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May 10Sticks and stones…
It’s almost impossible to parody a story like this:
North Korea says it will sever all ties and communication with Seoul as punishment for what it calls a “smear campaign” over the sinking of a South Korean warship.
There have been a lot of recent articles about the Land of the Morning Calm, which all make the same basic points:
- North Korea is unstable (duh), thanks to incredible poverty, corruption, and a lunatic leprechaun despot with a penchant for wearing fuzzy hats during photo ops.
- South Korea is really small (it’s 2/3 the size of my adoptive home state, Iowa), but packs 50 million people into that space (for comparison, Iowa has 3 million).
- North Korea has a huge number of weapons (maybe nuclear, maybe not) aimed at those 50 million people, and there’s no real reason to believe they won’t use them.
- Even if the DPRK government collapses without annihilating the entire peninsula, South Korea, China and other countries would have to deal with North Korea’s 24 million citizens, who are largely poor and unskilled (though apparently South Korea is now outsourcing animation to NK, one of the jobs historically outsourced to SK from the US). None of them are super-excited about that.
Of course, no one actually knows what the North Korean government is trying to do, so we’ll have to see how this plays out.