What is most frightening about the west's response to Kim Jong-un is the scale of the exaggeration

[malaise]

Where's the real threat here – Kim Jong-un or Trident?
What we should fear is not the North Korean's bellicosity but how it's being used to subvert domestic politics in the west
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/04/wheres-real-threat-kim-jong-un-trident
<snip>

The politics of fatuous fright know no bounds. This week the calmest response to the ludicrous rhetoric of North Korea's Kim Jong-un appears to have come from those most concerned, the people of South Korea. They ignored it. They have heard it before. Should their megalomaniac neighbour ever mean what he says, they could see him off in 24 hours. They even let him sink the occasional ship or shell a village to keep his people happy.

The answer for David Cameron is the same as for Kim Jong-un – that mighty dictator, domestic politics. Cameron is trying to justify capitulating to the navy lobby when he came into power, giving them new aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, weapons that serve no purpose but to keep him at some macho "top table". He seized on the latest bombast from North Korea to declare that "uncertainty and risk" had increased as a result of the "unpredictable and aggressive" North Korea. So we had to blow £20 billion on renewing Trident and its submarines.

We seem unable to break out of that mindset. The vested interests are too strong. This applies even when the price is to leave a British army ill-equipped for the wars it is actually told to fight. For a quarter of a century now, British submarines with armed nuclear missiles have been wandering the North Atlantic, fulfilling no strategic purpose. They are an extravagance sustained only because potent industrial and military lobbies have cowardly politicians by the vitals, helped by the rightwing press. Policy on Trident is like drugs policy, rooted in unreason and taboo and fertilised by fear.

What is most frightening about the west's response to Kim Jong-un is the scale of the exaggeration. Cameron awards him the global reach of a superpower. We might almost ask which side is now impoverishing its people to pay for glamour defences, which is concocting blood-curling scenarios to justify them and which conjures up enemies to keep its people in thrall to its defence and security chiefs and their demands. Is it only North Korea that feels it must periodically flex its muscles and peddle a ridiculous view of the balance of world power?

North Korea constitutes no conceivable threat to the British state, or to the US and its allies. Even in some nightmare scenario, such a threat is beyond feasible "deterrence" by a submarine in the North Atlantic. Every reference to North Korea, including from Cameron in the Daily Telegraph today, relies on a crazy sequential causality. That regime is said to have "unveiled" a missile which "it claims can reach the whole of the United States". This in turn "would affect" the whole of Europe, including the UK.
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In other words it's all more BS propaganda for a few to enrich themselves via the military establishment.

[redgreenandblue]

1. Americans fall for it because they are still butthurt about the Korean war.

North Korea is a small fish. It gets way disproportionate attention.

[hatrack]

2. Other than the Pacific Ocean, I can't think of a thing they've hit with their missiles