Over the past 15 years the regime in Pyongyang has painted itself into an ideological corner — or, to put it better, it has pushed itself up to the edge of an abyss. Kim Jong-il shook off responsibility for economic matters in the mid-1990s in order to avoid public blame for the famine. The propaganda machine claimed that his new “military first” regime would henceforth be too busy defending the country from the Yankees (who in fact were sending aid at that time) to bother with economic issues. This line not only maintained support for Kim, but also enabled officials at the provincial level to begin dismantling the command economy.

The West, of course, was overjoyed to note that the North Koreans no longer took all that Communist nonsense seriously. But the spread of capitalist values is what made the current string of nuclear provocations inevitable. Simply put, the more North Korea resembles a third-rate South Korea on the economic front, the more the Kim Jong-il regime must justify its existence through a combination of radical nationalist rhetoric and victories on the military and nuclear front. This is why North Korea will never disarm, for to do so would be to declare itself irrelevant.

Some in the West are now suggesting that North Korea’s nuclear capability must be accepted as a fait accompli, but that is no solution either. Needing constant tension with the outside world for his own political survival, Kim Jong-il is no more interested in winning international acceptance of his nuclear ambitions than in normalizing relations with Washington. The West must assume that he will always find a way to make his nukes unacceptable, while at the same time engaging sporadically in arms talks to keep the tension from tipping into all-out war.

It is time for America to shift its focus from negotiating with North Korea to negotiating with the Chinese about North Korea. Beijing understands how vital these nuclear provocations are to Pyongyang’s survival, which is why it continues to bankroll them. Washington must therefore do more to assuage Beijing’s fears of a collapse of the Kim Jong-il regime.

Let us remember how opposed the Soviet Union was to a unified Germany, until NATO came up with a promise not to station troops in the former East Germany. It would be a step in the right direction for the United States to assure the Chinese that they will never have to face American troops along the Yalu River.