Simple Question of International Import

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

What are the odds that this gets a LOT worse by the traditional spring time offensive season when a young general's fancy turns to invasion?

Brief timeline:

North Korea is accused of torpedoing a South Korean warship.

South Korea fires at North Korean fishing boats crossing the maritime border North Korea refuses to recognize.

North Korea is revealed to have highly modern facilities for nuclear material enrichment.

Not to mention, North Korea is facing the challenge of passing along the regime to a third generation of the Kim family.

North Korea is known for rattling its sabre and demanding to have attention paid to it when it is being ignored, but this is looking like a very different than recent years -- South Korea really has to retaliate...and half of South Korea's population lives in the Seoul metropolitan area within artillery range of the DMZ.

So a question -- is North Korea suicidal or are they betting that this behavior can get them some more winter grain shipments?

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

They drag their feet for the same reason South Africa won't do anything about Mugabe's Zimbabwe. They know the collapse is inevitable, but like human beings all over the world they prefer to delay the inevitable and ensure when the final collapse does come it's much, much worse. It's not right or decent but then neither is much of anything else in the real world. :-(.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

They drag their feet because N. Korea was their doing, and their ally. They wanted more countries like that, but this one is turning in to their own little political disaster. They've come around quite a lot about N. Korea, because Lil' Kim be crazy, but they'd really rather not have to, because sticking the political knife in N. Korea means they aint getting any other little dictator allies as friends.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, North Korea was the doing of the Soviet Union. The USSR occupied Korea north of the 38th parallel in 1945 and *it* was the one that propped up Kim Il Sung, who was solidly in power before the Maoists had even won the Chinese Civil War. China nowadays props it up because the migration crisis and the economic collapse would really be unpleasant for it. And their motivation for ignoring it is a basic (and base) human one, not that they're inherently evil.