Word: brinkmanship
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...reasonable New Year's resolution for India and Pakistan might have been to stop playing nuclear brinkmanship. Instead, 2003 in South Asia has begun with both countries reassuring each other that destruction would be mutual. Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf had rung out the old year by boasting that he had forced India to back down during last year's tense standoff in Kashmir by threatening to go beyond conventional warfare. On Jan. 4, New Delhi responded by announcing it had established a command and control structure for its nuclear arsenal. Then, three days later, Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes...
President Bush set out to wrestle the headlines back from North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship, Friday, warning that Saddam Hussein's "day of reckoning" is approaching and telling U.S. troops that they may soon be asked to "liberate" Iraq. He added the by-now traditional war-is-not-inevitable rider, but made clear that avoiding one was up to Saddam - and that he doubted the Iraqi leader would do so. On North Korea, however, he was more optimistic, insisting that unified diplomacy could force Pyongyang to renounce its nuclear ambitions, even if the same approach had failed to shift Saddam...
...Still, North Korea's actions fit a well-established pattern of North Korea negotiating via nuclear brinkmanship, and Pyongyang itself insists that it is ready to renounce its programs in exchange for economic aid and political recognition. While the Bush administration has insisted that it won't negotiate before Pyongyang closes down its nuclear program, U.S. allies in the region - most notably South Korea - are urging that Washington adopt a more flexible approach. That may cut against the administration's political instincts, but the president has strong grounds for stressing the potential for diplomatic efforts to resolve the standoff...
...Increasingly, it is the country with the closest ties to North Korea that could play a key role in dissuading Kim from his nuclear brinkmanship: China. A budding superpower with a seat on the U.N. Security Council, China shares a border with North Korea and has a long history of propping up the country's bankrupt regime. In 1950, Chinese troops poured across the Yalu River and fought the U.S. to a stalemate, ending the Korean War and rescuing Kim's father, Kim Il Sung, founder of North Korea, from defeat. Today the mainland is North Korea's biggest benefactor...
...South Korean officials, however, see the latest nuclear muscle flexing by Pyongyang as the continuation of a long-established pattern of extortion through brinkmanship - the North Koreans unveil some new weapon threat and hang tough, and then agree to mothball it in exchange for economic aid. Even now, Pyongyang is sending out mixed messages, brandishing a nuclear threat but also hinting that it would disarm in exchange for a non-aggression pact and other concessions from the U.S. That's not palatable to the Bush Administration, but the alternative is a policy of malign neglect in which North Korea...