North Korea's nukes and China (Natural disasters)

As I'm sure anyone and everyone has heard by now, North Korea (DPRK) has finally announced what's been speculated for a while now - they have nukes.

No surprise there.

And the timing comes as no surprise either - in the midst of the 6 Party Talks, DPRK walked away from the table and summarily announced that they were now in the big boys' club.

Much hay has been made of the Bush Adminstration's...utter lack of involvement in the DPRK issue. Some claim that it is because of the neoconservative obsession with Iraq, others think that - well, that's pretty much the only hypothesis out there (there's also some anti-Clinton instincts, but I'm hoping that's not a basis for foreign policy).

So let me offer a slightly off center analysis: Bush has been ignoring DPRK to keep China in line. If it hadn't been for terrorism, the neoconservatives would now be spending even more billions on their non-working missile defense system. Missile defense was almost entirely geared toward protecting us from the threat they believed was emerging from China. There are numerous reasons why they thought this; the most cynical of which imply that these allies of the Pentagon wanted to ensure that its budget didn't get cut for lack of a war to fight. By assuming China was an enemy, they could force it to become one.

9/11 meant that they couldn't exert as much energy in building up Chinese animosity. Indeed, with a large population of Muslims in Western China (and their own problems with extremism), the U.S. needed China on its side. Of course, at the same time, they don't believe that China could ever be anything but an enemy as long as the post-Maoists remained in power, so they have to ensure that there is a continuing common goal to develop a friendship. Once DPRK is no longer a threat, then there's no reason (from the neo-conservative point of view) for the US and China to continue cooperation.

I don't have much evidence to back this up. Indeed, if this was the strategy, little old citizens like me shouldn't have any clue as to what's going on. Divinations from headlines rule the day. Bush, for example, rebuffed North Korean requests for bi-lateral (as opposed to multi-lateral) talks. China, in a departure from its normal civil discourse, has taken to criticizing the DPRK in its official media and allowing anti-DPRK statements to remain online in censored chat rooms.

Does this add up to anything? Probably not. But if so, it's an interesting means of containment - containment of China at the expense of North Korea.