A quiet twelve months, and a decade that does not inherit it. The equilibrium survives on Beijing’s patience, while the reasons for that patience are quietly eroding.

Pyongyang has abandoned unification, which changes what a war would be for without changing how likely it is. The same number now describes a different standoff.

The post-intervention arrangement rests on a choice that either capital could reverse next quarter. Until that choice becomes structural, the calm remains contingent on it.

Moscow’s object on the eastern flank is the credibility of Article 5. The test is calibrated below what the alliance would have to classify as an attack. Anything larger dates from the end of the war in Ukraine.

Seven instruments are already in use, and neither capital can concede what the other requires. So the paper asks the harder question: what would settlement even consist of?

A border neither state can police and neither can disown, governing far more than itself. What follows is a war with a ceiling and no floor: it cannot escalate past a point, and it cannot stop.

Nothing local produces this peace. It is supplied from outside, by a tripwire now scheduled to shrink and attention that is already thinning. What looks like equilibrium is a diminishing external subsidy.

Coercion here is stable because both capitals want it stable, which is a different kind of safety from having nothing to fight over. The tail needs no decision, only an incident.

Seven years without a bilateral conversation, and two positions that cannot both be written down. What contains it is a commission, a notification practice, and seventy-three years of habit, now under strain.