[T]here has long been in the North a very real contempt for the South Korean left, the kind that radicals always feel for moderates no matter how obs… - Brian Reynolds Myers

[S]trong racial pride always entails intense awareness of an inferior other. For the North Koreans, foreigners are inferior — even the friendly ones.

The North Koreans have pretty much laid down the whole sequence of the events that they plan in order to bring about their goal [of taking over South Korea]. First, a nuclear threat to U.S. territory, then an American failure of nerve, then a peace treaty, then withdrawal of U.S. troops, then confederation, then unification [under the North Korean regime]. This can be pieced together and inferred from the leaders' own speeches, from North Koreans' inner-track propaganda, in other words everything from wall posters to political novels. We've heard this from captured North Korean operatives who've divulged their ideological training to South Korean intelligence. So, we do need to take it very seriously and we do need to understand this is a long game that the North Koreans have been playing since the 1980s.

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.