[S]tart by reading Pareto; elites routinely do things that in retrospect look politically suicidal. - Brian Reynolds Myers

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

I don’t buy the common notion that if the US and South Korea promise convincingly enough never to topple the Kim dictatorship from without, it will let itself be toppled slowly from within.

[W]e must at least stop acting as if the only motive for North Korea’s armament too preposterous to discuss were the one that the country has reiterated, and acted in accordance with, for the past seventy years. Our initial response to 9/11 was to reduce it to a protest against U.S. support for Israel. Only recently have we begun to understand that the jihadists quite literally want the whole world. It is wishful thinking to assume that the ultra-nationalists in Pyongyang, who are far better armed than Islamic State, do not at least want the rest of their ethnic homeland.