Austin Bay mulls over the (as usual) limited options facing South Korea in responding to North Korea’s role in sinking a South Korean ship and killing 46 sailors.

This seems a good scheme:

Explicit naval tit-for-tat, which exposes and exploits North Korean strategic weakness before a global audience, has more political impact. Seoul and Washington should consider seizing North Korean ships in open waters around the globe. Ships and cargoes could be held pending reparations.

In Asia, Pyongyang might route its ships through Chinese and Vietnamese coastal water (paying bribes to local coast guards in the process), but eventually they will encounter the U.S. Navy. The maritime cowards will encounter cameras and appear on YouTube. The Google world will get it.

In the Rhineland fiasco, the Western allies lost face. This Korean confrontation is also about political face, and it’s time Kim and his killers lost theirs.

Exactly.