It's hard to overestimate them.

Crud, that should be "It's hard to underestimate them."

I think that it's more than likely that South Korea would Finlandize itself and India and Japan both arm themselves.

The latter is almost certainly true (both Japan and India would heavily step up arms purchases and expenditures, and Japan would probably modify the clause in their Constitution so as to loosen up the ban on anything other than self-defense), but I don't buy the former. You forget that South Korea is pretty wealthy and prosperous in that region; I think it's more likely that they would

A. Go nuclear, and
B. Form an uneasy alliance with the Japanese (I say "uneasy" because there's a lot of bad history there) against the Chinese.

They already have a pretty solid military - the only reason why the North Koreans are even a threat is the sheer quantity of hardware that they've got (much of which is ancient).

So our policies toward the Chinese should be more like those towards an occasionally maddening ally like France than a vicious adversary like Stalin's Soviet Union.

I agree. I don't think we should encourage the French to overthrow governments in Africa (for example) however much it might stabilize things in the short term.

Do you really want to make the argument that the U. S. is no more benign than China?

It depends. Is Bush president at the time of the comparison?

Okay, I kid.

No, I don't want to make that argument. BUT, on a continuum with the U.S. at close to one end and, say, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia at the other, I think China today is more comparable to us than to those revolutionary powers. So our policies toward the Chinese should be more like those towards an occasionally maddening ally like France than a vicious adversary like Stalin's Soviet Union.

It isn't that I want to encourage Chinese ambitions, as much as I want to avoid using terms like "Finlandization" which make connections to quite different powers, with quite different (and I would argue) more dangerous aspirations.

I think we shouldn’t underestimate the dangers posed by a North Korean nuclear weapons program but let’s not overestimate them, either.

It's hard to overestimate them. North Korean technology isn't exactly state of the art. I don;t believe they've had a single successful rocket launch or test detonation.

With no payload and no delivery vector their nuclear program is about as dangerous as the contents of my garage.

also they're hemmed in on all sides by neighbors that are less than sympathetic to islamic terrorists (most definitely including China). That makes it less likely they can smuggle any future bombs or even dirty bomb materials to the kind of people we worry might use them. Unlike say PAKISTAN, which has working nuclear weapons, working ballistic missiles (medium range at least), strong ties to Al Qaeda, and easy smuggling routes via Afghanistan to pretty much anywhere.

Pakistan worries the hell out of me.

I think that U. S. involvement in East Asia is on net beneficial both to the people in East Asia and here. Were we to materially absent ourselves as would be the case were Galen's prescription to be followed I think that it's more than likely that South Korea would Finlandize itself and India and Japan both arm themselves.

War between India and China is not beyond the realm of possibility. I think that our involvement with both and involvement with East Asia makes that less rather than more likely.

My main view on Galen's suggestion is that we don't know what the outcome would be and that it's better not to encourage the Chinese in behavior that's the opposite of what we'd really like to see from them.

And we can prevent that without abandoning all of Asia to China’s tender mercies.

isn't a bit over the top? I mean, I agree we shouldn't get too panicky over North Korea, but I also think there is little evidence that China has imperial ambitions in East Asia. Hegemonic? Sure, in the same way that the U.S. has hegemonic aspirations over Central America. But in Asia, China is nicely balanced by Japan, India, South Korea, and even an ASEAN grouping that seems pretty committed to the concept of regional autonomy.

I don't think, in the end, that even if China were to engage (at our request or not) in quasi-coup to install a more predictable regime in North Korea that it would be a new Anschluss or anything. China's aspirations seems wholly conventional for any great power rather than revolutionary to me.

As for the Chinese, it's probably a good bet that they'll, at the very minimum, keep the current North Korean regime from collapsing under its own weight. We could probably take advantage of that, and do a "malign neglect" policy where we just outright ignore the North Koreans, refuse to give them any aid, and give South Korea and the Japanese things like additional American ABM technology and other support.

That would shift most of the burden of keeping the North Korean government from collapsing from mass starvation and slow economic failure to Beijing, which is only fair (considering the role they played in setting up the DPRK anyways). Considering that the North Koreans have pretty much broken every treaty commitment they've made over the years regarding nukes and proliferation, why not let the Chinese bear that burden?