Bypassing Beijing

It’s time to move beyond the wishful fantasy that China will rescue our national security from North Korea’s nuclear factory outlet.

If I’ve ever believed that China would be willing to exert substantial pressure on North Korea, that was a long time ago. China sees its top geopolitical priority as gaining control over Taiwan, whether by negotiation, intimidation, force, or a combination of all of the above. China doesn’t want to see a united Korea emerge as a potential cultural, military, or economic competitor. What it wants is a Korea that is weak, divided, and sufficiently threatening to the U.S. and Japan that the latter will never be able to bring all their forces to bear in defense of Taiwan.

And yet, everyone from Hwang Jang-Yop to David Frum and Richard Perle to (presumably) the entire Council on Foreign Relations crowd appears to see no solution in North Korea to which China isn’t central. Get over it. China isn’t going to help us because it sees our pain as its own gain. From today’s New York Times:

China on Tuesday ruled out applying economic or political sanctions to pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program, appearing to undercut a crucial element of the Bush administration’s evolving North Korea strategy. The announcement comes just as American intelligence agencies are trying to determine whether North Korea is preparing for a nuclear test.

. . . .

“The normal trade flow should not be linked up with the nuclear issue,” [a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman] said. “We oppose trying to address the problem through strong-arm tactics.”

Argue all day about China’s fear of a nuclear Japan or damage to its own investment climate. Makes perfect sense to us, but that doesn’t matter if China’s own politco-military establishment doesn’t see it that way. Nor am I persuaded by David Sanger’s sources in the Administration who suggest that China is either deeply enmeshed in argument about the matter, or saying one thing and doing another. I’ve heard all of that too many times to believe it anymore.

Now ask yourself whether China would reassess the rule of Kim Jong Il if armed North Korean guerrillas started sheltering on its territory, crossing the border, and shooting back at any Chinese police who got in their way. Given the number of ethnic Koreans in that region and the number of them who are (1) Christians, and (2) sheltering North Korean refugees, there is base of support and an underground network that could host such a movement. The little evidence we have also suggests that there is a base of support for that inside North Korea, particularly in the Northeast. It might even pressure China into setting aside some real U.N.-monitored refugee camps as a condition for a demobilization of / cease fire with guerrillas on its territory. A prudent Chinese government, fearful of the kind of unrest it is already experiencing, and induced by a few “sweeteners” like an agreement not to station U.S. ground troops on the peninsula, would seek a solution to stabilize the situation. Fast.

Might this also cause China to intervene in North Korea? Yes, it might. The Soviets intervened in Afghanistan, too, and it was eventually the end of them (in the short-term, it also meant the replacement of a vicious Maoist by a more palatable Soviet puppet; it also meant years of war and a tragic U.S. disengagement in the war’s aftermath, from which I hope we’ve learned something). If there’s one thing a big, mechanized conscript army does badly, it’s guerrilla war. Ditto awakening populations living under repressive governments. But if China is so stuck on Kim Jong Il that it’s willing to risk dirty bombs and suitcase nukes going off in U.S. cities, that’s a fight we ought to have sooner, rather than later.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that the United States was unafraid of helping guerrillas to fight the Soviet Army. You’d think that doling out a few Chinese-made weapons and providing some non-lethal training to people who are trying to knock off a tin-horn tyrant like Kim Jong-Il shouldn’t be beyond our imagination, given the latter’s leap across the “red line” by supplying Uranium Hexafluoride to Libya. Or do such grave threats to our nation’s security come without consequences for either the perpetrators or the enablers? Our strategy for squeezing North Korea depends on closing off avenues of destructive commerce. If China isn’t amenable to diplomatic persuasion or a U.N. resolution, then guerrilla attacks on the roads, rails, pipelines, and powerlines that lead to China could be the only way to constrict this trade without the direct application of U.S. military force.

Let there be no mistake about what I’m saying here. I have never agreed with the notion that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. If you intentionally target unarmed civilians for political reasons, or if you eschew a free ballot and choose violence instead, you’re a terrorist. I don’t propose to support anyone who does that. Yet can anyone still believe that a regime so infused with violence and brutality as North Korea’s will go peacefully? I propose that it’s time for us to consider support for armed resistance against the military forces of a state whose sole claim to legitimacy rests upon at seat in the U.N. and control over a ruthless secret police organization (which is, all too often, just two different ways of saying the same thing).

And instability in Northeast China? Call that one a bonus. I’m not calling for the retaking of Koguryo here, but the best thing for China might well be more instability if the short- or medium-term result is a more democratic state. The events of 1989 prove that there’s substantial popular support for that, just as clearly as the recent spate of rural riots shows that there is growing discontent with the Beijing regime.

Readers of this site know that I’m firmly opposed to a U.S. invasion or occupation of North Korea, and that I also favor removing U.S. ground forces from the South (sending a couple of Tomohawks to the bridges over the Yalu might be another matter at some point). I believe that in building friendships overseas, shared values and common enemies are of infinitely more value than military, diplomatic, and even economic relationships. Repeatedly, we are offered the false choice between invading North Korea and learning to live with it at its aggressive, miscalculating, proliferating, genocidal worst. The Administration, and others, continue to insist that these dangers will eventually lead to a more enlightened policy in Beijing, but clearly, nothing about any of this bothers China in the least.

Worse, none of this calculus includes the aspirations of the North Korean people. Their survival and our own both demand the extinction of the North Korean regime itself.

It thus becomes incumbent upon us to get over our own hangups about endangering the illegitimate rule of the Mandarins in Beijing. It is they who have closed off all peaceful alternatives despite the fact that the status quo has killed millions, and may well kill millions more.