North korea

Let’s be honest. If North Korea didn’t have nuclear weapons and missiles to carry them to targets as far away as the US homeland, you would not be reading this article. In fact, the national security establishment would most likely consider North Korea, a nation that can no longer feed itself with a GDP smaller than Rhode Island's, to be a joke. And yet the so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) keeps cranking out ever-more advanced weapons platforms that drive headlines and clicks the world over. North Korea’s most recent test, a submarine-launched ballistic missile, seems at least on the surface to be pretty threatening. Yet a more sober analysis suggests that such a weapon, at least by itself, is no major threat to anyone, and for the foreseeable future.

North Korea now possesses a nuclear weapons arsenal that could kill millions of people in minutes. Our media, rushing to create the simple but misleading narrative that President Joe Biden has ended America’s supposed longest war, forget that Washington technically has been at war with North Korea for 71 years. It's Pyongyang, not Kabul, that will be the real test of Biden's foreign policy — and the real opportunity. A few months back, the Biden administration named that conflict its top national security priority. Yet Team Biden has done little to work towards ending what can only be described as the ultimate forever war. And, just like clockwork, Pyongyang seems to always remind us that its deadly atomic arsenal is growing by the day.

Don’t believe the Trump-haters when they trash the Singapore summit between America and North Korea, which we mark the first anniversary of today. This was a win for everyone who wants to see a stable peace on the Korean Peninsula. And the alternative remains too horrific to imagine. Some will say the summit accomplished nothing but a vague statement of goals and principles, with nothing delivered and no schedule for future deliveries. The pundits will pontificate that Trump was duped, that he shied from going toe-to-toe with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un – and that Washington has done the worst thing possible, and legitimized a state whose human rights record is surely the worst of any on the planet. That’s just wrong.

‘This is not the Cold War redux; it is even worse than the Cold War.’ That’s how Nicolas Roche, of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, described the current climate around nuclear weapons. Roche spoke at the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, a veritable Woodstock for the nuclear policy community (organizers insisted on referring to the shindig as ‘#NUKEFEST’), which convened for two days in Washington, DC. Despite the party-like atmosphere at ‘Nuke Fest’, despondency pervaded the gathering. North Korea received substantial attention at the conference, while Iran and South Asia were relatively neglected. The dominant topic of conversation, and predominant reason for despair, was the US-Russia relationship.

Cable networks have countless hours to fill, and it is far easier to fill them with speculation about a closed-door summit than to wait patiently for real news. We won’t have that news until the Trump-Kim summit ends. Oh, we might get a nudge about whether the talks are going well, but nothing more. That’s how secretive negotiations work. To save time, here’s the essential background. It covers almost everything you can hear — and several things you won’t — for the next 24 hours ‘live from Hanoi’ on all the networks. Kim Jong-un’s only goals are to stay alive and in power. To that end, he and his father have spent enormous resources to build deliverable nuclear weapons, with substantial aid from China.

Forget all the nuclear threats or pumped-up rhetoric, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un might just be the most boring of world leaders for one reason: he consistently tells us what he is going to do then tries to do it. Case in point. For the last few years, Kim has been very clear about setting his agenda for the coming year in the most public of ways, letting the world know his plans. In a now annualized New Year’s Day Address, Kim in 2017 told the world he would test ICBMs — weapons that can, at least in theory, hit the US homeland. Last year, he signaled he was ready for a better relationship with South Korea and participate in the Olympics, which ended up being the foundation of the détente we see today between Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington.

What if the foreign-policy elites in Washington, D.C. could admit the truth when it comes to North Korea? The fact is that there is next to nothing the Trump administration can do to rid the world of this nuclear nightmare unless Kim Jong-un’s regime is willing to deal his weapons away. At the moment, we are nowhere near a deal to denuclearize North Korea. Just trying to even figure out where we are in talks with Pyongyang is confusing enough. Inter-Korean détente is moving forward at a rapid pace. It should be called the Moon Miracle, since South Korea's president has staked his entire legacy on securing peace and deserves much of the credit.

By offering to pursue a joint bid to host the Summer Olympics in 2032, the two Koreas hope to right a historical wrong: no doubt, the exclusion of Dennis Rodman from the 1992 Dream Team. But just as the retired Piston rebounder and peninsular hero would be a fool to pursue today’s Olympic Gold, let’s stop fooling ourselves about the Olympic Games. Through the Koreas’ absurd suggestion, the time has come to question the fool’s gold of the modern games and its longstanding currency among the world’s murderers, despots, and thieves. The ancient Olympics were a religious rite and a celebration of free people. According to myth, inaugurated by Heracles and consecrated to Zeus, the first recorded games began in Olympia in 776 BC.

As Kim Jong-un might blow up the world next year, if not this, and people are forever trying to work out what is going on in his country, perhaps it is worth describing a military parade I attended in Pyongyang a few years back. The occasion was the centenary of the birth of the current Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the founder of the Marxist monarchy who, despite his death more than two decades ago, remains Eternal Leader of the nation. Other attendees included some flotsam and jetsam of the Cold War, a reunion of the Axis of Evil and representatives from various other rogue states and immiserated nations. Presuming it to be one of the better covers under which to pass as an admirer of the regime, I claimed to be a schoolteacher from England.