Benign Neglect--Why Not Try It?

The Hermit Kingdom of North Korea did the totally expected. Dear Leader and Company went ahead with the well-known and well-publicised plan to let go with another underground nuke test. As an added attraction for the world, the Merry Makers of Pyongyang fired off a set of short range surface to surface and surface to air missiles.

This temper tantrum from the Terrible Twos of the Hermit Kingdom was in no way shocking. It in no way caught any government--including that of the US--off guard. Unless no one bothered to read the news over the past month.

Now people all over the globe are tossing hissy-fits like confetti at New Year's Eve. Investors and speculators are shaking in their portfolios. Take a look at this alarm bell for market wallahs. Even the Mexican peso took it on the chin from the Great Nuke of the North surpassing the impact of the drug slaughter down south. In the US, market prices fell at first, but the Gnomes of Wall Street took comfort from consumer confidence and decided the world was not going to end in the near future just because the Hermits blasted a big hole in the mountains of their northeast.

Then, of course, there are the diplomats. The UN Security Council was in a tizzy. So also is the Obama administration. Susan Rice melded the two with her threat that the Hermit Kingdom of the North would "pay a price." Ms Rice's rhetoric almost matched the frothings of Senator Kerry speaking in China yesterday.

Heck, even Iran got in the act with a mild denunciation of the North Korean test. This remark should be considered along with the strong probability that the Tehran regime had observers present as they did during last month's ICBM test firing.

Underneath all the posturing, threatening noises and stock market pants wetting, there is a real dilemma. The best way to put it is in the words of a famous treatise by Lenin: "What Is To Be Done?"

To make a long and rather boring story short, there is not much that can be done. The Chinese are quite unlikely to support any more sanctions than those already in place. There is a good reason for this.

The Men of the Forbidden City do not want to deal with the consequences of more impoverishment, more hunger, more disease in North Korea. Quite simply Beijing does not want to face the flood of refugees which would pour across the porous border particularly along the shallow, slow moving Tuman river. The last thing the Chinese government needs considering the effects of the global economic slowdown is the expense and attendant dislocation imposed by hordes of North Koreans seeking a partially filled rice bowl. (Neither do they want the ministrations of those NGOs which leap into action at the first scent of a humanitarian crisis.)

Any other gambit, including some sort of promise of inducements would be counterproductive. One of the main reasons, if not the primary one, for the nuke test and surrounding missile shoots was that the Hermits in Pyongyang suffer from a form of Attention Deficit Disorder. As Dick Morris once wrote of the Clintons, when deprived of attention, Dear Leader and Company suffer from a disorder.

The real deal at work has nothing to do with the Six Power Talks or bluffing South Korea into returning to the Pyongyang loving days of deceased Prime Minister Roh. No. The North Korean regime wants to be bribed. The sort of attention Pyongyang desires, demands, is expressed in dollars and yen.

As the Geek has argued in previous posts, North Korea is a master at the fine art of extortion. They have taken extortion to the level of major economic input. Along with the export of weapons and weapons related knowledge, extortion is the only source of hard currency available to Pyongyang.

The money-for-cooperation gambit has been attempted. It failed. It failed as it must before the ever-escalating demands of the extorter.

A far better approach is that of benign neglect. It doesn't really matter if the Hermit Kingdom has a small--make that very small--nuclear arsenal. This reality, unpleasant as it might be in principle, in no way perturbs the balance of power in the region, let alone the world.

The North Koreans have never demonstrated that rare degree of insanity which would couple the assured destruction of the country and the regime with victory. Pyongyang is not about to go on a nuclear tipped rampage against the South. It is not going to send its low yield devices off on a one way trip to Tokyo. Or Beijing.

A North Korean nuclear capacity will not alter the realities of the region or the world in the slightest. The nuclear djinn is not going to leave North Korea quickly or easily. Not only does the Hermit Kingdom have such a small stockpile of plutonium that it must horde its widow's mite tightly even in the face of ready buyers with gobs of cash, the means to track and interdict shipments of fissile materials exist. While not absolutely leakproof, this capacity is sufficient to minimise the probability that North Korea will be the source of nuclear materials for al-Qaeda or Taliban or some other Islamist jihadist entity.

But wouldn't North Korea getting away with becoming a nuclear power make it all the harder to keep Iran from reaching the same goal?

Perhaps. However, is that consideration relevant? The Iranians have plugged on with their quest for the "Mahdi Bomb" regardless of sanctions and diplomatic disapproval. As the recent indictment sought by New York federal prosecutor Robart Morgenthau demonstrates, the Iranians have become very accomplished at sanctions busting using Chinese and British fronts. Beyond that approach, both Venezuela and Bolivia allegedly have been selling uranium to Iran regardless of any UN or US disapproval.

Ahmedinejad has been making points both at home and with anti-American, anti-West governments and entities abroad with his full-court defiance of the P5+1 and the Obama administration. If, as all indications point to, Ahmedinejad is re-elected next month, there is no reason to believe he is suddenly going to drop the highly successful hardline he has been following for years now.

In short, events on the small appendage on the far east edge of the Asian landmass are of no moment to Tehran. The mullahocracy is going to get the "Mahdi Bomb" unless stopped by force.

But, Geek, won't a failure to curb North Korea make the task of making the Earth a "nuclear free zone" as President Obama has said he wants even less possible? Won't a North Korean success make nuclear proliferation more likely?

The short answers? Yes. And, yes.

President Obama, progressive ideologue, is meeting realpolitik once again. While it is certainly undesirable that Pyongyang or Tehran possess a nuclear capacity, this eventuality does not bring the end of the world as we know it measurably closer. Dear Leader and those military commanders on whose support the regime depends for survival are not a collection of suicide inclined folks for whom death before dishonor is a watchword. While some of the clerics who are the power behind the Iranian government as well as Ahmedinejad may be of an eschatological bent, there is no plausible indication that the Apocalypse announcing the coming of the Mahdi is either a goal or a tool of state.

The record of the Tehran regime over the past thirty years points to the contrary. The gambits played by the mullahs and their front men have been conservative. They have taken no action which places Iran at risk of destruction. Just because the lot of them are Islamists, jihadists even, does not imply they are a passel of suicide bombers hoping to push the clicker on the nation which they rule.

To put it bluntly there is no reason to eschew a policy of benign neglect toward North Korea. There is no reason not to pat the Terrible Twos of the Hermit Kingdom on the head and say, "That's nice. You have a bomb all of your own. Join the club and pray for peace. Oh, by the way, how many people up there can eat your atoms?"