I have a lot of respect for Nicholas Eberstadt and John Bolton who have co-written an op-ed recently in the Wall Street Journal.  Their article is in regards to the potential opportunity to reunite the Korean peninsula if regime collapse was to happen if Kim Jong-il died.  I don’t think the regime would collapse if Kim Jong-il died, but the article is an interesting read none the less.  However there are a couple of points in the article that I disagree with:

Critical here is that Beijing be told clearly that any military action across the DMZ is intended only to deal with the regime crisis, and is in no way aimed at China. Indeed, to the extent Beijing has information about, say, the location of the North’s nuclear weapons, it would clearly be in China’s interest to share that information.

Not only would a decisive CFC operation minimize the chances for loose nukes or warlord-minded generals, it could also dramatically help reassure the North Korean population that they could stay in their homes, and prevent massive refugee flows into China. That, in turn, could eliminate any thoughts Beijing might have about its own intervention to keep North Koreans from flowing across the Yalu River.  [Wall Street Journal]

The very fact that US forces would be moving into North Korea if the regime collapsed would be enough of an excuse for the Chinese to move in.  The Chinese want to keep the North Korean buffer state along their border and will not willingly go along and give it up if they can help it.  That is why I have always believed that if the ROK Army was prepared to execute an immediate occupation of North Korea if the regime collapsed, China would then have a harder time legitimizing any invasion of North Korea with their own forces if the ROK Army is already moving in to stabilize the situation.

US forces moving into North Korea would only legitimize any Chinese action into North Korea plus cause a host of other issues.

Anyway here is the other statement I disagree with in the article:

Second, whatever the CFC is able to do, there is little doubt we must plan for urgent humanitarian needs in the North. The scale and expense of the response required to forestall tragedy in these circumstances could be staggering — but today such an international response is not only feasible, but potentially quite manageable.

“Quite manageable”?  What preparations and coordinations has anyone done to provide humanitarian relief for 25 million starving North Koreans?  Who is going to buy the food, medicine, blankets, etc. needed to supply this many people?  How is it going to be delivered?  I can foresee a lot of problems coming from North Korea that would hardly make any occupation “quite manageable”.

Managing any occupation of North Korea would only be harder to do with US troops helping to occupy the place as well considering the North Korean populations animosity to the US. Plus the US troop presence would only confirm in the minds of the North Koreans that the South Koreans are simply puppets of the American imperialists and greatly harm the legitimacy of the South Korean government in the eyes of the North Korean people.

I could go on and on, but bottom line is that the US should stay out of North Korea and focus on South Korea leading any occupation of the country that will surely be an extremely difficult undertaking which will only be made even harder without in depth operational planning to prepare for it.

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