How North Korea Could Start World War III (Or a U.S.-China Conflict)

Kyle Mizokami

Security,

And it would be awful. 

A war between the United States and China is difficult to think about. It would be enormous disruptive and lethal, and could potentially involve the use of nuclear weapons. It is important for the two countries to come to an agreement in the event of a regime collapse in North Korea. Once collapse comes, events will move quickly. Unless Washington and Beijing can hammer out a framework for cooperation now, the likelihood of conflict between the two countries is unacceptably high.

One of the most dangerous places in the world is North Korea, and not entirely in the ways one might think. Although North Korea is a nuclear state with nuclear arms, a far more dangerous scenario is the collapse of the regime in Pyongyang and the political vacuum that would create. Competing interests could draw two of the most powerful countries on Earth, the United States and China, into direct military conflict.

(This first appeared in 2017.)

North Korea lies at the intersection of two strategic fault lines. The first is its proximity to China, and China’s desire to keep a friendly—if unwholesome—regime in place to safeguard its borders. China’s borders are probably the most secure than they’ve been in a thousand years, no mean feat for a country stretching from Central Asia to the Yalu River, and China would like to keep it that way. Instability along the 880-mile-long Sino–North Korean border would be an unwanted distraction, even more so than the dilemma of the nuclear-armed dictatorship.

The second fault line is the regime itself and its interaction with the United States. Pyongyang has repeatedly threatened to unify the Korean peninsula by force, resulting in a strategic alliance between the United States and South Korea. To counter the overwhelming might of the Pentagon, North Korea has developed nuclear weapons and is making rapid progress to delivery vehicles, from land-based long-range missiles to missile submarines.