Bean, “This will not end politely...”
Your missive is spot on. Howsomever, there are more players than Mo Larry & Curley.
NK is a China Pawn. If President Lee, has only friends like O and Hill; the Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, alliance will be mmmm motivated to greater than traditional cohesion. This could be a good thing.
Asia is never really polite, and never ends.
Rab
Good points all, but I think Kim made an unreversible error with his insistence on developing and testing nuclear weapons. Remember that test NoKo conducted right before the Olympics?? I suspect the Chinese are a lot less inclined to treat North Korea the same way they used to because of the nukes. I don’t think the ChiComms are going to publicly admonish Kim, but they sure aren’t very inclined to help him either.
If there is any cohesion in Asia, it is a lot more motivated toward protecting their financial and business interests, rather than uniting to protect North Korea in any way. Kim is an enormous threat to a lot more people than just South Korea, and none of the countries you mention are interested in having warm relations with NoKo.
At the same time nobody really expects Premier Hussein to do anything meaningful about North Korea until it is far too late, and probably not even then. If the North Koreans really did attack the South, Obama is just as likely to convene another White House study group to try and figure out what to do.
In any case, the Regime is far more interested in protecting Mexican illegals from American law enforcement than anything that happens on the Korean peninsula...