My thoughts on North Korea

Nota - Esse assunto tem sido manchete no EUA e Canadá, mas parece que nem tando no Brasil. Por isso eu resolvi escrever em Inglês, o assunto é possivelmente de mais interesse para os colegas que não falam Portugues.

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Today the US has deployed anti-missile defense system to South-Korea, which is seem as threatening by China. Well, this is understandable if we imagine what the US would think about Chinese military forces being deployed into Mexico, for example.

The reason for the US deployment was the launching of 4 missiles towards Japan by North-Korea.

They did that because joint American-South-Korea millitary drills have taken place at NK borders.

It is not difficult to imagine that a crazy isolated regime like NK will feel threatened and react to such drills. This is identical to what happens on Baltic countries: the NATO campaingn is seen as a threat by Russia. You dont expect that a guy like Putin will just say "sorry folks, I am wrong, I have done bad things...". It is the though behavior that keeps Putin in power, and so that is what he will be.

NK has asked the UN to review its sanctions, which are crippling NK's people and keeping them in the dark ages. Well, nobody doubts that.

It is easy for us to say that NK could just comply with UN demands, and sanctions would be lifted; but that shows a lack of understanding of how power works. NK will just not do it, like we have seen in history over and again.

But the NK talks at UN is an overture nonetheless. A statement that they know they are not in position to win any war, that they therefore do not want war - it would just be so silly for NK to start any war. They saw what happened with Lybia and Iraq. The US can wipe-them out of the map in one day.

However, by threatening Tokyo and Seoul, NK is sure to make US think twice before doing anything against NK. Despite US being sure it could wipe-out NK regime, it is not sure it can do it without devastating consequences to SK and Japan. NK achieves then the defense goal that they want by doing their "reckless" thing.

Meanwhile the Western media prefers to label the NK regime as crazy and threatening, which justifies and draws support for military actions, which would be very bloody in the lucky scenario that China is not dragged into the conflict. If that happens we would be lucky if we have a cold, instead of hot, war.

It is sensible to look at the past too, to the so called "Agreed Framework", which failed in large part because the US did not hold its part of the deal. Then we see that the goal in both sides is not really the good of the people. The difference is that in the NK side, we know that the good of the people is not the goal, but how about the US?

Here is a link of one of the few media reports that tries to report NK's views. We cannot be biased as to look only at what the US thinks.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-sanctions-un-idUSKBN16D2LO