No good options as North Asian tensions rise

The launch of increasingly long-range North Korea missiles this year, threatening the US territory of Guam in the Pacific Ocean, and then the firing of a missile over the Japanese island of Hokkaido this week, indicate Pyongyang's willingness to test US and Japanese red lines.

It suggests a recognition that the US has no good options, but at the same time runs the risk, particularly with an unpredictable US president in post, of escalating tensions to the point of retaliation.

Conflict in North Asia is probably one of the few events that could send the oil price soaring back above $100/barrel, followed by depression as economic dislocation would fall most heavily on the demand side of the global market.

But what is it that Pyongyang actually wants?

North Korea does not appear to have any major territorial ambitions nor the desire to export ideology. It could "win" a war against the US only in the sense that it could survive retaliation and the US would stop short of invasion.

It does not have any real offensive ambitions. It has a large military, but one limited in offense by weak supply chains undermined by a moribund economy. It is capable mostly of being able to inflict damage on its immediate neighbor South Korea. North Korea's military structures are essentially defensive, designed to keep Kim Jong-un in power.

Why then push so hard to create a military capability that physically threatens the US and Japan?

Again, it is defensive. North Korea wants to achieve impregnability, not least because of Western countries' willingness, led by the US in recent years, to engage in military ventures abroad with the aim of regime change -- a strategy that has generally been preceded by sanctions. North Korea sees sanctions, potentially at least, as a precursor to intervention.

It is not the US that feels threatened -- it is the most powerful military and economic nation on earth -- it is North Korea.

This is something that Beijing appears to understand much better than Washington, and China's role is ultimately critical. The North Korean economy only survives because of Chinese economic support.

But Beijing's support provides security, the flipside being that if this security did not exist, the last desperate throw of the dice from Pyongyang, as its already-impoverished economy imploded, would be war.

If Pyongyang's bellicose stance and development of deliverable nuclear weapons is an expression of insecurity then the solution is to enhance the country's security, and that means delivering it some prosperity.

It could be argued that this would strengthen Kim Jong-un's domestic position and the North Korean economy, and thus its ability to engage in conflict. But if Pyongyang perceives less of an external threat then it has no reason to project military power.

Clearly weapons technology transfers should remain sanctioned, but otherwise the solution to the North Korean problem lies in engagement and positive reinforcement. Broader economic sanctions threaten the country's internal stability and thus its propensity to strike out.

No one wants to appear to be supporting such an appallingly restrictive and inequitable regime, but change and the eventual challenge to Kim Jong-un's dictatorship is better coming from within than without, however long it takes.