The Korean war never really ended. There was a cease fire, but there has never been a formal peace treaty.

The Korean war was actually one of the major battles of the Cold War, and it can't really be understood without understanding the larger context of the Cold War. China and the Soviet Union had provided arms and advisors to the North Koreans to finance a war to reunite Korea under a communist government which would be a client of Moscow, and by so doing to hand a major defeat to America and its allies...

The initial offensive went well, and the defending forces commanded by MacArthur were surrounded in the Pusan pocket. MacArthur then launched the Inchon landing, placing a large force in the rear of the communist forces, and they began to pull back. MacArthur eventually pushed the communist forces into a pocket of its own in the north, at which point China intervened.

Macarthur is an interesting figure for students of military history. He was an enormously capable general officer who suffered from deep character flaws. He began to vocally criticize Truman and made plans for an actual invasion of China, and eventually it became impossible to ignore the insubordination and Truman fired him, replacing him with General Matt Ridgway. Ridgway had begun WWII commanding the 82nd Airborne, and later was promoted to command the XVIII Airborne Corps. He was a superb soldier and commander and he understood the one thing MacArthur had refused to accept: it wasn't actually possible to win the war in Korea.

Stalin had been humiliated in Berlin in 1949. In an attempt to wring concessions from the west, he'd imposed a de-facto blockade of the western zone in Berlin. Most supplies for Berlin had been shipped from West Germany by rail, and the Soviets stopped permitting the trains to run. The Western response was the now-legendary Berlin Airlift, which did not bring enough supplies in to make the people of Berlin comfortable, but did bring in enough to keep them alive. Eventually the Soviets recognized that the blockade had failed, and started letting the trains run. The first significant struggle of will in the Cold War had been won by the West.

So in the first shooting war of the Cold War, Stalin wasn't going to permit another defeat. Any attempt by an American commander there to try to win and crush the northern forces would only lead to escalation, which is exactly what did happen when MacArthur came close to wiping out the North Korean army. China committed hundreds of thousands of troops, causing the allied forces to once again pull back to the south. Eventually the military situation stabilized on a front more or less where the border is today.

Ridgway understood that his job was to maintain a stalemate so that negotiations could bring about a truce. He had also noticed that there were serious flaws in the Chinese command structure, with a distinct lack of flexibility at the lower levels. They were really good at following orders, but nothing like as good at reacting to unexpected situations. When the Chinese launched a major offensive south, the men leading the battle would be briefed about their objectives, and as long as the plan lasted they'd fight very well. But once they'd reached their objectives, they seemed to be confused about what they should do next.

When Ridgway detected an impending attack, he'd pull most of his troops out of the front line. The rest would withdraw when the attack came, putting up little resistance, so the Chinese would be permitted to easily take the physical objectives they'd made their plans to reach. Then he'd launch a counter-attack which would cause confusion and demoralization in the Chinese ranks, and chase them back to the original line. Over a couple of years this happened several times, and by using these tactics Ridgway reduced the allied casualty rate to the point where the Chinese were sacrificing five casualties for every one they inflicted on the allies. Stalemate is war of attrition, and Ridgway tailored his tactics to bring about the most favorable attrition exchange rate he could manage.

Meanwhile, peace talks proceeded at Panmunjom.

And for the first few months it seemed as if they only talked about preposterously silly things. Months were spent discussing the exact shape and dimensions of the main table which would be used in the negotiations.

There was a reason for that. If one side in a negotiation is more desperate than the other, and needs an agreement more, and if both sides know it, then the desperate one is at a disadvantage.

It's like buyer's markets versus seller's markets. When demand for a product exceeds supply, then the sellers will raise their prices, because buyers will be willing to make concessions (in this case, pay a higher price) to get the product. On the other hand, when there's more supply than demand, the buyers can shop for a deal, and sellers needing to make a sale may drop price or offer other enticements.

So it is in diplomatic negotiations. If one side is under more pressure to make a deal than the other, then the other will do better in the negotiations. The meaningless negotiations about table sizes and similarly trivial details really covered a period of stalling by both sides. Both were waiting to find out whether the other might become desperate and be forced to make concessions. Would the Chinese be willing to continue to suffer such an unfavorable casualty exchange rate? Would the upcoming presidential election in the US change the situation? If the Democrats were defeated, would a Republican administration be more eager to get out of a war they'd inherited from the Democrats and be willing to give up more to do so? Would the citizens of the open western nations begin to protest the war and bring pressure to bear on their leaders?

"Alright, dammit! We'll make the table the size you want it to be. Now let's start talking about the real issues, OK?" If one side had said that, it would have lost the negotiations before they truly had begun.

Eventually it became clear that neither side was going to blink, and they made a deal to cease hostilities with both sides holding their positions as of the time hostilities ended. But what they agreed to was a ceasefire.

In a way, VietNam was a replay of Korea. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, both sides in the Cold War recognized that any time there was a direct head-to-head confrontation between the two sides there was too great a chance of ultimate catastrophe. So the majority of the hot battles in the Cold War were fought by proxies on at least one side, with one side perhaps being publicly and formally engaged and maybe even using its own troops, while the other side offered support to its proxy without being directly engaged. Both sides in the Cold war would smile and nod at one another and publicly pretend they weren't really quite having a war, sort of.

With support from the Soviet Union and China, Ho Chi Minh continued his ongoing military campaign to reunite VietNam. He had managed to chase the French out after the battle of Dien Bien Phu, and the resulting Geneva Accords formally recognized the communist government of North VietNam. Unfortunately, it also formally recognized the government of South Vietnam, and the Eisenhower administration supported it. Eisenhower also ordered the very first American troops into South VietNam.

President Kennedy had significantly increased the number of American troops to try to sustain the government of South VietNam, and under Johnson the numbers became massive, as did the rate of American casualties. Nonetheless, there was never any plan to invade the North, because doing so would have risked a huge escalation, possibly leading to a full nuclear confrontation. It was accepted that neither China nor the USSR would stand by while North Korea fell, and just as with Korea, there was a border with China. The stakes in VietNam didn't justify that risk. So an invasion of North VietNam wasn't politically possible.

That meant that like in Korea, it wasn't actually possible to win in VietNam. America had to fight to maintain a stalemate, just as had been done in Korea, and hope that eventually the will of the other side would crack and they'd give up their attempts to conquer the south. The difference between the two is that in VietNam it failed. (It's not clear it could really be called a success in Korea, but there's no doubt that it was a failure in VietNam.)

The Tet Offensive was the turning point in the VietNam war. It was a brilliant victory for Ho, who understood the difference between winning battles and winning wars. Ho had always kept his eyes firmly fixed on the true objective of his war, and Tet was brilliantly conceived to achieve that objective.

Understand: the Tet Offensive was a military debacle for the communist forces. But it was a political victory, and because of the Tet Offensive American voters began to ask themselves why the United States was even involved in the struggle. The anti-war movement picked up strength, Johnson decided to not run for reelection, and Nixon was elected on a platform of "Peace with Honor".

Which meant he was looking for a way out, and means that the leadership of North VietNam knew it. They consented to peace talks in Paris because they pretty much had to, but just as in Korea the first few years of those peacetalks accomplished nothing whatever, and instead bogged down in endless discussions about completely meaningless issues including, once again, the size and shape of the main table.

Ho did not live to see the end of the war, but the leaders of North VietNam knew that time was on their side. Nixon tried to increase the pressure on them by bombing the North, and expanding the struggle into Laos and Cambodia. Invasion of the North was still out of the question, but he hoped that bombing would cause the leadership of the North to lose heart. Unfortunately for him, it didn't, and the pressure on Nixon, directly and indirectly, because of the war and because of domestic issues, eventually forced him to give up. In 1973 Kissinger and Le Duc Tho negotiated an agreement which gave Nixon the political cover to pull American forces out. America's POWs would be released, and the government of North VietNam insincerely promised to use peaceful means to seek to reunite VietNam, a promise that I think no one actually expected them to follow. But they were happy to lie about it in order to get the Americans to withdraw.

In 1975 the NVA overran Saigon, and the VietNam war ended when one of the governments which had been fighting the war ceased to exist.

But the Korean war didn't really end, quite. Technically the war is still going on. There was a ceasefire but no formal treaty ending the war. The two governments are still there. The front is still there. The armies are still there, and sometimes they still shoot at one another. Military stalemate became diplomatic stalemate, and over the course of decades South Korea became rich and powerful while North Korea collapsed. During the Cold War, North Korea (like Cuba) was propped up by massive subsidies from Moscow and Beijing, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, most of that was cut off. North Korea truly began to suffer.

In the early 1990's they started raising hell. Using their trademarked gibbering-lunatic mode of diplomacy comprising dire threats of attacks to the south, scathing denunciations of their enemies, preposterous demands, and a clear declaration of intention to develop nuclear weapons, they managed to convince the United States to buy them off. The deal was negotiated by former President Carter on behalf of the Clinton administration. We gave them huge amounts of aid in the form of food and refined petroleum, with the tab being paid by the US, Japan and South Korea, and in exchange the NK government promised to stop trying to develop nukes, and more informally to stop causing trouble.

But the situation in NK continued to degrade, and late last year the government there began to engage in a new round of mouth-foaming, gibbering condemnations, grotesque demands and dire threats, and other forms of cage-bar-rattling. A NK diplomat informed an American diplomat that NK had actually continued working on creation of fissionables for nuclear weapons, in direct violation of the 1994 agreement.

Being publicly listed as one of the three members of the "Axis of Evil" probably didn't make the government of NK happy in any case, but I think that what they mainly hoped was that they might take advantage of America's concentration on Iraq. Given that Bush was working to try to commit a large percentage of American military forces to Iraq, reducing our ability to react in case of a simultaneous war in Korea, I think that NK thought that it was their best chance to suddenly start making demands. With the US distracted and relatively weak locally I think the leadership of NK hoped that Bush, like Clinton before him, would be willing to pay them off in order to shut them up. As it turns out, they deeply misjudged the man. (There's been a lot of that going around the last couple of years.)

They made demands. They offered little, demanded much, and intimated that imminent catastrophe would follow if Bush didn't "become reasonable". The Bush administration's response was to stand strong; we cut off the petroleum shipments, ad reduced our shipments of food (which hadn't been reaching the starving people of NK in any case because the NK government had been diverting that food to feed the army and apparatchiks), largely ignored their threats, and waited. I referred approvingly to the overall strategy as "engaged apathy".

What has taken place since then has been a struggle of will, with an attempt by both sides to apply pressure on the other side. NK made a couple of attempts to actually provoke a confrontation, including making one attempt to intercept an American spy plane in international airspace and trying to force it to land in North Korea. The emphatic threats continued, and NK tried to make the governments of South Korea and Japan nervous. But though there was some initial public disagreement amongst the governments of SK, Japan and the US, that has subsided and the three have acted with surprising unanimity in staying strong against the pressure, and trying to wait the NK's out.

Though it might not be as surprising as all that, because I think the Japanese and South Koreans may have been told that if they didn't follow our lead, we'd pull the 2nd division out and disengage from the region, and leave them alone to solve the problem without us. Even if that wasn't explicit, certainly that possibility was manifest.

As time went on and North Korea continued to make absurdly dire threats, that had an effect opposite to what NK had hoped The people of South Korea, Japan and the US increasingly came to believe that they were bluffing. Cartoonist Ramirez beautifully summarized the whole thing this way:

As always, it's really a question of which side is more desperate. NK is a hellhole, and it may well be near to total collapse. The government there doesn't care at all that the people of NK are miserable beyond my ability to describe, but they damned well do care about the "collapse" part. Part of why NK has been trying to extort aid is because without such aid the government there is doomed. After western aid drastically declined, the only thing that was keeping NK going at all was food and fuel shipped in from China, and even with that they couldn't sustain indefinitely.

Just as in the original Korean negotiations, and the VietNam negotiations, the earliest power struggle has been about meta-questions relating to the structure of the negotiations themselves. The big public issue has been the conflict between the NK demand that negotiations be solely between NK and the US, while the US refused to participate in any negotiations unless they also included other governments from the region (specifically, South Korea and Japan and China and possibly Russia). And while NK has tried to bring pressure to bear on Bush by trying to panic the South Koreans, the Japanese, and the voters of the US, the Bush administration appears to have been trying to bring pressure to bear on the Chinese.

China's in a bind. There are no good answers for China here, but in a sense there are no good answers for anyone. The Chinese policy had been to try to maintain the status quo. Part of why they've been providing aid was to keep NK from collapsing. There are a lot of things China doesn't want.

China doesn't want a reunited Korea under a government in Seoul which is an American ally. They don't want territory where America could deploy troops right on the Chinese border.

China also doesn't want anyone in the region getting nuclear weapons. If NK gets them, there's a good chance that the other nations in the region would too, and an unacceptable chance that they'd end up getting used.

China doesn't want the Korean war to start again, even if only using conventional arms. Among the many ways that could become very bad, China doesn't want a huge flood of refugees crossing its border. But they're also not happy with the idea that the US might use nukes there to end it. American doctrine for the region doesn't exclude that possibility.

China doesn't want a lot of other things, but it's reached the point where they don't have any choice but to do something they don't want to do: to use the threat of cutting off the flow of supplies to bring pressure to bear on NK.

China has been trying to manipulate the situation so that America would crack and buy off the NKs, but Bush had held strong. It's becoming apparent that the defining characteristic of the Bush administration is that it is virtually unaffected by panic or any tendency to react to criticism.

China tried to arrange bilateral negotiations between the US and NK. The US refused to participate in such a thing, so the Chinese tried to pull a fast one on us.

So they invited the US to join NK in Beijing for three-way negotiations. The US expressed skepticism over the value of such talks but agreed to participate, and after the Americans publicly accepted, the Chinese then announced that they actually thought of themselves as being the hosts for bilateral negotiations between the US and North Korea, in which the Chinese actually would not be involved. That hadn't actually been what the US had agreed to, but the Chinese hoped that the US would be unwilling to back out. They thought they'd trapped us.

However, once the American diplomats arrived at Beijing they refused to meet with the diplomats from NK, even though that was what the Chinese had announced was going to happen. So the Chinese ended up doing shuttle diplomacy. There were three-way sessions, and the Chinese had a series of alternating two-way negotiating sessions with the Americans and the NK representatives. The NK representatives stuck to their usual script of raving accusations against the US and grandiose demands, but it was the Chinese who had to listen to it.

The American diplomats finally declared that the talks had been a complete waste of time, and left a day early. It was not a Chinese diplomatic triumph.

The Chinese have been trying to convince America to take total responsibility for the situation and pay off NK. (So, indeed, have most of the other powerful nations on earth, rather hypocritically in light of their feverish demands for "multilateralism" when it came to Iraq.) The Americans have been trying to convince the Chinese to join all the other nations in the region in applying pressure to NK to force it to back down. As long as the Chinese refused to help, there was no way to truly force NK to start negotiating honestly and realistically, based on census reality instead of paranoid delusion.

The war of nerves has continued, and the NK's pulled out their best card. North Korea turned the threat dial up to 11.

They reactivated a facility for reprocessing reactor fuel rods and to extract plutonium out of them. They formally withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. They later claimed that the reprocessing was complete. They announced that they might start selling nuclear weapons on the world market to anyone with the price. And last week they set a deadline for American action:

North Korea is prepared to declare itself a nuclear state unless the United States responds positively to its proposals for resolving a row over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions by Sept. 9 -- the anniversary of the communist country's founding, diplomatic sources in Tokyo said.

One source with close ties to Pyongyang told Reuters that the North was ready to declare itself officially a member of the nuclear club, opening the way for possible nuclear tests and increased production of weapons. "North Korea will move on to possess nuclear weapons and declare itself a nuclear state if the United States fails to respond to its proposals before September 9," he said.

And the Bush administration still isn't reacting to the pressure. Far from being intimidated by this threat, one American official made a speech where he referred to the situation inside North Korea as a "hellish nightmare". He also referred to Kim as a "tyrannical dictator".

North Korea shoved all their chips into the middle of the table. But they're playing poker with a Texan. He didn't panic. But I think someone else did. I think that the Chinese finally reached the breaking point.

Just one week after that threat, North Korea's tune seems to have changed completely. After months of unwavering demands for bilateral negotiations with the US, the government of NK has now accepted six-way talks. They seem to have capitulated completely.

North Korea and the United States said on Friday they have agreed to hold six-way talks on the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear intentions, with President Bush expressing optimism about the talks' prospects and Pyongyang still hoping for a one-on-one meeting.

A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Pyongyang said North Korean officials had met U.S. counterparts in New York on Thursday and proposed holding the six-way talks, which would include China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

It may seem as if the entire issue of just who would even be invited is trivial, but it isn't. This is a major political victory. It indicates the shape of things to come in the negotiations.

Why was the entire issue of bilateral talks versus six-way talks so contentious? Why has so much diplomatic ammunition on both sides been expended about something which seems so unimportant?

There are two aspects to it. First, if the talks had been solely between NK and the US, that would amount to acceptance by the US before the talks even began that it was primarily responsible for making a settlement, which would give NK a stronger position to try to extort concessions from us. But that's not the real point.

This has been a size-and-shape-of-the-table discussion. The apparent issue was a smokescreen for something far more important. What was really going on was a struggle of wills to see just who was actually more desperate, and who would have the upper hand in negotiations once they actually began. After months of standoff, someone's determination finally cracked.

But I don't think it was the Kim government. I think it was the Chinese. I think the Chinese leadership has finally accepted that North Korea is the problem, and that it can only be solved if China helps apply pressure to NK. They have finally accepted that Bush isn't going to back down, so their only way to avert catastrophe now is to force North Korea to back down. As distasteful and perilous as that might be, it's now the least bad of their many bad alternatives. The NK announcement went too far for the Chinese leadership.

There's really no other way to explain why the stated policy of NK changed so radically in such a short time. A change from monumental pugnaciousness to a major concession in just one week could only really have happened if someone capable of applying intolerable pressure actually did so, and only the Chinese have that ability.

Which means that this announcement by North Korea abandoning its demand for bilateral talks and accepting six-way talks is actually a major diplomatic triumph for the Bush administration, because it means they've finally reached the Chinese.

When the talks actually begin, they won't be on the basis of America being panicked and needing an agreement soon. We won't have given away the farm before the talks even begin. Rather, they'll be based on the political reality that North Korea had made concessions, plus the hidden fact that the Chinese have now accepted that they may need to force the North Koreans to accept a reasonable solution. North Korea will go into the talks in the weakest negotiating position it could have faced, surrounded by enemies and having no friends at all.

Not that the negotiations are going to go rapidly. NK will begin the talks by viciously denouncing the US and blaming everything on us, and will introduce a list of extremely moderate and obviously fair and just steps that America should clearly take immediately in order to satisfy the NK government. We won't pay much attention to it.

But NK doesn't have a lot of time, and the situation there continues to deteriorate. If China actually cuts NK off completely, NK will utterly collapse in weeks. NK only has a couple of diplomatic cards left to play, and all of them will hurt NK more than they hurt us, because they'll either totally alienate the Chinese or because they amount to suicide.

Time is still on our side, and it will continue to be on our side as long as the prospect of NK getting nuclear weapons scares China as much or more than it scares us.

If I'm right about this, it is a major diplomatic victory. But if so, it's happened entirely behind the scenes in part because of our diplomacy, in part because of steadfastness, and in part because the North Korean government is the diplomatic equivalent of a rabid dog. I haven't seen any reports which suggest that China actually had a hand in forcing this concession out of NK. But I'm convinced that's what actually happened.

There's another point; the Chinese may have been hoping that the Bush administration would be willing to buy Chinese help in applying pressure against North Korea by making concessions relating to Taiwan. That was never possible.

If China has started applying pressure on North Korea, it means they've accepted the fact that they're not going to get any quid pro quo relating to Taiwan. And that, too, would be a diplomatic triumph.

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