The World on the Way to the Future With North Korea

"As long as Kim Jong Un is in power, North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons, even if it's offered $1-trillion or $10 trillion in rewards."
"Some countries are interested in following North Korea’s path to become nuclear powers themselves. Therefore, North Korean diplomats retain their dignity despite the criticisms of the international community."
"It is not easy for North Koreans to understand the concepts of the ICC or human rights. But they will be greatly interested if they hear that Kim Jong Un will be tried at the international court. It will be a direct sign that Kim Jong Un is a criminal and his regime has no future."
"North Korea will collapse on its own when enough external information introduced through the internet reveals the truth of the Kim regime to the residents."
Thae Yong Ho, North Korean high-level defector

Thae Yong-ho, the former North Korean deputy ambassador to London, gestures while speaking during a news conference at the Government Complex in Seoul, South Korea, Dec. 27, 2016. Reuters

"Almost nothing can be done diplomatically to dissuade North Korea from abandoning its nuclear program. It will consistently cheat on any agreement."
"Rather than hanging on to the fantasy that Pyongyang can be cajoled into relinquishing its nuclear weapons, the United States should consider adopting a more traditional deterrent policy against North Korea. Washington should state that if Pyongyang launches a nuclear-armed ballistic missile, the United States will respond with a full U.S. attack on North Korea."
"The only sure way of ending North Korea’s nuclear threat is to change the regime in Pyongyang. Denuclearization will not happen as long as Kim and his junta are in power."
Michael Auslin, director, Japan Studies, American Enterprise Institute

The US and North Korea aimed at restarting denuclearisation talks before Kim Jong-il, right, died

A rogue dynastic regime that constantly threatens its neighbours, from South Korea to Japan to the Philippines, going so far as to target a South Korean ship resulting in multiple deaths of South Korean sailors does so because of a high degree of hubris, the assurance that a powerful neighbour in China, will protect it, and behind it all, an illogical fantasy that their stance strikes fear in the hearts of their enemies.

North Korea's success in managing to evade any international consequences for its potentially world-destabilizing actions acts as an inspiration to yet another despotic, threatening regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has exchanged scientists and ICBM and nuclear programs between the two outlier nations.

In one respect they are quite right; the mass delusion that they display with impunity does strike fear in the hearts of those whom the Kim regime threatens for the very real reason that there is no reasonable mind behind the rash, impetuous, irascibility and sense of  triumph that permeates the regime, led by a megalomaniac who insists that his population view him as a semi-divine hero.

A man capable of quixotic episodes of bravado, boasting that his regime is capable of striking both near neighbours and those at a geographic distance, and which has the demonstrated capacity to do that very thing. Testing nuclear weapons, testing medium-to-long range intercontinental ballistic missiles, and sending up successfully launched satellites.

AFP -- Pyongyang used a three-stage rocket to put a satellite into space in 2012

This, by a nation that lives on a financial shoestring, whose general population lives in poverty, whose critics are imprisoned in gulags, and whose military is well equipped and well fed and numerous while the bulk of the population lives in privation, schooled from childhood to venerate their tyrant, a man capable of the most venal excesses, rewarding the faithful, deliberately unmindful of a government's responsibility to its population.

And even his retinue of faithful supporters tremble at his dangerously impulsive moods which can turn in an instant against a relative, to condemn him to a horrible, tortuous death to remove any doubts of his loyalty; serving as a warning to others. Convinced that their hermetic way of life is sacrosanct as long as that power is supported by the threat of nuclear warheads, nothing dissuades them from this path.

Korean Central News Agency/AFP/Getty Images     Trump says U.S. pressure on China will rein in Kim Jong-un, but also wants to slap punishing tariffs on Beijing while seeking its help

The outside world looking in on what they can see of North Korea bleeds tears of compassion for the suffering, starving North Koreans and deals are made to supply food, medicine and energy sources for the promises by the regime that the research that culminated in ICBS of longer thrust, and the miniaturization of nuclear heads would be discontinued.

Those agreements provide vast entertainment potential to the erratic, unpredictable regime that casually sloughs off any promises made in exchange for humanitarian aid for a delusional dictator that is comfortable with a starving populace whose underfed status leads to genetic changes in problematical health presentations, reserving its meagre treasury for its military programs.