LOOK OUT FOR THE WORLD'S SUPER-BULLY

The United States is frequently called the world's only remaining superpower. But with a rapidly rising economy, an increasingly sophisticated military and its huge population, China may be prepared to dethrone the USA by mid-century.

But if the USA and China are the big guys in the world's class of nations, who is that super-bully pushing both of them around?

Why, it can't be. How can the bully be the smallest kid in the class? Bullies are supposed to be the biggest.

But the times, they are a-changin'.

Little North Korea has been bullying both China and the USA, while throwing huge frights into Japan and South Korea.

The USA has called North Korea part of "the axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran. Uncle Sam doesn't approve of the North Korea because of its dictatorship, which starves its people in order to spend heavily on its military and atomic bomb-building programs. The administration wants to eliminate North Korea as a producer and potential user and seller of atomic bombs.

But North Korea has given the USA the Asiatic version of "up yours" while announcing a million man military and a half dozen atomic bombs. Threatening to attack South Korea and wipe out Seoul in retaliation for an American military solution, North Korea has neutralized American power. As a result, South Korea, an American ally, has become entirely cowed into European-style pacifism. With a small population of 22 million and a distressed economy which has little food or energy, North Korea has stood off the world's big superpower with embarrassing ease. Its army all tied up in the Iraq adventure, the world's last remaining superpower seems to have become the "paper tiger" Mao predicted decades ago. Imagine the genius and audacity of it all. A weak country of 22 million holding a strong country of 50 million hostage in order to bully the superpower of 300 million.

China also is less than enthusiastic about finding an atomic power on its border. The big guy realizes that if North Korea becomes an atomic threat, South Korea will certainly go the atomic weapons route too. And there will be enormous pressure on Japan's government to arm with atomic weapons and missiles. Soon the Far East would become a hot bed of bristling bombs and missiles, each capable of reaching each other’s capital cities. Preoccupied with its economy, China does not want to become distracted with an atomic weapons race among its neighbors.

Now, you would think that a powerful nation of 1.2 billion people could snap a pinkie and get North Korea to toe the line. After all, China supplies North Korea with both food and energy, without which it would degenerate into chaos. But therein lies the rub. The wily North Koreans have figured out that chaos in North Korea would send millions of desperate people charging across the border into China. The result could be the destabilization of China's entire North East.

In a move to intimidate North Korea last year, China cut off oil supplies for three days. Under the threat of millions of North Korean peasants crossing the border into China, Beijing quickly threw in the towel and restored energy shipments. Thus, after successfully bullying the USA, little North Korea had effectively humbled its powerful neighbor as well.

While the USA fears atomic weapons, it is clear that Beijing fears destabilization even more. China has good reason. Last year there were more than 70,000 anti-government demonstrations in China among the rural poor, a group numbering about 700 million people. Records indicate that 28 policemen were killed, probably a big under-estimate.

The concept of rural destabilization becomes even more frightening to China when the leadership remembers that Mao Tse-Tung's revolution started among the rural peasants. Mao's famous "Thousand Mile March" did not meander about in Shanghai's alleys or Peking's paved roads. Instead, Mao's army marched through the countryside, picking up enormous support along the way. Confronted with a massive rural uprising, Chiang Kai-Shek and his Kuomintang Army retreated to Formosa, where Chiang renamed the island "Taiwan" and recreated his warlord style of dictatorship.

North Korea's rising political power was shown on President Bush's visit last year when South Korea surprised everyone by announcing an early withdrawal of its troops from Iraq. The surprise announcement on a state visit was the diplomatic equivalent of a right cross to the jaw. Moving in the opposite direction, pacifist Japan is churning up the waters of a move to remilitarization.

Just think of it. Little North Korea, with its puny economy and 22 million people, has demonstrated the ability to bully the USA, China, Japan and South Korea at the same time.

Tragically for world stability, Iran seems to have learned some of the same tricks in bullying Europe, the United Nations and the USA about its atomic weapons program.

At the start of the millennium, the USA was the feared and respected superpower. But within six short years, we find ourselves being bullied by North Korea in the Far East and Iran in the Middle East. Not to mention al-Qaeda everywhere else.

We seem to have lost a lot of our superpowerness.