The Bigger Threat

Even the most irrational and authoritarian leaders have occasional moments of peaceability, and the notorious nuclear-armed world-threatening man-baby with the silly hair has emitted a few encouraging grunts about the prospect of peace on the Korean peninsula. The North and South have engaged in dialogue to ease tensions, and Kim Jong-un himself has condescended to meet the South's national security chief and personally host a dinner for his delegation. Although the world-threatening man-baby responded with a few not entirely threatening exclamation marks on Twitter, there is still a long way to go: "Words alone won’t be enough to impress people in Washington," said one think-tanker, and if the examples of Iraq and Iran are anything to go by, giving up nuclear weapons won't do much to impress them either. North Korea, after all, has during its entire history faced only a single quasi-genocidal assault by the United States and its friends; while the USA has spent most of the last half-century in constant existential peril from the world-bestriding empires of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.