Let's stop calling North Korea 'crazy' and understand their motives

[NeoGreen]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/13/stop-calling-north-korea-crazy-understand-motives

Let's stop calling North Korea 'crazy' and understand their motives
Like his predecessors, Donald J Trump is trying to figure out how to handle North Korea’s provocations – the country may be preparing for its sixth nuclear test – and how to compel China to help constrain Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.

On Sunday, the Pentagon deployed a strike group moving towards the Western Pacific, because “it is prudent” to have the ships near North Korea, National Security Advisor HR McMaster said. In response, on Tuesday North Korea’s state media threatened that they could “hit the US first,” adding that “pre-emptive strikes are not the exclusive right of the United States.”

(snip)

Two things to keep in mind: don’t underestimate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and don’t forget South Korea.

There is widespread belief in the United States that North Korea is so hard to deal with because Kim is insane; Senator John McCain, for example, recently called him “this crazy fat kid that’s running North Korea.” But there is a simpler, and more convincing explanation for Pyongyang’s behavior – and one that Trump, a firm believer in brinksmanship, should understand: it makes strategic and economic sense for North Korea to act this way.

Kim’s desire for deterrence – to not end up like Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi – helps explain the existence of its weapons program. Someone who has participated in more than a decade of Track 2 dialogues with the North Koreans once recounted to me how North Koreans asked them: “Would the Americans have gone in and done what they did to Gaddaffi, and to Syria, if they had what we have?’

[DetlefK]

1. NK's motives are very simply:

1. North Korea is essentially a monarchy. The Kim-family even co-opted korean mythology to give Kim Jong Il a mystical birth-place, to turn him into a quasi-religious ruler.

2. The Kim-family is corrupt as fuck and they know that things will end very badly if they ever lose power.

3. To prevent losing power, foreign powers must be prevented from intervening in North Korea.

4. To prevent them from intervening, North Korea must be dangerous.

5. As North Korea isn't actually dangerous, they are pretending to be crazy, unpredictable motherfuckers. Which they are not.



Hey, remember how Kim Jong Un declared a "war to end all wars" against South Korea a few years back?
And then did nothing?
And then went straight back to the usual stand-off?

[mn9driver]

2. The entire country of North Korea is a crime scene.

The people running the country are the perpetrators. They have no intention of ever allowing themselves to be held accountable. It's a classic hostage situation, except there are millions of hostages.