North Korea: Edging toward war

“The Korean Peninsula is on the brink of war again,” said University of Georgia professor Han Park in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That’s been said many times in the past 60 years, but the current crisis—precipitated by the sinking in March of a South Korean warship by a North Korean submarine—truly is alarming, with each side “becoming increasingly emboldened in its promise of retaliation.” The mix is volatile, said David Sanger in The New York Times. The current “hard-line government in South Korea” is less inclined to shrug off the North’s aggression than were previous administrations. The North, on the other hand, now has nuclear weapons, and is acting even more irrationally and belligerently than usual, with an aging Kim Jong Il trying to ensure that he will be succeeded by his 27-year-old son, Kim Jong Un. The big danger is that the young Kim may try “to put a few notches in his belt” with further military provocations.

There are three crucial factors here, said Richard Haass in The Wall Street Journal: “China, China, and China.” The Chinese are reluctant to isolate their communist ally and neighbor—and were unmoved by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s entreaties during her visit last week. But what they want even less is a bloody, destabilizing war on their doorstep that could cause millions of desperate North Koreans to stream into China. South Koreans don’t want war either, said Martin Fackler in The New York Times. Yes, they were outraged by the deaths of 46 sailors on the Cheonan, and polls show them supporting President Lee Myung-bak’s decision to sever economic ties with the North. But war is another matter. Most South Koreans still feel “a strong sense of shared ethnic identity with Northerners.” They also know that Kim could easily level Seoul with conventional artillery fire, killing tens of thousands, and then send 2 million soldiers streaming across the border.

This is “a wake-up call” for the U.S. and the West, said syndicated columnist Austin Bay. The sinking of the Cheonan provided one more piece of evidence that Kim’s brutal regime—which “starves, jails, and murders its own people”—will not be negotiated or shamed out of its rogue-state status. The only reasonable response is truly crippling sanctions, backed by credible threats of force. “It’s time to end the Korean War, and that means ending the Kim regime, not placating it.”

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