Sixty years after the end of the Korean War, North Korea remains the most dangerous nation on earth.
In 1950, dictator Kim Il Sung invaded South Korea, triggering a war that drew the United States and China into a terrible and bloody conventional conflict, and nearly drew the United States and Soviet Union into a nuclear exchange.
Now Kim’s 30-year-old grandson, Kim Jong Un, has declared a “state of war” with South Korea. He’s also threatened nuclear missile strikes on Los Angeles, Washington, DC and Austin, Texas (home of a large facility belonging to Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant).
His weapons can’t actually reach those targets — but they could certainly render Seoul uninhabitable.
It’s all too easy to dismiss the crisis as just another attempt by North Korea to blackmail the world into giving its starving people more food — and Kim’s corrupt government more foreign currency credits. But this time is different.
Until now, we’ve allowed North Korea to get away with murder — literally murder, including three senior South Korean politicians in a 1983 bomb blast and a South Korean airliner full of passengers in 1987 — as well as building and testing nuclear weapons. The fear is that taking decisive action would not only put Seoul at risk, but rouse the wrath of Kim’s powerful patron, China; better to let the problem fester.
After all, North Korea is diplomatically and geographically isolated, with little GDP to speak of. And while we’ve known it has been building nuclear weapons for the past decade, that threat was always remote from our own shores.
Not much longer. Pyongyang’s successful launch of an orbital satellite using a multi-stage rocket in December significantly changed the threat game, and hugely raised the stakes. So did its successful nuclear test on Feb. 12.
It’s now clear North Korea aims to target America’s West Coast with nuclear missiles in the near future. It also has a well-documented habit of selling its weapons technology (a previous customer was Syria).
The Obama administration’s decision to spend more on missile defense is an insufficient answer — as is another predictable round of UN condemnations. The time has come instead to take out Pyongyang — not by military action (at least not yet), but by taking on Beijing.
China keeps its tiny Communist dependant alive with shipments of food, coal, oil and consumer goods for North Korea’s elite. More important, its protection gives the Kims a license to fish in troubled waters.
This has very much served Beijing’s own purposes, like drawing US strategic attention to the Korean peninsula and away from places like the South China Sea and Indian Ocean, where China sees its real future interests.
It’s time to finally force China to suspend its aid and comfort to its nuclear-armed protégé, or else suffer US retaliation on the economic front — or perhaps more active US support for those countries like Japan and Vietnam that are disputing China’s claims of sovereignty over the South China Sea.
We could even make it clear that the cyberwar Chinese hackers are waging against us could quickly become a two-way conflict.
Until now, we’ve tended to buy Beijing’s argument that a collapse of the Pyongyang regime would flood China with millions of refugees. The truth is if those starving North Koreans head anywhere, it’ll be south toward South Korea and prosperity — not to China, where they’ll be imprisoned or shot.
And, no, supporting tougher UN sanctions, as Beijing recently did, is not sufficient.
The administration deserves credit for not calling off our current military exercises with South Korea in the face of Kim’s bluster. But that’s not enough. The Obama team needs to undo the knot that ties Pyongyang to Beijing before it entangles us in a new, even deadlier conflict than the one that ended 60 years ago this July.
Arthur Herman’s latest book, “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II,” will be out in paperback in July.