North Korea, China and the US

A further piece from Philip Stephens on China, this time in relation to North Korea. Stephens has a proposal he thinks would work but won't be tried:

China has the capacity to bring down Mr Kim. It is often said it should cut off supplies of food and fuel. To the contrary, instead of closing its border, it would be better to open it - allowing starving North Koreans to flee into China in their millions. The regime would implode, as happened in East Germany after Hungary opened its borders in 1989.

For all its irritation this week - it called the test "brazen" and said it will back a measured punitive response - Beijing shows no sign of contemplating such a course.

Against the threat of nuclear proliferation he projects another scenario he also judges unlikely in the short term:

One obviously troubling question is how long before Japan, South Korea and Taiwan decide they cannot rely on the US nuclear umbrella for their own security? Japan, for all the latest thaw in its relations with Beijing, already feels threatened by China's rise. Conventional wisdom has it that Tokyo would need between two and six weeks - yes, weeks - to build its own nuclear device.
.....
At some point [China] will have to choose and to recognise that its economic power has reshaped its strategic interests. Locked away, China could afford to play the role of champion of the developing world. As a great power, it has a much bigger stake, economic and strategic, in building a stable international order. That stability would be fatally undermined by nuclear proliferation.

Asking China to make such a change would require an equally radical shift from the US. To persuade China to be a responsible player in the international system demands that the US actually commit itself to that system...

I suspect that we are a long way from the grand bargain between the US and China that the above implies. There are too many people in Washington who believe that conflict with a rising China is inevitable; and too many in Beijing who are inclined to agree with them. But the truth is that both have a huge interest in creating a new global order.

(Thanks: GC.)