July 5, 2006: While everyone's attention was focused on North Korean missiles, the real story is the North Korean economy. It continues to fall apart, and more North Koreans are unhappy about that. Worse yet, more North Koreans are finding out how badly they have been screwed by their leaders.
Meanwhile, North Korean officials engage in even more bizarre behavior. For example, food and fuel supplies sent to North Korea have been halted, not to force North Korea to stop missile tests or participate in peace talks, but to return the Chinese trains the aid was carried in on.
In the last few weeks, the North Koreans have just kept the trains, sending the Chinese crews back across the border. North Korea just ignores Chinese demands that the trains be returned, and insists that the trains are part of the aid program.It's no secret that North Korean railroad stock is falling apart, after decades of poor maintenance and not much new equipment. Stealing Chinese trains is a typical loony-tune North Korean solution to the problem.
If the North Koreans appear to make no sense, that's because they don't.
Put simply, when their unworkable economic policies don't work, the North Koreans just conjure up new, and equally unworkable, plans.
The Chinese have tried to talk the North Koreans out of these pointless fantasies, and for their trouble they have their trains stolen. How do you negotiate under these conditions? No one knows.
The South Koreans believe that if they just keep the North Korean leaders from doing anything too destructive (especially to South Korea), eventually the tragicomic house of cards up north will just collapse. Not much of a plan, but so far, no one's come up with anything better.
Thanks
And we want Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore types in the white house in this time?
We can only hope NK will implode rather than explode and take Seoul with it.
"The South Koreans believe that if they just keep the North Korean leaders from doing anything too destructive (especially to South Korea), eventually the tragicomic house of cards up north will just collapse. Not much of a plan, but so far, no one's come up with anything better."
That often publicly stated position of many South Koreans (like the above example) is only half right, and my guess is that many South Koreans know it.
What is it that they know but won't say?
Without a push, a non-military push, the North could hang on for decades, many decades.
What would push it over the edge, to implosion, would be a Reaganesque approach - no concessions to the North's saber rattling, and continually upping the military status-quo ante by the U.S. (permanent, nuclear, strategic flotilla at the edge of North Korea's international waters' boundry together with open encouragement for Japan and South Korea to get their own nuclear missles)(China would hate that).
Why does the South hesitate, against such measures?
The have seen how Germany is still suffering from absorbing Eastern Germany, which was infinitely better off than North Korea is now. They prefer to live on false hopes and delaying that prospect, instead of helping to precipitate it and free their northern cousins sooner.
I just heard on Fox news that NK may have just fired yet another missle (05/06/06 5:10PM EST roughly)
No confirmation or headlines yet, however.
"Never get in your enemy's way when he is busy destroying himself."
- - Sun Tzu "The Art of War"