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| quote: | Kim Jong-Il's explosive mistake
National Post
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
There are two kinds of rogue dictators: the successful kind, who stay in office by playing major powers off against each other; and the failures, who overreach, unite the world against them and thereby summon the forces of regime change.
Until Monday, Kim Jong-Il seemed to fit into the first category. But things have now changed. As Con Coughlin of the Daily Telegraph notes, thanks to Pyongyang's underground nuclear test, "The world's leaders have finally found something on which they can all agree."
For the first time since North Korea's uranium enrichment program was discovered in 2002, we may now see a complete and crippling set of sanctions imposed on North Korea, and an end to the coddling provided by Russia, China and South Korea. In the best case scenario, the reaction to North Korea's belligerent provocation would be so strong that it would discourage North Korea's Middle Eastern counterpart, Iran, from going down the same route.
The civilized world now faces three choices in regard to North Korea -- none of them good, but one of them better than the rest.
The first option is a U.S.-led military strike against North Korean nuclear sites. Such an action would almost certainly unleash a catastrophic North Korean rocket and artillery attack against South Korea, incinerating whole neighbourhoods and plunging one of the world's largest economies into total chaos. Absent a direct North Korean attack on South Korea or one of its allies, this is not in the cards.
The second option is to appease North Korea by fulfilling the long shopping list it has provided the West in recent years -- including food, oil, uranium and security guarantees. Such an option would produce peace in the short-term but, like all other efforts at appeasement, would simply generate more extensive demands in the future. (Recall that Bill Clinton sought to buy off North Korea with the 1994 "Agreed Framework." But all that did was delay the inevitable for eight years.)
The final and best option is for the major powers with a stake in North Korea -- Russia, China, the United States, South Korea and Japan -- to jointly create a strategy for regime change in North Korea, including a plan for managing the massive humanitarian fallout that such regime change would bring.
Prior to Sunday's nuclear test, such co-operation would have been unthinkable: Russia, China and South Korea were all paralyzed by their fears about what a North Korean meltdown would bring. But things changed drastically this week, and a consensus may be possible.
Kim Jong-Il would have been wise to avoid taking this step: There's nothing like a nuclear explosion to focus the mind.
© National Post 2006 |
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