While I stopped long ago trying to predict when North Korea will fall, the repeated signs that crop up may not be predictors of imminent collapse. but they sure seem to be signs leading to that collapse at some point.
The signs sure do keep coming. And the collapse chatter seems to be picking up:
South Koreans are expressing their concern over the deteriorating conditions up north, by spending more time discussing how South Korea will handle absorbing North Korea. It's become accepted that the north will eventually collapse in chaos, and South Korea will be largely responsible for taking care of the mess. This is not expected to turn out well.
The Northerners, who are lining up behind different sons of Kim Jong Il, who appears to be dying, may be more ready for flight than fight, however:
There are indications of that from Chinese reporting North Korean officials increasingly arranging to establish second homes in China, and sending children, and even wives, there. Defectors report that there is an escape tunnel, from the capital, to the port of Nampo, which would enable officials, in an emergency, to secretly flee to China by sea.Obama would need to be lucky to have North Korea collapse. He'll need to be very lucky to have even a Romania level of collapse involving only internal violence and not any violence directed abroad. With North Korea's chemical and (I assume) biological weapons arsenal, you can't rule out that the North Korean true believers will order a strike on South Korea in order to provoke a crisis that they hope will rally the population. South Koreans are closer, but if the Northerners retain any sense of reality, they'll know South Korea is the only one of South Korea, America, or Japan that can invade and occupy them (and I assume Seoul has an arrangement with Peking to divide the peninsula in case of a regime or national collapse. Or could there be a broader agreement?). America, of course, is too far away for now, and in any case would quite possibly respond with a nuke or two if Pyongyang uses chemical weapons on US forces or people.
That might leave Japan as the logical target for a chemical weapons strike with missiles. Close enough to hate but far enough away and weak enough not to be able to really knock down North Korea. I think we, at least, would join the Japanese in smashing up the Pyongyang regime, but the Northerners might not think we'd do that.
Still, given the destabilizing role North Korea plays in Northeast Asia and their role in nuclear proliferation, any type of regime or national collapse has to be considered getting lucky.
So how lucky is our president?
