North Korea Is Completely Insane

Many people who know me believe me to be a 'liberal' when it comes to foreign policy.  I try my best to shirk titles like this and any other lazy terms seeking to confine someone's entire worldview into one rhetorical box, but people don't want to think.  They want to label you quickly, store you in a little stamped box in their brain and move on.  I believe nations should do more to avoid war than they do and I'm all for increased international dialogue, which is going to be essential as the world gets more complicated and more dangerous.

But there comes a time when a fellow nation on this little blue marble of ours makes it clear that they are, well, fucking insane.  Germany did it in the 1930s, and they had to be dealt with.  Our old friend Saddam Hussein did it in 1990, and he had to be dealt with (the second war is another issue).  Now North Korea is the raving loon smearing feces on windows and screaming at the sky.  I don't know any people who live there, but their regime, the national face that they project to the world, it completely, batshit, Cuckoo's Nest insane.  In this modern Information Age world, detonating mega-expensive nukes while your people starve, throwing ballistic missiles all over the ocean like a fireworks party, and publicly threatening to 'wipe out' the most powerful nation in the history of the planet makes you a goddam lunatic.  Period.  There's just no other way to describe it.

As I write this, there's a North Korean ship en route to southeast Asia apparently carrying some nasty cargo, and if we stop and inspect it (as the UN sanctions signed by us say we must do), then the crazy midget with the shades says, in a manner of speaking, that he'll blow us up.  They're even talking about shooting off a long range missile in the direction of Hawaii, I suppose as a friendly 'hello'.  Of course war is the last resort.  I mean the absolute, horrible, gut-wrenching last thing you want to do.  But the regime in North Korea has proven that they're not rational, they're not friendly, and they have no intention of working within the bounds of a civilized international society.  They're threatening the lives of millions of people in their vicinity, starving their own people, and now have access to the most dangerous weapons in the world.  It's not at the point where I tip in favor of action yet, but goddam, they're getting there.  Hopefully things calm down, as they usually do.  Hopefully.