KIM JONG UN BETS TRUMP IS BLUFFING ON WAR

Kim will not disarm. Day by day he is increasing preparedness for a war that he will fight without mercy.

What takes place when an “irresistible” force, aka Donald Trump, meets an “immovable” Kim Jong Un will become clear latest by mid-2019. Either the United States will give a pass to the military option and continue with its policy of threats and UN-approved sanctions till then, or there will be war, waged by the US, Japan and, possibly, South Korea, to take out the nuclear and missile assets of North Korea before these become too deadly for countermeasures.

Interestingly, the Korean peninsula is legally still in a state of war, with only an armistice, rather than a peace treaty being agreed upon in 1953 between North and South Korea and their respective patrons. Since then, there have been regular eruptions of tension between the two sides, with the Demilitarized Zone ( DMZ) cutting across the 38th parallel witnessing testy exchanges between the rival militaries. Although President George W. Bush put North Korea alongside Iraq in his “Axis of Evil” speech, the 43rd US President showed extreme timidity in dealing with the challenge to US, Japanese and South Korean security posed by the steady accretion of the nuclear and missile strength of the Kim family fiefdom. This same Clinton-era action-reaction cycle has been played out repeatedly since the early 1990s, in which North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, DPRK) would test missiles and continue with its nuclear weapons research and development, followed by harsh words, but mild ( in comparison to those imposed on Saddam-ruled Iraq) sanctions by a clutch of countries led by the US and Japan. The Obama administration did not make any serious effort to give an impression that it was prepared for conflict, with the consequence that the coming to power in North Korea of the youthful and steel-nerved Kim Jong Un in 2010 as the Chairman of the Central Military Commission ( followed a year later by being appointed Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces) saw a steep acceleration in the pace of both the nuclear as well as the missile programs.

Their experience with US Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama has convinced the DPRK “leadership centre” that Washington is bluffing when it warns Pyongyang of a possible conflict designed to take out the Kim regime. The only sceptic of such scepticism was Kim Jong Un’s uncle, Jong Sang Thaek, who warned against dismissing the US threat of war as empty, and counselled a slowdown in the WMD program so that international sanctions could be eased and funds diverted to civilian needs. Such advocacy was counter to Kim Jong Un’s growing conviction, that any US administration would be relentless in its enmity to him and his control over North Korea, and hence that any US talk of compromise was only a smokescreen designed to lull the regime into a false sense of security. Such negotiations would ensure that Pyongyang relax its vigilance, and first dilute and then give up its WMD stockpiles, thereby making inevitable the kinetic US-