Love Triangle’s Getting Complicated
In his latest inflammatory remark, Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidate, proclaimed that he “would be willing to offend China and speak directly to Mr Kim (leader of North Korea), a move antithetical to US foreign policy. While this may seem outlandish, several close observers of North Korea remarked that in fact, given the choice, “Mr Kim would prefer an alliance with America, the far-off superpower, than China, the ancient oppressor and emerging superpower.” The relationship between these three nations seem to be changing along with the tides of the latest politics and development—and hence the title.
I find it interesting how China’s relationship with North Korea is evolving (more specifically, souring), for a previously balanced network is slowly unbalanced. Half a century ago, North Korea considered China her “blood brother”, for their histories are intertwined and forged by wars and violence. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, both are, in a way, political pariahs. Unlike the rest of the world, they remain impervious to the hubris that democracy is the panacea to a society. Thus if you were to present this in a diagram, you would get this rather balanced network.
(Dots encircled within a circle denotes other countries that are allies with the US)
Professor Tardos, in her lecture, explained how type 4 networks (three nodes connected by negative relationship to one another) are not balanced as tension is present and the relationship is likely to evolve when the two nodes decide to collaborate against the third one, forming a balanced network. Yet, in this case, this balanced network still evolves, and evolves to become rather unbalanced due to many factors.
For one, North Korea’s nuclear bomb testing has irked China so much that China’s Ministry of Commerce rolled out sanctions supporting the United Nation’s call to stop imports of coal, iron ore and jet fuel, to North Korea. North Korea’s think tanks thus refer to China as “a vanity-driven nation bowing down to the US”. On North Korea’s end, Kim Jong Un also suspects that China is keeping his older brother safe in case they need to install a member of North Korea’s dynastic family to replace the incumbent, and so is distrustful of China. A growing China, concerned about her economic interests, also wishes to enjoy close relations with her neighbours such as South Korea, which usually are the allies of United States. We can represent latest political sentiments in this graph.
(Directional arrows indicate desire of closer ties with another country. Crossed arrows indicate souring relations.)
This situation begets another question—is it possible for country A to have good ties with country B if country A is not on good terms with country C, who is a strong ally of country B? In this case, country A-B-C could be China-South Korea-USA, or North Korea-USA-South Korea. I find that it’s possible, as seen from the relationship shared by Singapore, Taiwan and China: China and Singapore share highly strong political, economical and cultural ties, and Singapore is one of the few countries to supply military weaponry to Taiwan, but Taiwan and China does not have very amicable relationship (as Taiwan clamors for independence from China). For economic and military interests, countries can form the most improbable alliances with others.
Overall, the aforementioned types of networks are merely models and they have their limitations—they are unable to reflect varying degrees of amicability/hostility between countries, nor are they able to accommodate recent changes in political climate. However, we are still able to glean information from these models as they hint of political alliances, and this would better enable us to understand the current international politics.