What Do You Do When Someone Who Is Insane Threatens You And Your Friends

Do you just keep humoring the violent nut job and pacifying him as was continually done in the past? Now this crazy is now getting out of hand and scary dangerous. m/r

North Korea, Unrestrained

By Claudia Rosett August 29, 2017

North Korea launched a ballistic missile over Japan on Tuesday, an act that all by itself qualifies as a stunning provocation. This followed a bout of North Korean threats earlier this month to girdle Guam with missile strikes. Those threats followed North Korea's successful tests last month of two intercontinental ballistic missiles. Those tests followed an 11-year span from 2006-2016 in which North Korea conducted five nuclear tests, prepared to conduct a sixth -- which could come anytime now -- and in 2010 unveiled a uranium-enrichment program to complement its production of plutonium for bomb fuel.

It should by now be possible to discern a certain amount of persistence in all this. But that did not discourage Secretary of State Rex Tillerson from finding a moment of relative calm, six days ago -- sandwiched between the threats to Guam and the missile over Japan -- to tell reporters:

I am pleased to see that the regime in Pyongyang has certainly demonstrated some level of restraint that we've not seen in the past. We hope that this is the beginning of this signal that we've been looking for that they are ready to restrain their level of tensions, they're ready to restrain their provocative acts, and that perhaps we are seeing our pathway to sometime in the near future having some dialogue.

To be fair to Tillerson, he joins a long roster of American diplomats who over the years have tried to cope with the intractable problem of North Korea by seeing (or at least professing to see) what they want to see. Going back at least to the early days of the Clinton administration, Washington has developed rituals in which American officials proclaim that North Korea's regime has a choice: to continue its rogue pursuit of nuclear weapons and suffer various penalties, or give them up and enjoy the many perquisites of life as a conventionally armed murderous totalitarian state.

It seems reasonable by now to say that North Korea's regime made its choice decades ago, and has stuck with it -- cheating its way out of a series of nuclear deals reached under Presidents Clinton and Bush, and availing itself of President Obama's passive"strategic patience" to complete a transition of power from the late tyrant Kim Jong Il to his son, the current tyrant, Kim Jong Un, and accelerate its nuclear missile program.

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