No, “Mad” or “Rabid Dog” this time doesn’t describe Gen. Mattis, and “Tyrant” not the yet 45th President of the United States.[1]
Rabid dogs like Baiden [sic] can hurt lots of people if they are allowed to run about. They must be beaten to death with a stick before it is too late. Doing so will be beneficial for the U.S. also.[2]
This is how Kim Jong Un called FRM Vice President Biden and Biden called his North Korean offender a Tyrant. It seems these two are not friends.
In just two days Americans will decide who will be the 46th President of the United States- and who will take the duty to deal with a country which built the largest vehicle-launched ballistic missile the world has ever seen. Should Mr. Biden take the Oval Office, however, they must overcome the animosity they put on display during the last weeks,
North Korea and its “Tyrant” as Biden said managed one thing for sure: to mislead practically the entire world and become under our very nose a nuclear power with more than 100 missiles. The 2018 visit of Trump and 2019 hopes to close the sad chapter of the Korean-Korean conflict seem now to be a staged theater play without a happy end.
But if not with talks like Trump how could Biden deal with North Korea? The commercial or military threat would not work. North Korea is already isolated and sanctioned. Probably the only country, which keeps the ties is China, and who would risk a military confrontation?
First of all, one cannot reach real results with inconsequent actions. As Stanton et al[3] suggest in “How to Hit Pyongyang Where It Hurts ”
The United States should begin fining and sanctioning the Chinese banks that illegally maintain relationships with North Korean banks and fail to report suspicious North Korean transactions to the U.S. Treasury Department.
It seems Mr. Biden will not want to deal directly with the Dictator from Pyongyang but it also seems that he has either an idea what to do. And North Korea keeps poking the bear, recently with the presentation of the monstrous nuclear rocket. It is like in Kindergarten; when you can’t impress with the old toys you need to have a bigger one and show it to everyone.
The solution of the conflict seems to be somewhere between Beijing and Washington, and between Washington and Pyongyang and it seems very much that the wisdom quoted by Yang et al[4] proves true
all roads to Pyongyang have to go through Beijing first.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/north-korea-calls-biden-a-rabid-dog-who-deserves-to-be-beaten-to-death/2019/11/14/09583e84-0748-11ea-b388-434b5c1d7dd8_story.html
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/north-korea-calls-biden-a-rabid-dog-who-deserves-to-be-beaten-to-death/2019/11/14/09583e84-0748-11ea-b388-434b5c1d7dd8_story.html
[3] Joshua Stanton, Sung-Yoon Lee, and Bruce Klinger, “Getting Tough on North Korea: How to Hit Pyongyang Where it Hurts, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 96, No. 3), May/June 2017, pp. 65-74
[4] Xiangfeng Yang, “China’s Clear and Present Conundrum on the Korean Peninsula: stuck between the past and the future,” International Affairs, Vol. 94, No. 3 (May 2018), pp. 595-611
Gabor,
This will be short response because I am still grading papers (in my other course). First, just a couple of corrections: (1) we do not yet know if the North’s “monstrous new missile” is real or just a mock-up — but even if it’s the latter, they are obviously getting close to having a workable ICBM, and (2) they probably have 60 or more nuclear weapons, not missiles. Negotiating with the DPRK is the “problem from hell.” They often lie and go back on their word, and they have been caught several times having cheated on agreements. We will discuss all of this in class on Tuesday.
–Professor Wallerstein