Aussie pundit Greg Sheridan astutely assesses the geostrategic issues facing Japan after its election change of power, and suggests how Japan will draw increasingly on America & Australia to buttress its strategic position in Asia, and to face possible crises with China & North Korea. GS quotes an ex-Bush 43 Asian security staffer's view of a coming showdown with North Korea:
Mike Green, the former Asia head of the US National Security Council under Bush, predicts a crisis in North Korea within a couple of years. South Korean intelligence believes that North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong-il, survived a stroke but now has pancreatic cancer, which would certainly accord with his haggard look in recent public appearances.
The best estimate is that he will die within two years. He has planned a succession for his third son, Kim Jong-un. But in a newly published analysis, Green argues that the favoured son, still in his 20s, is in a much weaker position to assume power than was his father, who inherited the mantle of leadership after a lifetime's grooming.
Green forecasts a three-stage crisis of intense danger. First, North Korea, armed with nuclear weapons, brandishes its arsenal not to gain aid but to alter the security structure of northeast Asia. Second, the regime begins to collapse. And finally there is the prospect of settling terms for a unified Korea.
Green reveals a meeting in 2004 at which the North Koreans told the US they would demonstrate their nuclear deterrent, expand that deterrent and transfer it. Given North Korea's recent nuclear tests, the nuclear reactor it helped to build for Syria (which the Israelis bombed) and the troubling reports of at least incipient nuclear trade between North Korea and Burma, Pyongyang has fulfilled all three promises.
Fears of North Korea have driven much Japanese security policy, and will continue to do so.
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