A reader chides:
The North Koreans launch a missile over Japan and nary a peep about it from anyone on The Corner??
I’m sure I’m not the only Corner-fan baffled by this…………
Well, I seem to be the only one around this morn, and that’s mainly because I’m stuck at an airport. But, since you ask re the Nork rocket, I said everything I had to say on this subject in my book, America Alone :
North Korea has millions of starving people; it has one of the lowest GDPs per capita on the planet, lower than Ghana, lower than Zimbabwe, lower than Mongolia.
But it’s a nuclear power.
The danger we face is not a Chinese superpower or an Islamist superpower: if it’s a new boss, you learn the new rules and adjust as best you can. But the greater likelihood is of a world with no superpower at all in which unipolar geopolitics gives way to non-polar geopolitics, a world without order in which pipsqueak thug states who can’t feed their own people globalize their psychoses.
The North Korean test, about which our new president has issued the feeblest of rote protests, is the flip side of the post below. The western world has no will. So we approach a state in which the planet’s wealthiest jurisdictions, from Norway to New Zealand, lack any capacity to defend their borders, and the planet’s basket-cases, from North Korea to Sudan, will be nuclear powers.
We’ll see how that arrangement works out.