business in great waters

Heads up for the next war:

The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia, and South Korea and Japan -- have agreed on a draft resolution on North Korea's second nuclear test," a diplomat said, requesting anonymity as reported by Yonhap. "The draft has been circulated to all the 15 members of the Security Council and we expect it to be put to a vote Friday."

 A Friday vote will ensure that there is a crisis over the weekend because of the North’s reaction to the vote. The North has vowed to break the Armistice and consider itself at war if – nay, when – a new sanctions resolution passes. Expect an escalation of the crisis this weekend, assuming the resolution is approved on Friday.

Chinese fishing vessels, which catch illegally in Korean waters and which usually have no compunction about defying either the North or South Korean coastguards, have reportedly vanished from the seas. The betting seems to be that we’re in for a naval conflict, presumably around the little Islands dotted about the East Sea that both the South and North claim.

Maybe that’s why everybody signed up. Winning a war against North Korea in such a way as to cause total regime collapse and see millions of refugees streaming towards the cooking smells emanating from China and South Korea is every local player’s worst case scenario. A naval conflict is containable and may just present the opportunity to topslice the regime without bringing the whole social structure crashing down. If so, that would be where China took the lead.