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As North Korea's Kim Jong-Il makes his way on that incredibly boring, slow Vladivostok to Moscow ride, it might be time to take a hard look at the Disneyworld of recent Asian treaties, alliances and diplomatic hookups of ill-defined protocol.
Kim, having participated in a few aeronautical “accidents” himself, doesn’t trust planes. Or maybe he is trying to figure out what he could possibly expect when he finally meets up with the Kremlinmeister Vladimir Putin.
North Korea’s dilemma as a bonafide “failed state” is looking for a way out. Putin might have some advice; he was, after all, hanging out as a failed KGBnick in Dresden when East Germany -- The New York Times never tired of feeding us graphs proving its strength in that Communist Central and Eastern Europe garden of dwarfs — imploded.
And in churning relations among the world’s powers, even a decade after the Soviet Union’s implosion, Kim is looking everywhere. He has just looked under the EU bed and found only failed ex-radical Joachim Fischer, the German foreign minister’s rhetoric. Allowing for difficulties of German syntax, Fischer held out no hope for beleaguered Kim Jr.
Gone are his father’s heady days of playing Russian superpower against his neighborly Chinese Communists; Beijing has too many other problems, prioritizes a stronger alliance with industrial South Korea. Kim will find out in Moscow, Putin with a demographic and economic disaster, doesn’t have wherewithal to play an Asian card. In fact, things are so bad, Putin is Kim’s competitor in selling missile and nuclear hardware to pariahs like Iraq’s Sadaam, Libya’s Qaddaffi, the Iranian religious loonies, and, alas! that former U.S. ally, the Pakistanis. But Moscow keeps the good customers, the Chinese and the Indians.
The Japanese Korean Diaspora and its associated pachinko gangsters, once a Pyongyang anchor, are now thoroughly scrutinized by growing Tokyo security — besides, younger Koreans no longer see Communism as the wave of the future. South Korea’s Kim Dae Jung’s sweetness and light has netted very little except some folding money from adventurous Seoul companies for Kim Jr.’s Hong Kong bank account. So 10 days on the Trans-Sib is not too short to think what to do to placate his hungry generals back home. And, finally, it must be a puzzle — maybe he can ask Putin’s advice after the two hour serenade of Streisand recordings they shared — whether it is Bush’s body language or Powell’s slogans he should accept as U.S. policy in forthcoming Pyongyang-Washington negotiations.
Yet, Kim’s dilemma is not unlike that of the whole range Asian states. All find themselves harried by contradictory forces. And all are reaching out for new permanent attachments, which would make life easier. They are not likely to find them because of those very contradictions.
Jiang Ze-min did the unpardonable in Chinese tradition by going to Moscow [rather than having the foreign prince come to the Middle Kingdom as Nixon did] to sign a new friendship treaty. Yet there is less there than meets the eye. Russia was already selling China its latest military hardware although denying technological transfer [something to which Washington might pay heed]. Surely there are Russian generals who worry about the implications what with Moscow’s influence fading in all the old Asian areas the tsars fought so hard and so long to build. Moscow reports the in-migration of Russian ethnics from the former Soviet republics continues apace, sure sign of the falling back of Slav dominance. [Tatarstan, half Tatar, has officially moved to Latin letters from Cyrillic, refuses to sign its treaty of affiliation with the Russian Federation — Kazan its capital, Lenin’s birthplace!]
China is meanwhile throwing [wasting?] vast resources in its efforts to consolidate its old imperial hold in the West — a railroad to be built at incredible cost and technological challenge into Tibet, the gigantic Three Gorges project which will cause enormous disruption, continuing efforts against the Moslem Uighurs in Singkiang [where the nuclear tests are held]. Inevitably, all this will collide with Russian interests as it has in the past. The Shanghai Five [now Six], an amalgam of Central Asian states, the Russians and the Chinese, to jointly wage a campaign against Islamic “subversion” cannot be but a temporary fix. After all, it is no secret that Central Asians are playing tit-tat-to with the Islamicists. And, so far, Beijing has turned down its ally Pakistan’s request to join — for after all, Afghanistan’s Taliban, whom all fear and detest as the source of Islamicist infection, is a Frankenstein of Islamabad’s [and Washington’s] making.
This not 1949. Stalin is not there, neither is Mao. Russia is a bankrupt superpower. China is a bubble waiting to pop. Alliances come and go. [Ribbentrop-Molotove lasted less than two years even though it tripped WWII]. U.S. policy should not be diverted by such flights of fancy.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.