BRUSSELS -- Newspapers are awash with speculation as to the likely outcome of the Korean Peninsula's nuclear crisis. Will it be the United States that blinks or North Korea? Nobody knows. What is clear is that while North Korea and the world wants and needs a solution, opinion in the U.S. is sharply divided between doves and hawks, between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The former wants to negotiate away North Korea's nuclear arsenal, and buy out its missile sales -- both of which were nearly achieved by Bill Clinton at the end of his presidency and only stopped by the chads hanging on Florida's voter punchcards.
U.S. doves want to address the genuine danger that North Korea's activities will trigger the spread of nuclear weapons. For unless there is a negotiated solution, Japan, bribed by the U.S. Star Wars II lobby, will deploy theater missile defense, forcing China to increase the number of its intercontinental ballistic missiles and to fit them with multiple independent warheads. Then Taiwan and South Korea will probably go nuclear.
If Taiwan and China go nuclear, it would be hard even for Japan's traditionalists in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to resist the nuclear imperative. They are increasingly being out-maneuvered by Japan's new nationalists, who are assertive in their demands for a "normal" Japan that puts an end to its guilt and is unrestrained in protecting Japanese national interests. A North Korean nuclear test might be enough to collapse the two stages into one.