North Korea

I just read a fascinating, albeit lengthy, article from the Atlantic Monthly about the situation with North Korea. Of course tensions have been high in Korea for over 50 years, but especially as of late with the recent nuclear tests. It seems to me that the Kim Jong Il is doing everything he can to get leverage in an increasingly failing state. This is the reason for the very public announcements of missile tests and nuclear tests. The more aid he can coerce out of the world, the more time he has as leader. How to deal with North Korea is the difficult question. No one wants war with a country that has a million-man army and an extensive stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, while at the same time economic sanctions that cause the country to collapse could create an enormous humanitarian crisis and a very dangerous security crisis with nuclear and chemical weapons up for grabs. Whatever we do, it needs to be well thought out. While Kim Jong Il may be crazy, he is more in line with “evil-genius” crazy. The article describes him thusly:

Expertly tutored by his father, Kim consolidated power and manipulated the Chinese, the Americans, and the South Koreans into subsidizing him throughout the 1990s. And Kim is hardly impulsive: he has the equivalent of think tanks studying how best to respond to potential attacks from the United States and South Korea—attacks that themselves would be reactions to crises cleverly instigated by the North Korean government in Pyongyang. “The regime constitutes an extremely rational bunch of killers,” [professor of history at South Korea’s Kookmin University Andrei] Lankov says.

Kim Jong Il is ready for the game, I just hope we are as well.