Brian Reynolds Myers Quotes

While I too may be wrong about North Korea’s intentions, I’m neither lying nor guessing. Granted, it’s not easy figuring out what any country wants. America? Damned if I know anymore. The beginning of political wisdom is the recognition that no government’s discourse can be trusted. That goes also for the regime our softliners consider uniquely guileless. And the beginning of I.R. wisdom is the realization that foreign-service officials lie especially often. I had to laugh when I first heard of a news magazine called The Diplomat; it’s like calling a porn magazine The Prude.

So the question we have to ask ourselves in 2017 is: Why does North Korea risk its long-enjoyed security by developing long-range nukes? Why is it doing the one thing that might force America to attack, to accept even the likelihood of South Korean civilian casualties? And the only goal, the only plausible goal big enough to warrant the growing risk and expense is the goal North Korea has been pursuing from day one of its existence? And I can ask you Matthew what that goal is; I'm sure you know. It's the unification of the peninsula. More concretely, North Korea wants to force Washington into a grand bargain linking de-nuclearization to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. South Korea would then be pressured into a North-South confederation, which is a concept the South Korean left has flirted with for years, and which the North has always seen as a transition to unification under its own control.

Like all men I have a maternal instinct, but I can clutch only so many characters to my breast at one time.

No one ever said the regime’s legitimacy reposes in the nukes themselves. It rests on a commitment to the unyielding defense and unification of the Korean nation.

The DPRK derives its legitimacy from the myth that the anti-Japanese hero Kim Il Sung was all right-thinking citizens' choice as the man to found and lead the new Korea after liberation in 1945... Until the mid-1960s the USSR was credited with defeating Japan, but since then propaganda has claimed that Kim and his guerillas freed the race on their own. That this is known to be untrue by those who lived through the time is of minor importance. The painful historical reality of mass collaboration (and the military insignificance of all armed Korean resistance to colonial rule) is precisely what made the Kim myth so attractive.

Americans can't really handle the truth, the enormity of the truth.

While watching Moon and Kim disport themselves on Mount Paektu — the modern nationalist myth of the ancient iconicity of which mountain our media swallowed hook, line and sinker — I was struck by a sobering thought: It has already become easier to imagine Seoul with a Kim Il Sung statue than to imagine Pyongyang without one. Not a lot easier, but easier. We may all disagree about what exactly a North-South league will mean, or even whether it will come to pass. But let’s stop the denials — the old-fashioned denials — that this is what the two Koreas are working on.

North Korea cannot normalize relations with the United States.

What you have here in South Korea really is extreme nationalists.

South Koreans would rather see their state's security compromised than risk their own prosperity. Let’s not overestimate South Koreans’ attachment to their own state, which a sizable but influential minority still considers illegitimate.

Koreans in both the north and the south tend to cherish the myth that of all peoples in the world, they are the least inclined to premeditated evil.

South Koreans do not consider the integrity of their state important enough to go to war for.

Since Moon's takeover the peninsula has become less like divided Germany than ever. The ROK has abandoned the competition for legitimacy, instead ceding the North’s superiority on nationalist grounds while reaffirming that these matter more than liberal democratic ones. I’m not sure a league will ever come about, but if it does, it will hitch a proudly radical nationalist state to an unloved, moderate-nationalist one too shamefaced to celebrate its own founding. If the South is already unwilling to criticize the North, or to renew a commitment to its own constitutional values, it’s hardly likely to mount a strong defense of human rights later on.

[S]omeone who doesn’t know a country’s history is bound to chuckle at the things its people worry about.

To assume that the two Korean administrations do not already see each other as confederates, and behave accordingly, albeit discreetly, is like assuming that a man and woman planning a marriage are not yet having sex. When we ask for Moon’s help in getting the other half of the peninsula to denuclearize, we are in effect asking this fervent nationalist to help remove the future guarantor of a unified Korea’s security and autonomy. Why should he comply? The only remaining point of the US-ROK alliance is to ease the transition to a confederation — which would obviate that alliance altogether. The recent news of South Korean violations of sanctions (and of a presidential award just given to the main importer of North Korean coal) is merely illustrative. It’s trivial in comparison to the basic truth staring us in the face: No true liberal-democratic ally of the United States would think of leaguing up with an anti-American dictatorship, let alone one still in the thrall of a personality cult.