China’s and Russia’s North Korea Dilemma

As everyone knows now, unless you’ve been sleeping under a very big boulder for the last two weeks, North Korea engaged in another show of brinkmanship by launching what it claimed to be a satellite over Japanese airspace and into the Pacific Ocean. It was the second time North Korea launched a “satellite” that somehow failed to break orbit. Okay, I’m going to be a good sport and not mention how incredible I find it that a country that has to rely on international humanitarian aid to feed its 25 million citizens can somehow afford to develop a space program.

At issue is the fact that North Korea was obviously feeling upstaged by the attention focused on President Barack Obama’s first time on the international stage since taking office. Whenever the world seems to have cast it aside for the time being, North Korea does something to remind us that they’re still there. If the United States is “The Great Satan”, as Iran likes to call us, then North Korea is “The Great Brat”, always throwing a tantrum of threats to get attention. And North Korea will continue to be “The Great Brat” until its two foster parents, China and Russia, begin allowing it to be held accountable for its tantrums. When and how that will happen is unknown.

North Korea is to China and Russia what Israel is to the United States – their staunchest, most loyal ally through thick and thin. Of all the communist regimes during the Cold War, North Korea was the most Stalinist and most loyal to both, even somehow managing it without having to take sides when China and the Soviet Union, who’s problems Russia inherited, often came close to exchanging bullets over each other’s ongoing quest to be the leader of the communist world.

Although Russia has, at times, tried to put some distance between itself and North Korea since the break of the Soviet Union, such as cutting off much aid which was not longer able to afford to send, Russia still has a certain sense of responsibility to this mistake of a state created by Josef Stalin in 1948. To abandon North Korea and leave it alone to face the world would be akin to trying to wash its hands of the whole affair. And an escalation of tension on the Korean Peninsula certainly wouldn’t help Russia at all. It would certainly have to take a firm side but wouldn’t know which to take.