THE KOREAN CRISIS ANEW: WHAT HISTORY SUGGESTS MAY PERHAPS BE THE VERY BEST OPTION

"In his acclaimed book The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark wrote about how the great powers of 1914 stumbled into a pan-European war that not only destroyed much of the continent, but unleashed destructive forces that defined the global order for much of the following century. Some of us fear that we are sleepwalking again, blindly unaware of the abyss that lies ahead. As a Chinese friend reminded me recently, war has its own logic. So too do crises. History teaches us they are both hard to stop once they start. The greatest global flash point today is the Korean peninsula. Most analysts regard crisis and conflict over the North Korean nuclear programme as improbable. They are right. But the uncomfortable truth is that it is now becoming more possible".

Kevin Rudd, "Creative diplomacy is vital to defuse Korean crisis". The Financial Times. 11 August 2017, in www.ft.com.

"The whole position of the United States is in the balance".

Dean Acheson, position paper dated the 28th of June 1961 on the Berlin Crisis. In Lawrence Friedman. Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. (2000), p. 67.

"We cannot and will not permit the communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force....In the thermonuclear age, any misjudgment on either side about the intentions of the other could rain more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all wars of human history".

President John F. Kennedy, Speech on the Berlin Crisis, 25 July 1961, in Friedman, op. cit., p. 71.

History while far from an exact science, does and can tell us a few things concerning the ongoing crisis over North Korea and its mercurial leader. First is that for all the bloodcurdling rhetoric by Mr. Kim Jong Un, as well as its missile and nuclear programme, the fact of the matter is that there is little likelihood that North Korea will unilaterally attack any of its neighbors of the United States. The North Korean nuclear programme is a very expensive and dangerous insurance policy for Mr. Kim. He possesses it, in the expectation that by possessing these weapons and by constructing systems which will allow him to fire nuclear warheads at the United States, that he will ensure the safety of his regime. In point of fact, with the ongoing and now recently strengthened sanctions on his regime, it is far more likely that some day soon, if not this year than in five to ten years from now, the current regime in North Korea will collapse. There most likely will be some coup d'etat by some internal enemy who will: a) oust and probably kill Mr. Kim; b) once 'a' occurs the regime will quickly begin to implode from within. With the eventual crisis resulting in the reunification of the two Koreas and the ending of the North Korean nuclear threat. The upshot is that just as the Americans and their allies withstood the rhetorical blasts of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the years (1958-1962) of the Berlin Crises, so must they do the same now. What occurred was that history was ultimately on the side of the West, the Americans and their allies and the stalemate that ended the crisis, eventually collapsed with the collapse of the DDR in November 1989. It took of course almost thirty years for this to occur. But occur it did. And it is my prognosis that similarly, in due course the regime in North Korea will also eventually collapse, and there is accordingly, absolutely no point in the least to either be provoked by North Korean rhetoric or for that matter North Korean stunts (missiles which are fired off and which hit nothing except empty air and the blue waters of the Pacific). North Korea au fond is a land and a regime of the past. Just as the DDR was. And it will suffer the very same fate. What the Americans and their allies the South Koreans and the Japanese need to do is to keep their nerves and a stiff upper lip while this hoped for event does indeed occur. Accordingly, the less said by the mentally challenged American President the better.