Kim Jong-un has been an easy target, to actually call someone a madman then you had better have some damn proof about the extent of their illness. Unfortunately, there seems to be none, as far as the President of North Korea is concerned anyway, and Donald Trump, after passing his 100th day in office is probably coming to recognize that fact. Kim is still threatening, and the US is still listening. The dictator is playing a dangerous game of bluff, the outcome known only to him. The President, having suggested that he is quite prepared to hold talks with the North Korean leader in person, one can only speculate on what they would talk about, and what might be the outcome?
What would they talk about?
Kim Jong, having just said that he is accelerating his county's nuclear readiness to 'maximum pace,' and that they are ready to launch another nuclear weapon imminently, well, it's certainly not a good starting point for future discussion. Of course, his threat is in reply to the US positioning of a defense system that could intercept and destroy enemy missiles in flight, on a South Korean golf course of all places. Surely a hint of irony there then? North Korea, railing at what it perceives as US aggression, and hysteria,' in ongoing maneuvers with the South, is saying that the region is on the brink of 'nuclear catastrophe.' Well, once the threatening was over, the tea drunk, and 'a delightful slice of chocolate cake,' consumed, they could talk about basketball - Kim is a big fan- and of course the real origin of the hamburger - which Kim insists he created in the early part of this century.
But one fears, little else...!
What would be the likely outcome?
The likelihood of the two sides actually drawing up chairs alongside each other is pretty remote. It would take an enormous act of mutual diplomacy from both sides to achieve that state, which is not going to happen anytime soon. They have spent years, if not decades racking up the points against each other, with bile, aggression, and rhetoric the order of the day.
Not even stringent sanctions nor the calming hand of China have quenched the desire for conflict. It would appear that the young dictator is hell bent on finishing something that his grandfather started and his own father never completed. That of squaring the circle with South Korea and taking the fight with the US to its own front door.
It matters little to him that his country is poverty stricken and he will devastate the Korean peninsula with his actions, before propelling the world into a catastrophic nuclear conflict, just so long as he can exit the stage, with the world in ashes, and three generations of anger sated, for some sort of blaze of glory demise that exists only in his own head.
