It's the NK cycle
>oh no Kim is about to get nukes
>everyone panics
>quick let's give Kim money
>everything is cool now
5 Years later
>oh no Kim is about to get nukes
And it starts all over again
That's actually one small part of the entire North Korean paradigm, and it's a fairly recent paradigm emerging in the late 2000s and early 2010s during Obama's tenure. "Strategic tolerance" was the name of the game, but I'd argue that it was such a narrow and short-sighted lens to look at North Korea from. As laughable as the idea may sound to us, let's try to
humanise the Kim regime to understand where they come from:
a) Kim il-Sung 100% started the Korean War, he had to be dealt with, but the USA's response with overwhelming force was 100% counterproductive as a deterrent.
Everything in North Korea was levelled to the ground in the US-led retaliation, and casualties
start in the six digits. Do bear in mind that it was the northern portions of the Korean peninsula that had all the temples, monuments, museums, and other such Korean historical/cultural sites going back centuries, if not millennia. There's very little,
if anything, left from before the Korean War in North Korea.
We, as Americans, don't look at the Korean War as a genocide, an ethnic cleansing, or what have you. From the North Korean perspective? It was tantamount to genocide, and it remains a cornerstone of domestic propaganda the same way that the Chinese refuse to let go of the Rape of Nanking. South Korean historiography, to this day,
does not address the horrors of the US-led bombing campaign because the security apparatus in Seoul is bankrolled by America. There is
nothing that the USA can do to the DPRK anymore, purely because the North effectively (from their point-of-view) survived a full-on ethnic cleansing.
b) Part of the Korean armistice agreement (bear in mind that only the DPRK, China, and the USA signed it) was the provision that no new weapons would enter the Korean Peninsula. The USA reneged on this part of the agreement, opting to park nuclear weapons pointed directly at North Korea (still rebuilding from the aftermath of total war) and China by extension (recovering from the Great Leap Forward, leading into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution). I've said it before and I'll say it again: there's "rubbing your nose in it" and then there's "smashing your face into the concrete until all the skin, muscle tissue, and cartilage are gone, leaving nothing but bone." Even when the North Koreans objected, the USA's own hubris meant that the response was "tough tits, faggot. I'm gonna park the nuclear death gun at you whether you like it or not."
c) Insisting that the USA is playing a funding -> tantrum -> funding game with North Korea is absolutely ludicrous. Before the collapse of the USSR, both China and the USSR bankrolled North Korea for two reasons: first, making North Korea look like a communist success story after rebuilding from total war. Second, it was competition between China and the Soviets for North Korean's patronage as a client state following the death of Stalin, the rise of Kruschev, the August Faction Incident, and the eventual Sino-Soviet Split. Had China and the Soviets not fallen out, North Korea would've faced a united front and Kim il-Sung would've had to fall back in line. Since they fell out, they were both looking to cosy up to Kim il-Sung and just
threw foreign aid at the DPRK to both prop up the regime and say "See? We're not like those (Chinese/Russians), align with us Dear Leader!" The collapse of the USSR led to China scaling back the aid it gave North Korea, causing the DPRK to effectively become the modern buffer state/tributary state/client regime of the Chinese. If that weren't bad enough, Kim il-Sung died
right as the March of Suffering (i.e. the 1990s famine) began happening. The origins of modern US aid to North Korea emerged as a byproduct of joint humanitarian aid from South Korea, Japan, and the USA to the Kim regime. This is a full decade before the Taepdong-2 missile tests in the late 2000s that led to
modern sanctions against North Korea emerging.
d) Sunshine Policy times began in 1998 between North and South Korea, there was definitely some modicum or facsimile of progress being made, but there was a huge wrench thrown into the plan that made Sunshine Policy doomed to fail: Dubya in 2002 referring to North Korea as part of the "Axis of Evil" alongside Iran and Iraq, and referring to the Kim regime in harsh, dehumanising terms. Does the Kim regime deserve the vitriol they receive? Of course. No one's denying that.
HOWEVER, it's still a fundamental case of foot-in-mouth when the country that's bankrolling South Korea's security apparatus calls North Korea part of an axis of evil, acts hawkish toward North Korea, and actively objected to the Sunshine Policy. Why? The utter lack of administrative continuity within the American presidency means that Clinton could spend two straight terms sending food aid to North Korea during a famine, Bush can start antagonising the DPRK for being part of an axis of evil and sanctioning them for missile tests, Obama maintaining sanctions while publicly dismissing the Kim regime through "strategic tolerance," and the Zion Don daring Rocket Man to try attacking America with their missiles of dubious quality.
Even if the North actively tries to uphold its own international obligations, and both Kim il-Sung and Kim Jong-il at least gave us the facade of trying, what incentive is there to trust the USA at their own word when there's basically fucking
nothing that gives continuity between Truman -> Eisenhower -> JFK -> LBJ -> Nixon -> Ford -> Carter -> Reagan -> Bush I -> Clinton -> Bush II -> Obama -> Trump 45 -> Biden -> Trump 47?
I'm not saying that North Korea is blameless; a good 85% of what they've gone through is 100% self-inflicted. Even so, we can't keep referring to regimes that are antithetical to America as "madmen" or "crazy" because that risks distilling our own failures in policy and warfare down into mere historical footnotes, and
not the instruments responsible for shaping North Korea as we know it today.
