Ignore North Korea

South Korea's leftist organ blames the latest replay of the fifteen-year-old crisis on the fact that "the [Obama] administration had decided to not engage with North Korea further, and to wait until either North Korea steps forward with a rational attitude or China twists its arm to act rationally" — N. Korea challenges U.S.’s “benign neglect” policy with second nuclear test.

Old Rightist Justin Raimondo phrases the title of his latest in the form of a question — Is North Korea About to Blow Up the World?. "No – but maybe a little corner of it, if we aren't careful." He has nothing kind to say about "the most secretive, repressive, and downright loopy neo-Stalinist regime on earth" that "is popping up like a grotesque jack-in-the-box, every few months, with a new outrage against international order," but injects some realism into the conversation:

Now, every regime, no matter how tyrannical, depends to a large extent on the consent of the people. What prevents them from rising up and overthrowing their oppressors is the conviction that they’re being protected from a much greater danger, and, in North Korea’s case, it’s the bugaboo of foreign occupation. Draconian economic sanctions imposed by the West reinforce this general impression and give the regime’s insistence that the Americans and South Koreans are about to invade enough credibility to increase the public’s tolerance of Kim Jong-il’s antics.

This is what gives President Barack Obama’s recent comments on the latest crisis a darkly humorous tone. He said that the world has got to "stand up to North Korea." The truth, however, from a North Korean perspective, is precisely the opposite: in their view, it is North Korea that is standing up to the world. So much of the Western commentary on the North Korean issue notes that the nuclear test generated firepower equivalent to the blasts that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki – acts carried out by the United States against a prostrate Japan. It is certainly not lost on the North Koreans that the U.S. could just as easily rationalize a similar attack on yet another nation of yellow-skinned people.

"The only rational policy is to avoid provocations at all costs," Mr. Raimondo suggests. "The West, however, holds a trump card that requires no action on their part, and that is the inherent instability of the regime." He concludes, "The best we can do is wait and let nature – in the form of a natural human resistance to intolerable conditions of privation and repression – take its course."

Benign neglect, for the record, is what this blogger has been advocating for at least eight months — Benign Neglect Toward North Korea / North Korean Headline of the Week / Do the Norks Read Donald Kirk? / The Future Secretary of State Speaks / North Korea's Eminent Preemptive Attack / The Foreign Entanglement That Is the Korean Peninsula / Should the U.S. Bomb North Korea? / ♪ I'm So Bo-o-ored With the D.P.R.K. ♪ / North Korean Refugees Look at the American Election / History Repeats Itself.