It amazes me how many varying opinions there are among genuine experts when it comes to how best to deal with North Korea.
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/artic...-bent-survival
“Waking up one morning and deciding he wants to nuke” Los Angeles is not something Kim Jong-un is likely to do, said Yong Suk Lee, Deputy Assistant Director of CIA for the Korea Mission Center. “He wants to rule for a long time and die peacefully in his own bed,” Lee said, in rare public remarks in Washington.
That doesn’t make him any less dangerous. “With each increasing escalation, they’re raising the threshold for the United States and others to accept or press back against that,” said Michael Collins, Deputy Assistant Director of CIA for East Asia Mission Center. The officers were speaking at the CIA’s annual Ethos and Profession of Intelligence Conference at George Washington University.
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Retired Ambassador Joseph DeTrani was more blunt. “The possibility of stumbling into conflict is very great,” especially with the added provocation from Trump’s rhetoric, he said, speaking on the same panel.
“When they hear what’s coming from the president, I think it resonates with them,” said DeTrani, the former special envoy for Six Party Talks with North Korea and the former director of the National Counterproliferation Center. “But they also know we have a process and I think right now they’re probing.”
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“What’s bound North Korea’s behavior is fear of Chinese abandonment on one end, and fear of a U.S. strike on the other end,” Lee said. “And right now…he’s not afraid of China’s abandonment and he’s not afraid of a U.S. strike. So then it begins tolerance of will — how far will Kim Jong-un go?”
The Kim regime’s long-term goal is to come to some kind of a big power agreement with the U.S. and remove U.S. forces from the peninsula, Lee said. As for the risk of North Korea firing nuclear-tipped ICBMs at the U.S., Lee reiterated that as a rational actor, it would not be conducive to Kim’s regime interests or his longevity to do so.
But he uses the threat to “keep us out of his sandbox.”
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But if the U.S. pulls out of the Iran nuclear agreement — which Trump has repeatedly called a bad deal for the U.S. and threatened to pull out of or renegotiate — that could make it much more unlikely for North Korea to even contemplate coming to the table, he said.
“That would be a message to Pyongyang that the U.S. could be fickle, that the U.S. may sign into agreements and walk away from those agreements,” DeTrani said, adding that North Korea may understand “enhancing the agreement, rather than cutting it.”
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Originally Posted by acesfull86
