NORTH KOREA’S LOGIC

BEHIND NORTH KOREA’S SURREAL THREATS IS A COMPLEX AND CURIOUS LOGIC

Associated Press

The Washington Post, April 13, 2013

SEOUL, South Korea — To the outside world, the talk often appears to border on the lunatic, with the poor, hungry and electricity-starved nation threatening to lay waste to America’s cities in an atomic firestorm, or to overrun South Korea in a lightning attack.

Enemy capitals, North Korea said, will be turned “into a sea of fire.” North Korea’s first strikes will be “a signal flare marking the start of a holy war.” Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal is “mounted on launch pads, aimed at the windpipe of our enemies.”

And it’s not all talk. The profoundly isolated, totalitarian nation has launched two rockets over the past year. A February nuclear test resulted in still more U.N. sanctions. Another missile test may be in the planning stages.

But there is also a logic behind North Korea’s behavior, a logic steeped in internal politics, one family’s fear of losing control and the ways that a weak, poverty-wracked nation can extract concessions from some of the world’s most fearsome military powers.

It’s also steeped in another important fact: It works.

At various points over the past two decades, North Korea’s cycles of threats and belligerence have pressured the international community into providing billions of dollars in aid and, for a time, helped push South Korea’s government into improving ties.

Most importantly to Pyongyang, it has helped the Kim family remain in power decades after the fall of its patron, the Soviet Union, and long after North Korea had become an international pariah. Now the third generation of Kims, the baby-faced Kim Jong Un, is warning the world that it may soon face the wrath of Pyongyang. If the virulence of Kim Jong Un’s threats have come as a surprise, he appears largely to be following in his father’s diplomatic footsteps.

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