{"id":26140,"date":"2017-09-26T17:39:37","date_gmt":"2017-09-26T22:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=26140"},"modified":"2017-09-26T17:39:54","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T22:39:54","slug":"north-korea-is-the-most-predictable-regime-on-earth-the-real-threat-is-the-erratic-u-s-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=26140","title":{"rendered":"North Korea is the Most Predictable Regime on Earth. The Real Threat is the Erratic U.S. Government."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo: Ed Jones\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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NORTH KOREA IS THE MOST PREDICTABLE REGIME ON EARTH. THE REAL THREAT IS THE ERRATIC U.S. GOVERNMENT.<\/a><\/h3>\n
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THE NUCLEAR SHOUTING<\/u> between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un often seems like a maddening version of whack-a-crazy-mole, in which an unhinged comment by one of them is hastily followed by a lunatic retort from the other. Trump calls Kim \u201crocket man,\u201d Kim calls Trump a \u201cdotard,\u201d Trump tweets that Kim \u201cwon\u2019t be around much longer,\u201d and on and on it goes.<\/p>\n

This raises a serious question: Which of these awesomely flawed men is the most volatile and dangerous? The trail to an answer begins with an article that Evan Osnos wrote for the New Yorker about his recent journey to totalitarian North Korea. His \u201cLetter from Pyongyang\u201d reached 14,000 words and was praised as a marvel of reporting that revealed the stark yet impenetrable contours of the world\u2019s most famous nuclear-armed nightmare.<\/p>\n

Osnos\u00a0described<\/a> how he was met at the Pyongyang airport by a polite government minder who never left his side. He stayed at a special hotel for foreigners that was isolated from the general population. He visited a school where the students made statements that were programmatic. He was taken into Pyongyang\u2019s subway and told that its deep tunnels would be fallout shelters in the event of nuclear war with America. He was not allowed to make a spontaneous visit to anyone\u2019s home.<\/p>\n

I was struck by these things because I had the exact same experiences when I made a trip to North Korea \u2014 in 1989. Same type of minder, hotel, and school, same prohibition on popping into anyone\u2019s apartment, even the same remark from my minder that the subway would double as a fallout shelter if America attacked.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo: Ed Jones\/AFP\/Getty Images NORTH KOREA IS THE MOST PREDICTABLE REGIME ON EARTH. THE REAL THREAT IS THE ERRATIC U.S. GOVERNMENT. THE NUCLEAR SHOUTING between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un often seems like a maddening version of whack-a-crazy-mole, in which an unhinged comment by one of them is hastily followed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[7844,8312,2006,2583,13330,5567,827],"class_list":["post-26140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-donald-trump","tag-kim-jong-un","tag-north-korea","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-peter-maass","tag-the-intercept","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26141,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26140\/revisions\/26141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}