Jacob Heilbrunn and Wallace C. Gregson
Maybe now we will finally realize who North Korea is. Over the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union we repeatedly assured ourselves and others that negotiations, agreements, economic cooperation, sanctions, threats and international scolding could reform, or at least restrain, North Korea. Each stratagem was tried in its turn, and repeated, to little effect. But we felt better. For a while.
In the first post-Soviet happy celebratory days, we assumed that the loss of North Korea’s most generous patron doomed the regime. We soon realized that the regime was not going away quietly, like Nicolae Ceausescu, when Kim Il-sung first raised the nuclear specter. We were forced to adjust. A fundamental, if implicit, assumption since that time was that we must deal with North Korea as a country, brutally and eccentrically autocratic to be sure, but one that would react to the right mix of policies and strategies by the United States and our allies. That’s what governmental institutions do, after all.
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http://nationalinterest.org/feature/thanks-north-korea-arms-race-may-be-coming-asia-22214
