Kim needs friends, not foolish threats
I AM sorry for North Korea. Not for its leaders, but for its people, some of whom I have met.
When I travelled to that country some years back I was determined to get a bit further than the usual stuff about Kimworship, mass rallies and the Pyongyang metro.
I found desperation. Accidentally close to a stunted young soldier, I was able to see the marks of hunger on his face, as well as to study his threadbare clothes and ancient weapon, whose wooden stock was split and crumbling and whose metalwork was worn to the point of danger.
I found drunkenness on what seemed to me to be an epic scale. In a short visit, I saw and heard so many examples of this (including a citizen passed out on the street, and then shielded from my sight by others) that I have little doubt it is a huge plague, probably tolerated by the regime as a safety valve.
I found economic collapse. My pseudo-grand hotel in central Pyongyang switched off its electricity as soon as the foreign guests had left for the day. Expensively electrified railway lines had almost no traffic, and the trains were hauled by ancient diesels. Farmland was tilled by the methods of the 19th Century.
And what is to become of them? South Korea will not reunify. It fears bankruptcy and a great wave of millions of half-starved refugees. China only offers colonial domination, which this proud people do not want. Japan is still loathed after a harsh occupation.
Kim Jong Un will not quit if he thinks he will end up in a prison cell. He would rather take his chances.
Given the immense likely cost of the new Korean war we seem to be heading for, I am more than ever sure that a grand gesture from the West, a high-level visit, and offers of real investment, might finally end this foolish, dangerous confrontation.
North Korea is the last trace of the Cold War, stranded without friends by a quirk of history. As long as it thinks it has no way out, it will continue to take terrible risks. Threatening war in return is not going to solve this.