North Korea--Just A Bunch of Jokesters

I was performing my nightly global political reading tonight (That’s right, I’m a boring person.) and I came upon this article from Statfor by George Friedman. Now Mr. Friedman is a serious person and thousands of business people, and of course some boring people like me, follow his writing and analysis on any number of current topics. Tonight, it just struck me as extremely humorous.

The article can be found here. The last sentence of the first paragraph escaped Mr. Friedman’s pop-culture alarm warning signal I’m sure, but it did set the stage for an enjoyable bit of reading. In short, Mr. Friedman explains the North Korean strategy as “ferocious, weak and crazy whereby the North Koreans are able to maneuver much stronger powers to accede to their demands. If it were not for the fact that the strategy seems to work for them, you would think their diplomatic advisor was Monte Python. The real “knee-slapper” is that this lunacy has been successful for almost twenty years!

Americans need to think about this. North Korea desires to be considered diplomatically insane to get whatever they want and the United States is just the opposite. We pine for countries to love us, we anguish over some feigned insinuation regarding our attitude or action, and we actually care what other nationalities think about who we elect as our president. We’ve got this all wrong! We need to start priding ourselves on being one-brick-short-of-a-load, or of being the diplomatic analogy to the crazy uncle who mows the lawn in his jockey-shorts. We need to announce that we’re moving hundreds of nuclear munitions all over the world and we’ll say “its just in case.” That will have them guessing.  Then we’ll see who gives a rip about our greenhouse gases