First some fact checking. There is no declared war unless it happened in the last few minutes. North Korea fired some artillery rounds into an Island claimed by the South. They killed 4 people. South Korea returned fire and claims to have inflicted casualties on the North, but there is no confirmation of count. The gunfire ended days ago. There are exercises there this weekend. Just training. We laready have 30,000 people stationed in South Korea to help defend them against a second invasion from the North—and I have not heard of any new deployments. We did send a nuclear aircraft carrier there, osstensibly for the training exercise, but obviously to send a clear sign to the North as well.
I do not think China wants a open war with the US and because that’s not in their national interest, I don’t think they would permit North Korea to go to far in their game of brinkmanship. We’re China’s number one market, and they hold a significant amount of our debt. If hostilities erupted on the Korean peninsula, China would have to chose between the cost of upsetting Kim Jong Il and his son versus the cost of losing their biggest market and having us renege on ¾ of a trillion dollars in US federal debt.