Korea Crisis Key: Refugees from the North

Nov. 29, 2010 - PRLog -- 29 November 2010. By David Caploe PhD, Chief Political Economist, EconomyWatch.com

Almost all public discussion of the Korean situation has focused on immediate actions and re-actions,

without a clear understanding of the deep factors at play for the main actors --

North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, and the US -- in the on-going tit-for-tat.

While there are several of these, in our view, the most important is the fear in China and South Korea that --

if pushed too far -- North Korea is going to collapse as an independent state,

thereby unleashing a flood of refugees that they -- not Japan, and not the US --

would have to deal with as an immediate and multi-dimensional problem:

economic, above all, but also social / political / and, potentially, strategic as well.

In this sense, North Korea is playing a game with the South / China / Japan / US that might be called "chicken blackmail":

You better let us do what we want -- or give us something else so we won't do it -- or we could very well go down the tubes,

and then at least SOME of you will be faced with a huge set of potentially unmanageable problems.

That is, North Korea is indeed engaging in a game of blackmail with the other actors in this drama,

but it is not particularly "nuclear" -- except in the eyes of the Japanese, who have a not-unrealistic concern in this area.

Rather, it's about the North Korean elite preserving two things:

their internal power; and even more importantly, the continued existence of the country as an independent state,

within which they can exercise that power, despite its evident and massive internal problems.

It is this potential for the ...

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