I mentioned Robert Kaplan’s 7 steps to North Korean regime collapse yesterday and sure enough he now has now published his opinion on the recent provocations by North Korea.  Here is a point I agree with made by Kaplan:

Nonetheless, Kim tries to remain feistily independent of China, for while China doesn’t want North Korea to implode catastrophically, China does have designs on North Korea’s territory: It prefers the idea of a Gorbachevian buffer state like Tibet on its northeastern frontier in place of Kim’s erratic totalitarian regime.  [The Atlantic via Coming Anarchy]

I have always felt that North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons had more to do with regime survival than getting international aid.  Read the Strategic Disengagement Theory to see what I am talking about.  However, this building of nuclear weapons for regime survival isn’t just to keep the South Koreans and the US at bay, but the Chinese as well.  The Chinese through their Northeast Asia project have long been setting conditions for the establishment of a puppet state in North Korea of the Kim regime collapses.  I think the case can be made that China is in fact a bigger threat to North Korea territorially than even South Korea and the US.

Thus the regime’s building of a nuclear deterrent is a way to ensure regime survival while at the same time get the US and the ROK back to the bargaining table at a time of North Korea’s choosing in an effort to restart aid to keep the status quo.  North Korea through the Cold War kept itself going through Kim Il-sung cleverly playing the Soviets and the Chinese off of one another.  His son, Kim Jong-il has done the same thing, but by playing off the Chinese with the US and South Korea instead.  Now this balance has been thrown off due to the election of Lee Myung-bak in South Korea and their recent nuclear test.  However, the regime is surely betting that at some point that this balance will get reestablished.  It has always worked before.

Here is something that absolutely disagree with Kaplan on:

North Korea, with 23 million people, is roughly the size of Iraq—and its population is less educated and has much less experience with democracy than do the Iraqis, who had enjoyed several decades of semi-democracy in the early- and mid-20th century. A regime breakdown in Pyongyang might necessitate the mother of all humanitarian interventions, with the American military and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army being forced to work together. Nobody wants to go down that road, certainly not China or the U.S. A nuclear test in the North irritates the Chinese leadership, but the thought of large-scale violence and millions of refugees outright terrifies them.

I have long advocated that US soldiers should be sent into North Korea if the regime collapsed in only the most limited of circumstances, preferably none at all.  The ROK Army should overwhelmingly fill the country with soldiers to exert authority over the north before the Chinese or Russians can move in.

It just so happens that South Korea has plenty of troops to handle regime collapse if it was in fact to happen:

As of 2006, South Korea had a standing active force of 687,000 (.pdf) with a regular reserve force of 4,500,000. 560,000 of those regulars were in the ROK Army. This means South Korea could deploy 460,000 regulars to North Korea and still have plenty left over to defend Dokdo from the Japanese. This would also mean, of course, that the US would be required to contribute almost nothing to the effort beyond that which is expected of a close military ally — which in the South Korean case, means perhaps an engineering unit, a field hospital and maybe a token “peace and reconstruction” unit to build toilets and restore East German Bauhaus architecture in Hamhung.  [Marmot's Hole]

If the US moves into North Korea that would give the Chinese the green light to move in as well.  That is why it is critical that South Korea quickly deploys it’s forces throughout North Korea and implement martial law and immediately begin humanitarian assistance to exert a sense of authority.  North Koreans have been brought up since the day they were born to hate the United States and if the ROK Army is seen working side by side with the United States in North Korea this may give many North Koreans the impression that the South Koreans are the puppets of the United States.

It is critical that the South Koreans have to be viewed early on as the legitimate occupiers of North Korea by the North Korean population.  Everything done in the early days of a collapse has to be viewed in the context of building the legitimacy of the South Korean government in the eyes of the North Korean population.  If the South Korean is not immediately prepared to act the Chinese will.

Kaplan concludes the article by warning about the lessons from occupying Iraq, which is just further reason why the US military should not deploy into North Korea.  If people think Iraq is strategic blunder, wait until you see what happens when tens of thousands of US troops are deployed in North Korea.