The Key Question at the U.N.: What Does North Korea Want?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

As President Donald Trump and other world leaders gather at the United Nations this week, a lot of important questions hang in the air, but none more important than this one: What does North Korea want?

That is, what is North Korea’s real goal in its relentless, reckless pursuit of nuclear weapons as well as missiles that can carry them as far as the United States? The answer will determine whether it’s even possible to push the country off the nuclear path at this point, or whether a strategy of regime change or containment of a nuclear-armed country is the most realistic option—or, most ominously, whether armed conflict is likely.

The international community is, of course, casting about for ways to deter North Korea, and U.S. officials say there will be conversations this week about imposing more-severe economic sanctions than the ones already implemented in a pair of U.N. Security Council resolutions this year. Chinese and Russian companies doing business with North Korea are likely targets.

...

If diplomacy ultimately can’t reverse the nuclear program, the U.S. and its allies likely will be looking at a long-term strategy of containing a nuclear-armed North Korea and all that entails: far more spending on missile-defense systems, a bigger American military presence in Asia, military buildups in Japan and South Korea, possibly the reintroduction of American tactical nuclear weapons into South Korea.

Such a containment strategy worked with the Soviet Union for half a century. It is an expensive and frightening proposition—though perhaps not as frightening as war on the Korean Peninsula.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-key-question-at-the-u-n-what-does-north-korea-want-1505750645

[Jamaal510]

1. There aren't

many good options in this situation, it seems. Kim Jong Un is intent on continuing his tests, and the past few U.S. administrations have been unable to make them curtail their nuclear program, but I guess they appear to be handling it OK in working to economically-cripple North Korea with the sanctions and looking at missile defense spending. I just wish that Trump et al. would shut up with the "Rocket Man" and "he's begging for war" talk. They don't need to continue going out there and trying to make that man even more upset.

[sarisataka]

2. What Does North Korea Want?

South Korea

[DemocratSinceBirth]

3. In five years the South would be as effed up and poor as the North.

[sarisataka]

4. But Kim would have houses

In Seoul and Pusan...

Along with lots and lots of new reeducation camps

[LanternWaste]

5. Or a seat at the big boys table in the nuclear room, or leverage against hostile trading blocs, or..

Or a seat at the big boys table in the nuclear room, or leverage against hostile trading blocs, or...

It seems rather short-sighted to reduce the answer to merely one of many possibilities. But dogma and bias often reduces us to a much more narrow realm of ideas.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

6. Kim knows the United States has never invaded a nation that has nuclear weapons.

[sarisataka]

7. North Korea's ultimate goal

Is reunification of the peninsula. Everything they do is viewed as a step towards that objective.

If a person looks at all those trees they can see a forest

[DaveBarton]

8. All I see is WW3

This guy has taken missiles to be balloon filled with water. He careless of how many people that may end up been victims.
He has all it takes to make away with ISIS but yet won't employ that.

[Warren DeMontague]

9. money

that's what extortionists always want.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

10. I don't know why "to be taken seriously" is so hard to understand.

They're not going to get rid of their nuclear weapons; it's the only card they've got. And it's a card that makes people listen. We should have talked with them during the years of "strategic patience." Now we're in a much weaker position, and we HAVE to talk with them.

[Warren DeMontague]

11. what exactly does "taken seriously" mean?

They want money. Pure and simple.

They have few exports and not enough arable land to feed their people. They were supported by the Soviets while the USSR still existed, now they aren't.

To top it all off, they have a totalitarian nightmare where 99% of the citizenry are oppressed and starved by a small group at the top. So the people at the top exist in a state of both unimaginable luxury (by North Korean standards) but also constant paranoia.