Magnificent Paranoia

North Korea's nuclear "treasure" will not be traded for "billions of dollars. They represent "...neither a political bargaining chip nor a thing for economic dealings to be represented to the place of dialogue or be put on the table of negotiation aimed at forcing (Pongyang) to disarm itself." And that is final. We know that because the regime's mouthpiece has so stated.

North Korea's brilliant new tactician, Kim Jong Un, while young, wasn't born yesterday. He knows what happened to Col. Moammar Ghadaffi when he assented, in fear of the Western reprisal that was the fate of Iraq's despotic Saddam Hussein, to surrender his nuclear ambitions. He lost his self-protective capabilities, made himself vulnerable, and North Korea has no such intentions.

The impression that North Korea is war-mongering is simply a by-product of its need to protect itself from the malign intentions of the imperialists by which it is surrounded, it assures the world. And the arch-imperialist United States represents the danger to which North Korea would expose itself to were it to weaken its resolve and agree to impossible conditions of surrender of its treasured safety-gauge.

Whereas the U.S. nuclear arsenal represents a threat to world peace. And it is that condition, world peace, that the North is primarily concerned with. It must be true, since this is what they passionately emote.  Until such time as all nuclear weapons are abolished it cannot and will not abandon its nuclear program.

So, that impoverished little bantam of a nation issues threats that surely  no one could take seriously, for to attack the powerful United States would be to voluntarily consign themselves to mass obliteration. And isn't that the backstop to the entire unpleasant and rather mad adventure in adversity that this country is extolling?

China, the powerful supporting nation that takes huge pleasure in witnessing the discomfiture of its arch-rival U.S., was content to allow the situation to simmer. Its former contentment has been replaced by a sense of uncertainty; how far would that as-yet-unknown quantity, the preening heir of the North go to solidify his reputation for ruthless cunning and courageous determination to defend the motherland?

Unless he is completely in surrender to the psychosis of belligerence that believes the louder the threat the more believable it is, rendering the enemy helpless to respond, and cowering with fear at the prospect of an attack, he is as he seems, a stupid little tyrant, deliberately content to allow his country to wither in a state of extreme poverty, his people suffer malnutrition, and his rule contrived by fear and intimidation.

The natural hegemony of geographical contiguity makes it common sense that China has so long manipulated the North to provide a barrier between itself and the encroaching influence of the United States. The very real prospect of a careless reaction creating an accident of dramatic proportions to inflict war upon a region anxious that it may occur, but unprepared for the reality, may seem a scenario too absurd to contemplate, but it could, perhaps, nonetheless eventuate.

Unless the regime of the North in calling for diversified foreign trade and investment, a focus on agriculture, light industry and a "self-reliant nuclear power industry", with a light water reactor, in which case it plans to resurrect the six-year-old shutdown of its nuclear plant at the Nyongbyong site signals a groping toward realistic practicality.

In which case the threats and belligerence are merely window dressing - who knows what this outlier regime will commit to?