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Alexander Dumas's avatar

Does not the various opinions of experts on the North Korea v South Korea relationship yet again testify to the fact that making predictions between these neighbors is as hazardous as asking economists to read the tea-leaves at the bottom of their cup to forecast economic trajectories? Because all too often, like economists, these experts get their "analyses" wrong or are way off the mark.

Baby-face Kim is -- to put it politely -- a nut-case, just as Donald Trump is a hardcore nut-job. And they probably deserve each other as Xi Jinping deserves Vladimir Putin. And maybe even Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. The most we can say about North-South relations at the present time is that Kim is rattling the cage or behaving like a rattle snake on heat. There is always a timing with his rants and innate stupidities but these usually amount to nothing in the end. Sure he has developed new missiles and probably deadlier nukes but, like Putin or his nutty chum Xi, would he use them? Really use them? So what is his point: To show that North Korea has joined the nuclear weapons age but then what?

And the South Koreans are no better. They panic every time Kim jumps up and down like Rumpelstiltskin. And this serves their own purposes. It hardens public opinion against the North even as they see themselves as brothers and sisters and cousins and affirms their belief that, like the Americans who want to save the world, that the South can save the North from self-destruction. It's a crazy notion, to be sure, because it merely consolidates US policy to keep its nearly 30,000 troops in the South, helps the South and the US military industrial complex continue developing and manufacturing more and more sophisticated and deadlier weapons, compel Washington to continue with its military aid policy to the South while the Seoul continues to expand its old export-oriented growth policy under the, again, old postwar geopolitical regional political economy while sanctioning the North. But these sanctions do not work because there are rogue state like China furnishing nuclear material and technology to Kim and failed states like Pakistan and Iran aiding and abetting Kim.

It's like a broken record. What did the vile ogre Donald Trump achieve after he met Kim in Singapore? Bupkis. What will he do now, if he wins the presidency a second time, if the suggestion is that Kim's rattle-snake antics are designed to help propel Trump to his second presidency? Bupkis.

So, please: take a deep breath, my dear analysts.

South Korean K-pop "culture" being exported is laughable, to say the least. The irony of the claim, that suggests that the export of it is "successful, is bizarre for its irony. The irony is that South Korea's K-pop "culture -- whatever the hell culture is supposed to mean -- and acts a soft diplomacy (another nutty idea), has seen two North Korean youth jailed for 12 years. Now, define for me "success"!

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