There are those who say we should just learn to live with a nuclear North Korea, and there are those who believe that all they want, Kim and his gang, is some kind of guarantee that they won't be attacked, and then all will be peace and light. Joshua Stanton sets them straight:
Since North Korea’s seventh nuclear test, I’ve already read several analyses concluding that North Korea now has the bomb and that we might as well give up on denuclearization — as if Pyongyang’s acquisition of a nuclear arsenal ends with us all living happily ever after. You can only believe that if you either haven’t read much North Korean propaganda, or choose to ignore it as much of Europe ignored the words Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf in the 30s. But what North Korea wants is South Korea. It has always wanted South Korea, and it has never stopped saying that it wants South Korea. Its messianic vision of reunification has always rested on its express promise of reuniting Korea under its rule. You can try to pretend that away, but North Korea won’t be content to sit behind its borders and watch its legitimacy eroded away by unfavorable comparison — made vivid by every smuggled DVD of a South Korean TV drama — to a superior model of Korean nationhood. Why do we refuse to believe Pyongyang when it makes its intentions manifest? Because it couldn’t conquer the South by conventional war? I assure you, Pyongyang’s plans have evolved since 1953. Their current plans are much more rational and attainable than that.
In the meantime, Pyongyang needs cash, and it will sell any weapon to any buyer to get it. And it will threaten or murder any critic, foreign or domestic, whose words threaten the integrity of its propaganda, until in some small way, we are all subject to Pyongyang’s global censorship. Not even the U.S. Ambassador, or a Hollywood film studio, is off limits to its goon squads. Accepting a nuclear North Korea doesn’t mean this crisis is over. It means we’ve entered Korean War II in earnest. Korean War II is a war of skirmishes in which Pyongyang will seek to incrementally terrorize South Korea into submission and the U.S. into disengagement. It will mean a new period of accelerating crises and outrages that will almost inevitably lead to miscalculation and war. We cannot live with a nuclear North Korea....
Comments