Once again, Kim Jong-il is testing the resolve of the international community. The latest North Korean nuclear provocation - an underground detonation yesterday - is the biggest trial of the Obama administration's foreign policy and of China's newfound global status.
The stakes are high not just because Pyongyang's provocations undermine security in northeast Asia, but also because a crucial issue facing the United States is nuclear proliferation to Iran.
Should North Korea acquire the status of a nuclear-weapons state, any effort to prevent the nuclearization of Iran would lose validity. And the prospect of a nuclear Iran would unravel U.S. Middle East policy, threatening the survival of Israel as well as the security of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf oil-exporting states.
For China, the stakes are no less important. It has banked its credibility on restraining Pyongyang through the diplomatic process of the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program.
The Kim family dynasty's determination to secure its survival through the acquisition of nuclear weapons not only threatens South Korea, but also may provoke Japan, the sole country that suffered an atomic bombing, to weaponize its advanced nuclear technology.
A nuclear arms race in northeast Asia would undermine the U.S.-Japan security treaty and inflame a fear of Japanese militarism in the rest of Asia, especially in China, where bitter memories of Japan's aggression simmer just below the surface. U.S. President Barack Obama's dream of a nuclear-weapons-free future would evaporate into a mushroom cloud, while Chinese President Hu Jintao's vision of a “harmonious world” would degenerate into a sauve qui peut scramble to acquire a nuclear stockpile.
Canada has a vital stake in this process, even if a renewed prospect of nuclear winter is not imminent. Without the safeguards of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and an International Atomic Energy Agency with authority, the regulated market for the export of nuclear-power technology will collapse and peaceful trade in uranium will fall under suspicion.
Kim Jong-il has shown no scruples in kidnapping teenagers from the beaches of Japan, starving a generation of his own country's children or engaging in counterfeiting and the export of narcotics. His response to the removal of North Korea from the U.S. list of countries supporting terrorism has been to renew his campaign of nuclear blackmail. He has no fear of the United Nations Security Council, whose resolutions he has defied on multiple occasions in the past five years.
The only way to restrain him from his course is the joint and explicit co-operation of the rest of the participants in the six-party talks, led by China and the United States and supported by Russia, Japan and South Korea. China's swift condemnation of this week's nuclear test by North Korea signals that its patience is at an end.
Over the coming days, we will see whether “Chimerica” can rise to the challenge. The limits of incentive-based diplomacy have been reached. The world must now tolerate imposing painful sanctions on Pyongyang. The price of inaction is too high.
The risk of a war that would once again devastate the Korean Peninsula has deterred any military option. Only close co-ordination between China and the United States can devise sanctions (such as a total energy embargo on a state that has no domestic source of oil and is chronically short of fuel) that constrain the continued operation of the North Korean regime without firing a shot that might provoke a suicidal attack on South Korea or Japan.
Mr. Kim threatens the world with the push of a button out of weakness, not strength. His isolated clan cannot depend on the loyalty of his million-man army even with his “Army First” economic strategy, so he blusters.
Mr. Hu and Mr. Obama may ultimately be forced into an uncomfortable and uncharacteristic game of brinkmanship, because only the point of all-out mobilization might give the Kim family pause.
Jeremy Paltiel is a professor of political science at Carleton University.
