Is Korea About to Explode (Not a daily Mail Article)

jesus.

I'm first in.


it's so ronery

/weeps

It could get awfully messy, but I doubt anything will really happen. China has tacitly supported NK since the Korean war, when themselves, NK and Russia attacked South Korea. Kim also makes a handy little distraction to draw attention away from whatever China is up to.

However the North hasn't the military capacity to take the South in a one-to-one scrap (most of their equipment dates from the 1970s), even with Chinese support, unless the Chinese get openly involved in a war with the US, which would destroy their economy utterly as Sino-US trade and EU-China trade falls apart overnight.

So the Chinese won't give lil' Kim the nod (note the Dear Leader's recent and almost unprecedented visit to Beijing), South Korea will get its pound of flesh by confining NKs ships to their ports for a few years, and then it will slowly swing back to business as usual.

Of course, if all of the above is wrong, its pretty much every man for himself, as if China and the US get involved in a hot war, Taiwan, Burma, and other areas will explode as well, along with the high probability of Iran making moves via insurgents across its porous border with Iraq while the US has its hands very much full, which will probably cause Israel to do something we all might regret. Plus there's the whole massively interconnected global trade network thing as well, even if China does back off to stay afloat, a LOT of stuff comes from South Korea. In the worst case scenario there is no limit to how bad the damage could get.