It is actually way more stupid then you think. Hypothetical China-North Korea war? Nope… but a hypothetical war between North Korea - South Korea where the North nukes China to prevent a PLA intervention. Does it make sense? No. For whatever reason, the author thinks that the DPRK could nuke China in a war against the US/South Korea.
She is a graduate from the RAND institute (RAND Corp). I didn’t even know RAND owned their own private school where the “students” are basically RAND employees as well.
Her idea is North Korea wants to kick off another war to unify all of Korea, China doesn't like it and tell Kim to stop on pain of military intervention. Kim doesn't listen so instead of a war with South Korea it ends up being a war between PRC and DPRK.
Shilao said this in the video too: it's not wrong per say to day dream about unlikely scenarios and then write military papers on them. US use to have those colour coded war plan for fighting UK and stuff and there's nothing wrong with that other than it being unlikely.
What makes this paper comical is the extremely bizarre starting point for the war. I can come up with a better one right now:
In the future North Korea undergoes their own "reform and open up" economic reform. They encounter their own 4th of June style event and reformers win, kick out the Kim family and takes power and begins to transform the country into more pro-west. Kim runs off to Northern China and China uses him as figurehead to kick off an invasion of North Korea under the premise of restoring socialism from revisionist. North Koreans being historically very resistant against any outside interference in their politics be it China or Soviet Union resist with all their might.
That's still not very likely because it implies China has taken up the
, something that China was explicitly very against during the Cold War. But hey it did happen in Europe so at least there's plausibility.
Diana Y. Myers can't write that because
is a Korean-American and the above setup implies that North Korea enjoys greater political autonomy from outside interference than South Korea. We know that's true for all to see, but she either can't say it, or she really believes North Korea is a running dog of China much like South Korea is with US, instead of the relationship being much more equal.
