Woke up this morning to find my fantasy football team is 4-1 and the Korean peninsula has officially gone nuclear. As Wu Ming pointed out in a comment to my most recent post, the US is likely to get more panicky than the South Koreans with Japan a close second. If Shinzo Abe needed some kind of extra push in his drive to remilitarize Japan, he found it.
In my last post, I talked about how Beijing used North Korea as part of a larger (and historically dubious) strategy of yi yi zhi yi or playing one foreigner off against another. For many years, the DPRK has been the pit bull in China’s front yard: really effective at getting attention and even better at making the neighbors nervous. The idea that only China could really wield the leash made Beijing indispensable in any discussion of Northeast Asian security. But here’s the thing: them pit bulls are unpredictable dangerous little dogs. Sure they’ll listen to the hand that feeds them, so long as that hand doesn’t pull too hard on the leash. Now the crazy little dog has been replaced by a crazy little dog with nuclear weapons.
From China’s perspective,