Airstrip One

How unreasonable is Red Korea?

Close your eyes and try to forget that the North Koreans are one of the world's nastiest governments. Think about them as a regime dealing with other states on the international stage.

As an international player is what they want utterly unreasonable? Charley Reese tries to look at North Korea from this realist perspective and comes to the conclusion that North Korea is acting like a normal player and not some nutball regime. I'm not sure I entirely agree, but they are certainly playing a good game with a bad hand. (For the case that they really are nutters read the War Nerd).

There's one thing that Charley Reese did miss out, and that it is perfectly rational for any regime that wishes to preserve it's independence to own nuclear weapons. Think Kosovo v Chechnya; or East Timor v Tibet; or Islamist Pakistan v Secular Iraq; or ...

Fact is we're going to have to grow to love the bomb as a lot more countries will be getting it, and even the expedient of scaling back Western forces is only going to slow down the atomic spread.