Outside In | Five ideas to help defuse the coming war

Like so many, I have in recent months been trying to bend my mind around the “North Korea problem”. The more I read, the more the storylines lead off into a thick fog. Ask even the simplest questions, and you get led off into a three dimensional maze.

How can the conflict have persisted unresolved for more than six decades? Why all of a sudden has a little local story exploded to be perceived as the primary threat to peace in the Asia-Pacific? What is the end-game of the main protagonists, and what is the likelihood of them achieving their preferred outcome? What are the various future scenarios, and what would they mean for everyone concerned?

I am not an expert, but I am frustrated at the foggy flabbiness of most expert efforts to explain to me what is going on, and how it is going to turn out. So this is my plain man’s attempt to pick my way through the conflict.

First and fundamentally, this has been since 1950 a conflict between the US and China, as much as it has been between North and South Koreans. I don’t think the Americans trying to tidy up the Pacific War in 1950 expected the newly-minted Maoist government in China to make such a feisty fuss about their plans to stabilise Korea with a “Pax Americana” (as they had Japan).

The armistice in 1953 that divided the country along the 38th Parallel was synthetic and probably no one at the time expected the line to stay in place for very long. No peace was ever formally signed, so to this day, all protagonists in formal terms remain at war.