a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2420 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why North Korea Is Threatening Guam - The Atlantic

So... the basic paradigm pursued by North Korea is "be easier to palliate than antagonize." They're a rogue nation whose income comes from largely illicit sources and that's drying up. Internally, they're unstable and precarious:

    In response to the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island in 2010, South Korea’s government cut off most aid, trade, and bilateral cooperation activities. In February 2016, South Korea ceased its remaining bilateral economic activity by closing the Kaesong Industrial Complex in response to North Korea’s fourth nuclear test a month earlier. This nuclear test and another in September 2016 resulted in two United Nations Security Council Resolutions that targeted North Korea’s foreign currency earnings, particularly coal and other mineral exports. Over the last decade, China has been North Korea’s primary trading partner.

We're talking about a country that needs more trade, not less, but the more trade they engage in the more precarious the regime becomes because the country functions on isolation. Kim wants to maintain isolation while gaining trade, which means loosened sanctions. The only way to gain loosened sanctions is by giving up something and if they give up the status quo they destabilize their domestic conditions. So they ramped up their saber-rattling so that a return to the status quo gives them loosened sanctions.

RAND has a number of policy papers that suggest the best way forward with North Korea was the way forward with East Germany: make sure the elites won't suffer danger or a loss of status and push for reunification. It's certainly the safest approach: allow inspectors to return to North Korea, agree to international monitoring of their weapons program and give them a shit-ton of aid.

My guess? Kim surmised that Trump's administration is naive and inexperienced enough that they'd give up a lot rather than a little so they pushed hard. Donald Trump isn't stupid enough to be completely immune to everyone in the State Department and North Korea's recent moves are an evolution, not a revolution. They're in a harder spot than they've been before and their opposition is weaker than ever before. They're behaving like rational opportunists.