I know the United States has no diplomatic relations with North Korea.
Thus, there can be no official dialogue between, say Secretary of State John Kerry and whoever in Pyongyang speaks as the NKs’ foreign minister. All that’s left officially is for the White House and/or the State Department to make public statements about the sabre-rattling that’s going on in North Korea.
However, I have to believe there is some back-channel talking going on here. It’s the kind of thing both sides guard carefully from public view. While the North Koreans bluster about using nukes on South Korea or launching missiles at U.S. targets – such as Austin, for crying out loud – the Pentagon is ordering fly-bys of B-2 Stealth bombers and Stealth fighters, deploying guided missile destroyers and putting all U.S. installations along the Pacific Rim on high alert. And let’s forget that the ocean is crawling with U.S. submarines armed with you-know-what.
And I am trying to imagine the tongue-lashing that some CIA operative should be giving someone in North Korea:
“Hello, Mr. Kim? This is your worst nightmare talking to you right now. I’m going to be brief and will get right to the point.
“You fellows keep saying you’re going to do all kinds of harm to us and to our friends in Seoul. You are moving missiles to your eastern coast, right? Well, OK. But know this, sir. If any one of those missiles leaves the launch pad and starts moving toward our western coast, we will shoot it out of the sky immediately and we will consider that act a provocation that must be answered in kind.
“Do you understand? And do you understand what kind of damage the United States can inflict in a very brief amount of time? If you do understand, and I think you do, then you’ll stop this foolishness immediately and just use your military hardware as showpieces in those fancy parades you like to have, the way the Russians used to do it when they were known as the ‘Soviet Union.’
“And one more thing. This is not empty rhetoric. We have the weapons to wipe your country off the face of the planet. We had this policy called Mutually Assured Destruction – aka MAD. It was meant to deter the Russians from using nukes against us. It worked. And we still have those weapons.”
Has this conversation – or something like it – occurred in the past couple of weeks? I hope so.