PLAYING CHICKEN WITH A NORTH KOREAN DINGBAT
(…is dangerous because he may not know how or when to…blink)

North Korea’s Kim Jong Eun’s recent behavior seems downright irrational, if not insane, from our point of view, but, apparently, not from his perspectives.

Conventional wisdom claims such provocative actions and wild bellicose rhetoric as typical North Korean reactions whenever it feels insecure, and its desperate economic needs aren’t being considered by the outside world. Thus, tighter international sanctions, and larger joint US and South Korean military “exercises”, are all seen as “threats” to its regime.

The B2 bomber exercise was a pointed reminder of what our military capabilities are today, compared to what they were sixty odd years ago, if we have to respond to any North Korean aggressive intentions. The impact value of that demonstration, however, is probably not the bombers’ horrendous bomb-carrying load (enough to scare the crap out of anyone, even a North Korean), but rather, the fact that those two birds were able to leave right after breakfast from their home base in Missouri, fly all the way to Korea, deliver their dummy loads, then zoom back home in time for Happy Hour… technological bit of one-upmanship against Kim Eun’s missile saber rattling.

Frankly, having two of our –Boomer- type submarines popping up unannounced off each coast of North Korean would have been a much more impressive demonstration of how we could mangle it if things came to a crunch. But since that would have perhaps been too provocative, and, due to our tighter budgetary limits, sending those two bombers instead was probably a less costly way to play such a game of chicken.

The problem is…playing chicken with a North Korean dingbat, is dangerous because he may not know how or when to…blink…and then what do we do…if he doesn’t?

One of the things that’s probably making Kim Jong Eun feel more confident in playing this kind of game with us is because he knows China is a constraint on any military moves we might make against his outrageous behavior. Because of the growing symbiotic relationship we have with China, he also feels more secure in the knowledge that a confrontation between China and the US over North Korea is not in the best interests of either of their respective geopolitical objectives. Effectively, Kim Eun is playing both against each other, making it a sorry situation where his two-bit thug regime “tail” gets to wag two super-power “dogs” because of that relationship.

Well let’s hope that these two “dogs” will have both the smarts and the will to figure out a way to jointly clip that “tail” down to a Boxer-type stub, before it wrecks everything for everyone else.

CENTURION