Time to hit North Korea where it hurts;
In best friend Red China’s pocketbook
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
Communist China seems determined to remain aloof as its pit bull, North Korea, flexes military muscles at America and its allies.
Last week marked the latest megalomaniac behavior by Pyongyang’s “dear leader” Kim Jong Il – the firing of multiple missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
The long range missile capable of hitting the U.S. flopped, but, absent restraint, Kim will keep trying. Unfortunately for Japan and others, the demo short range missiles worked just fine.
We could stop further North Korean testing with our own nuclear weapons, but there is an easier way.
The Bush Administration should force the interest of China, the one world power guaranteed to have “dear leader’s” absolute attention since they finance some of his nuttiness and throw a protective military arm around him.
How? By curtailing or shutting down the American marketplace for trillions of dollars worth of Chinese consumer goods. And by building our own factories to restart the making of said goods.
If that were to happen, we’re sure the North Koreans would quickly hear their master’s voice and we wouldn’t have to fire a shot.
A catastrophe, you say? No more cheap shirts, shoes, DVRs, end tables? Like the average American needs another cheap shirt from China if purchased at the price of our lost industrial base or national security.
China is at a precarious place in its march to supplant the United States as the world’s top economic and military superpower.
The mega-billion trade imbalance that the Chinese have with us – their cheap goods coming in, our factories, jobs and dollars going out – pales to their losses should we curtail their trade.
And best of all, we wouldn’t need to violate a trade treaty or place stiff tariffs on China’s goods.
We could simply follow the strategy the South Koreans are using to keep from having their industrial base for consumer goods wiped out by China as ours has been.
The South Koreans have been building factories on their side of their border with the North and daily busing North Korean workers to South Korean jobs. By doing this, the South gets a worker to help take back a lost industry at one half of what a similar worker gets in China and one-tenth of what a South Korean worker earns making more sophisticated products.
This is what, in effect, the Midlands Business Journal and this writer have been urging our government and corporate leaders to do for the past 10 years.
Our plan pivots on using bused-in Latino workers, paid well by Mexico standards, to retake electronic products, all manner of clothing and other consumer goods, textiles, furniture, all lost forever unless we innovate.
By focusing on “lost” industries, we avoid shaking the labor union leaders and politicians. Building hundreds or even thousands of factories on our side of the Mexican border would also be a multi-billion dollar shot in the arm to the U.S. construction industry.
It will take congressional action to pass a lost industries reclamation act to create needed enterprise zones in south Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
(For more on our ideas, see the Editorial Opinion section of our Web site, www.mbj.com.)
Keeping North Korea on missile hold by acting in a way China will heed solves a military threat.
It also slows the frantic pace of China’s march toward supremacy. Letting stand an indifferent but militaristic China and allowing the forming of a missile-ready, nuclear armed North Korea and throwing into the mix an equally ambitious Iran has dangers most Americans have yet to think much about.
That situation would mean a return to the “MAD” world of the U.S.-Soviet cold war – with only the U.S. as the potential fall guy.
With MAD – mutually assured destruction – both America and the Soviets felt neither would attack with nukes since a massive nuclear retaliation would be the response.
But what does an American president do if some future Chinese dictator slips the attack go-ahead to North Korea or Iran, nations already famed for sharing their military hardware with terrorists.
Whose destruction do we assure?
North Korea’s? Iran’s? Some terrorist cell’s? China’s?
China seems almost to enjoy having North Korea as a mad dog client state whose “dear leader” nobody can predict next much less control.
This is one dilemma we can solve quickly through the pressure point of our China trade – or lack thereof.
