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April 7, 2013
It is hard to take Nth Korea rhetoric seriously because it doesn't have the capability to deliver on the threats and it is not preparing for war on the Korean Peninsula. Yet the US talks and acts as if its dominance in Asia is being challenged by the sound and fury from this tin pot regime. Nth Korea's threat of nuclear war is being interpreted as plowing full speed ahead toward an international nuclear crisis.
Alan Moir
North Korea does not have a demonstrated capability to put a nuclear weapon on the U.S. homeland. It's still mostly loud noises----bluster, bellicosity, insults---and provoking the South Koreans in their game of chicken. They are succeeding in making South Korea more and more edgy.
The Nth Korean regime survives through its drumbeats of storm and menace and by playing their neighbors off one another. By acquiring nuclear weapons, the communist regime has warded off the threat of foreign intervention. But they have failed to resolve any of their underlying economic problems and may even have deepened them. As Fred Kaplan points out:
North Korea, while still the most closed society on the planet, is a bit less closed than before: The experimental markets and manufacturing joint ventures with the South, as well as the frequent flow of traffic across the Chinese border, have exposed its people to a bit of the world; a growing number of them are realizing that they’re much worse off than the others, that they don’t have to live the way they do.
Nth Korea certainly doesn't want a war with the US and the Pentagon has no desire to be drawn into a war that was not of their own making.
As Tim Shorrock highlights:
The Obama administration has a choice: It can continue a policy of sanctions, military pressure and no talks until North Korea agrees to abandon its nuclear weapons; or it can try something that’s been tried, with varying success in the past: negotiate, possibly with the assistance of China and other regional powers, toward a peaceful solution that benefits everyone in the region, including the DPRK.
The reality is that the US dominance in the pacific is being challenged by China, which is the rising power in the Asia Pacific Rim, not missiles from Nth Korea designed to reach the continent of the United States or Hawaii, the home of the U.S. Pacific Command.
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Australia stands between China and The US.