Maybe Kim Jong Un is tired of presiding over one of the world’s most backward countries. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:
Is he North Korea’s Gorbachev?
Why has North Korea suddenly decided to negotiate with Seoul and Washington, and quite possibly give up its nuclear weapons?
This question has commentators in the West stumped, and so they fall back on the usual self-serving narcissistic America-centric nonsense: Kim Jong-un was so intimidated by President Trump’s outlandish threats that he decided to be a good boy and capitulate. The North Koreans naturally deny this, and their denials are quite credible: after all, the Korean stalemate has been pretty much unalterable since the signing of the armistice in 1953, and there is no reason to believe that this frozen conflict would reemerge as a hot spot – and burst into flame – since both sides would be very badly burned.
Yes, there has been plenty of rhetorical bombast since the North acquired a nuclear capacity and some semi-credible means of delivering a nuclear payload, but in reality this actually lessened the prospect of bombs dropping on either side of the demilitarized zone – for the same reason that deterrence worked to make a nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union unthinkable.
So if Trump’s tweeted bloviations weren’t the cause of the North Korean charm offensive, and subsequent North-South rapprochement during the Winter Olympics, then what is going on here?
There is a lot of evidence that the North Koreans have decided on a major turn toward the West. Although the present opacity of the North gives us only a limited view of what is going on, there is sufficient reason to believe that the last Stalinist regime on earth is on a course of self-liquidation that – they hope – will enable them to survive as a political force in a reunified Korean nation.
In short, Kim Jong-un aspires to be North Korea’s Mikhail Gorbachev: a communist dictator who wants to come in from the cold.
To continue reading: Kim Jong-un: The Commie Who Came in From the Cold
Talk about the blind. Your nation is starving due to the application of Marxist/socialist principles. The army and security arm is also starving. Revolution will come. So what is a dictator to do? If you live within the Beltway a funny mold sets in, that makes all communists of failed nations suddenly see the light. Pathetic. We’ll hear this about Chicago, NYC, Seattle and San Francisco soon.