The Korean Crisis may blow over or it may not. But even if it does you can be sure that it’ll blow up again sometime in the future. The Kim Jong-whoever show is set to run and run, and not just for the entertainment of fans of James Bond, Thunderbirds, and Fu Man Chu. Underneath the absurdity of the fat kid with the bad haircut waving nuclear missiles about and demanding to be loved, there is a mother lode of realpolitik of the kind that would make the most ruthless American Neocons look like Mother Teresa.
Why is this happening there and now and not someplace or sometime else?
Tectonic plates give a clue. They also have to rub up against and subduct one another somewhere sometime, and in a sense this is what is going on. The Korean peninsula lies right on the geopolitical ley lines, and although all the attention is on Kim 3, this is only because the Chinese want it that way. The Korean crisis is just a tentacle of a much bigger beast, something to get us all excited while the other seven tentacles go about their nefarious tasks elsewhere.
