North Korea, the Next Iraq?

So asks Robert D. Kaplan in his latest dispatch in the Atlantic, which you can read here. Kaplan titles his dispatch with the question “North Korea, the Next Iraq?” but Kaplan’s actually talking more about how North Korea wants the US to protect it from China—a unique perspective and an interesting one at that:

China and Russia rely on North Korea as a buffer state between themselves and the dangerously appealing middle-class, vibrant, pro-American [Curzon: ?] democracy that is South Korea. China, moreover, would face perhaps millions of North Korean refugees streaming across its border were the North Korean regime to crumble. Seeking to stem this possibility, China continues to prop up the buffer state of North Korea. And indeed, without Chinese assistance, Kim’s regime would probably not last long.

Nonetheless, Kim tries to remain feistily independent of China, for while China doesn’t want North Korea to implode catastrophically, China does have designs on North Korea’s territory: It prefers the idea of a Gorbachevian buffer state like Tibet on its northeastern frontier in place of Kim’s erratic totalitarian regime.

China also has good reasons for not wanting to see the kind of North-South Korean conglomerate that might ultimately emerge from collapse. Reunification of the Korean Peninsula would be, to say the least, geopolitically inconvenient to China. Jutting out far from the Asian mainland, the Korean Peninsula commands all maritime traffic in northeastern China and, most importantly, traps in its armpit the Bohai Sea, home to China’s largest offshore oil reserve. Moreover, a unified Korea would likely be nationalistic, with distinctly mixed feelings toward its large neighbors, China and Japan, who have historically sought to control and even occupy it.

And so Kim lives in dread of the Chinese slowly, methodically undermining his regime in a way that will lead to him being replaced—in a palace coup, perhaps—without the implosion of the North Korean state. His only hope is to draw America into direct talks, with Washington implicitly recognizing his regime, so that he can leverage Washington against Beijing. Nuclear tests and missile launches are his own warped way of trying to get the attention of the new Obama Administration. He needs to be enough of a problem that Washington will have no choice but to deal with him directly, rather than merely as one party among several in the multilateral talks that have characterized negotiations with North Korea since 2003.