Kim Jong Il is doing his best to make the world safe for the DPRK. Our task, by contrast, is to make the world safe from the DPRK. This will be a difficult, expensive and dangerous undertaking. For America and its allies, however, the costs and dangers of failure are higher--incalculably higher.
This is paragraph from an excellent piece on North Korea's nukes by Nicholas Eberstadt, who's the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy @ AEI. He notes that the North Koreans are not in the game for a win-win situation they're here to play a hardball zero-sum solution. We can negotiate all we want with the Stalinist state but they will continue to deny us a deal. Eberstadt points out that the Kim Jong Il regime has three objectives 1.Conduct a war - finish what they started in 1950, 2. Reunify the two Koreas and remove the US from the peninsula via nuclear weapons, 3.Would rather be a hostile nuclear pariah than a poor, nuke free third World nation. If they can stand up to the US, they feel they'd be the envy of dictators. Just see for yourself, Eberstadt has his finger on North Korea's pulse.
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