the closer and more provocative the regime leadership becomes, the more likely it is that it will be like setting off sparks in a hay field which eventually ignite a chain of events that speeds up the regime’s downfall.

And what I am talking about might be something like what happened in Germany in World War II when they tried to assassinate Hitler — with a key difference being the bulk of the North Korean people likely despise the regime on a much wider scale than in the Hitler case.