North Korea Breakthrough--US Might End Korean War At Last

Elaine Meinel Supkis

As I said long ago, Baby Dragon of North Korea simply wanted to get some sort of solid peace treaty signed and the way to do this was finally to scare everyone to death so they would be forced into action. This rather crude method of diplomacy did work in the end, shooting a missile over Japan motivated Japan to join South Korea and China in pressuring the US to finally stop the Korean War...at long last. The US denies it is signing a peace treaty but this is what all the others want and it is the only sane thing to do at this point. Then China will sigh with relief, their northern borders finally secured.

From the Guardian:

The United States has agreed to lift sanctions against North Korea and remove it from its list of pariah states that sponsor terrorism, the foreign ministry in Pyongyang announced yesterday.
Washington declined to confirm the report, but if true the move would represent one of the biggest steps towards peace on the divided peninsula since the Korean war armistice in 1953.

Less than a year after North Korea tested its first nuclear bomb, the two cold war enemies said they had made substantial progress during talks in Geneva at the weekend. The North Korean foreign ministry confirmed earlier US reports that it had agreed on measures to neutralise Pyongyang's nuclear facilities this year.

North Korea wanted a face to face meeting with the US and the US had steadfastedly refused for years and years and years. The US, pressured by Asian allies, tossed this whole salad bowl into China's lap and the Chinese then worked long and hard to make these talks move to the final point they wanted from day one which was for the US to engage in talks with North Korea and thus, finally admit sovereignty to that mad kingdom and its madder ruler. I am overjoyed this finally happened and maybe the 55 year nightmare life of that hold-over Stalinist state will finally come to an end. The only way to end this is for the greater Asian neighbors to slowly draw Kim out of his bomb shelter and pry open the doors and let some fresh air in. My heart goes out to the poor, tragic North Korean people. I pray they finally gain some happiness at last not least being reunification of divided families.

From Xinhua:

The DPRK had repeatedly demanded removal from the terror sponsors list, which is considered a key element in the relationship between the two countries.

The spokesman also said the Geneva talks "laid a groundwork for making progress at the plenary session of the six-party talks to be held in the future."

Besides the U.S. and the DPRK, the six-party negotiations also involve China, the Republic of Korea, Japan and Russia. The next full session of the six-party negotiations is expected to start in Beijing in mid-September.

I wonder what was said behind closed doors vis a vis China and the US? I would suspect, this being very sudden and right before China was going to open their session in Beijing which they wanted to be a great occasion with the signing of many papers and promises of eternal friendship. Already, China's teeth were on edge when baby dragon hauled out missiles and bombs and began threatening to toss them into everyone's laps. But this deal shows China can control events and if Japan wants peace and plenty, they should ring China's doorbell, not the US. The US, on the other hand, is in financial trouble, big time. The list China has for 'what we want to save your asses' isn't very long. One was, peace with North Korea so they could finally deal with that mess on their borders, the other one of course, is Taiwan. The US is still dragging heels on that.

But one thing at a time! The third thing is to keep Japan non-nuclear and more neutral and not be used as an aircraft carrier for the American nuclear forces. China has moved this to #2 and is intent on moving military diplomacy further along.

From Xinhua:

Zeng made the remarks at the high level forum on Northeast Asia Economic and Trade Cooperation of the 3rd Northeast Asia Investment and Trade Expo that opened Sunday in Changchun, capital of northeast China's Jilin Province.

Northeast Asia has huge potential in deepening cooperation and witnessed booming economic growth and robust trade and investment activities during the past few years, the vice premier said.

"The countries in the region, with close geography and long friendly people-to-people relations, should enhance exchanges and cooperation to foster a mutually beneficial relationship of common development," he stated.

Zeng proposed that China would like to work with other countries in the region to boost infrastructure construction including building Dalian Port into an international shipping hub and construction of railways and roads to Russia, Mongolia and North Korea.

If we just look at the news in the West, all these subtle tidbits escape notice. This is because all diplomatic breakthroughs must be advertised as American victories and victories for the Western Empires. The idea that China is rapidly building up a superstructure to support a vigorous home market that doesn't need the US escapes most news media notice. As I pointed out before, the interlacing of rail lines is being encouraged and paid for by the Chinese so they can have swift and economical economic ties via trade with all the northern partners. Why steam across great oceans when there are markets right under one's nose?

And this trade is quite different from the deal with the US where we use China as our pollution and inflation sink. The trade with the neighbors of China will strenghten China's security and power. Whereas the US views China as a tool and little else. This is why the US has made it pretty clear, we intend to cheat China out of almost $2 trillion by destroying our currency's value in Asia. I suspect a goad towards negotiating peace with North Korea had a very strong threat from China if we fail.

From Xinhua:

China and Japan vowed Thursday to continue top-level defense exchanges and enhance cooperation in security consultation, training and other military fields, a joint press communique said.

The communique was signed while Chinese Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan is paying an official good-will visit to Japan, which started on Wednesday. It was the first visit to Japan for a Chinese defense minister since 1998.

According to the agreements reached during his visit, Cao has invited his Japanese counterpart Masahiko Komura to visit China in 2008 at both sides' convenience.

The Japanese are frightened of Chinese power since there are quite a few million bones to chew left over from WWII. But China will forgive and forget if Japan strengthens its ties with China. But Japan wants to form an anti-China, anti-Russia and probably now, anti-Korea coalition with the English and American empires. I doubt the Chinese will allow this. Japan should learn to triangulate or they may find themselves suddenly cut off from everyone rather than they menacing everyone. Their population is in decline. The proportion of old people to young is rising higher, faster, despite WWII killing millions of Japanese who would be retiring today.

Japan can't let a flood of round-eyes to invade. So it looks like the Chinese and Koreans will, as they did several times over the last 4,000 years, move into the Japanese islands. This is a long, savage history of influence and invasions that are seldom mentioned today.

Now let's look at this same story as told by the Western empires. From Reuters:

But Japanese suspicions over the lack of transparency in China's rising military budget showed no sign of letting up.

"It is only natural for other countries, including Japan, to become increasingly concerned about China's recent military trend," the Yomiuri Shimbun daily said in an editorial, adding that Cao had given no concrete examples of how Beijing planned to improve transparency about its military force.

China said in March it would boost defense spending by 17.8 percent to about $45 billion this year, but a U.S. Pentagon report in May said Beijing's total military-related spending could be more than double.

Without a breakdown of China's defense spending in line with international standards, doubts would not subside, the conservative Sankei Shimbun said.

"Japan should work to build trust with China through dialogue, but its core policy is its alliance with the United States," the paper said in its editorial.

Japan is a leech upon the US. We spend far, far more than China on our military, about 5X more. Japan depends on us bankrupting America in order to surround Japan with our military that do a splendid job of protecting Japan even as it falls on its face here at home. Whining about China's military spending is hilarous when one sees clearly, the US spends far, far more. How about the Japanese pay us an extra fee of around $200 billion a year instead of forcing us to go to them for loans? They hold the most US debts of any nation by far!

From Xinhua:

China hopes to see progress on such topics as climate change and clean development, integration of regional economy, multilateral trade and APEC reform at the impending APEC summit, said a senior official with Chinese Foreign Ministry.

The proposal was raised by Chinese assistant foreign minister Cui Tiankai at a press conference here Tuesday afternoon.

From Sept. 3 to 9, Chinese President Hu Jintao will pay a state visit to Australia and attend the summit meeting due to be held in Sydney on September 8-9.

"China will make concerted efforts with concerned parties to achieve the objectives", Cui said.

I almost forgot this tidbit. Australia has a much higher interest rate than Japan and the carry trade business is now going bust for reasons that have little to do with Japan raising interest rates and tons to do with the growing trade surplus with Australia. The hedge funds feeding off all this are dying and banking is in a mess and no one has any idea, how to fix this. And China is desirous to get Australia to consider triangulation rather than being only pro-Japanese. And if the Japanese flub this, it is their own fault for wanting to keep the doors in Japan tightly closed.

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Comments

[JSmith]

Great! NK gets to kep its nukes (no, they are NOT giving those up!), we get to pull our troops out, and the South Koreans get to deal with Kim.

"maybe the 55 year nightmare life of that hold-over Stalinist state will finally come to an end."

And maybe it goes the other way: the nightmare Stalinist state gets the rest of the peninsula (which it would have done long ago, had the US not interfered where it had no business.)

[Suusi M-B]

Or maybe now Bush gets to free up a load more grunts for his killing fields of Iraq Oil adventure.

[Liberal AND Proud]

JSmith and Suuusi are right on both counts.

The Korean standoff served the military industrial complexes need for new weapons and mo money mo money mo money.

AND, tada, with the Korean conflict over...instant troops for the Middle East...oh and more weapons...mo money mo money mo money.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

NOW the US is saying it retracts everything. Must be they saw my cartoon...and I am not joking, the State Department reads this blog.

[Dragon]

CHINA COULD HAVE STARTED TO DUMP US TREASURIES

David Powell
Wednesday, September 05, 2007

China could have started to dump US Treasuries, says David Powell, currency analyst at IDEAglobal.

He says the latest report from the Federal Reserve shows central banks' holdings of US Treasuries fell by $7bn in the week to August 30, after a drop of $25.2bn in the previous week.

「While we cannot say with any degree of certainty which central bank is making a marked shift out of US Treasuries, the first suspect is China,」 he says.

「The country's new sovereign wealth fund . . . will officially start operations later this year, but has already been busy laying the groundwork.」

He says China's Ministry of Finance issued $79bn of bonds last week, its biggest bond sale, to begin funding the sovereign wealth fund.

「The finance ministry said the proceeds would be used to buy from the People's Bank of China some of its $1,330bn of FX reserves for the China Investment Corporation, which is expected ultimately to have assets of about $300bn.

「The Chinese government had also made some high-profile purchases earlier in the year such as the $3bn investment in Blackstone. This has all been in preparation for a move out of US Treasuries with the goal of producing higher returns.

「We won't know for sure who was behind the large shifts out of Treasuries until the August TICS data is released on November 16. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.」

[JSmith]

"NOW the US is saying it retracts everything. Must be they saw my cartoon...and I am not joking, the State Department reads this blog."

Well... you read everything except the US news, so what you have to go on is what the Chinese et al. say the US said. Perhaps the US didn't say anything at all like what was reported in the foreign press.

From the Guardian, quoyed above:

"The United States has agreed to lift sanctions against North Korea and remove it from its list of pariah states that sponsor terrorism, the foreign ministry in Pyongyang announced yesterday.
Washington declined to confirm the report."

The NKs wouldn't lie about something like that, would they?